Using Far-Field Cab IR's to fake Mid/Side Recording

Birdy

Inspired
I've messed around with a nice trick to get some width on a dry mono track (say lead guitar for example), without making it sound "roomy" and without changing the tone of your main cab (like adding another cab would).

What I did is split the signal from the amp block into 2 cabs.
The first one is just your normal one, nothing changed there.
But on the second one I loaded a far-field cab (F028/F029 on the XL II+).

The I treated it like Mid/Side recording, with the far field cab being the side of course.
I put a filter block after that cab and inverted the phase of one of the channels (left or right), and then blend that in with the main cab.
However, like M/S recording many times do, it gave it a nice width but also made it sound panned towards one side, and pushed it off the center.
(which is a cool effect on its own if you know that guitar part is not going to be centered in the final mix).

In order to solve that, I changed that second cab block to a stereo one, and loaded 2 far-field cabs in stereo, and split them into 2 different lanes.
With the help of the Vol/Pan block, I made both lanes mono, with each one containing only one of the far-field cabs.
Then I inverted the phase of the left channel on one lane, and the right channel on the second lane.
Now when you blend in with the original normal cab it gives it a nice width, without any early reflections or reverb tails, and while keeping the sound centered.
It's also mono compatible.

I'm really happy with how it sounds so I thought I'd share!
 
Hi there
I am very intrigued by this.Could you please post a preset so we can see exactly how this works?
Thanks
Sure thing!
I took the stock preset #8 Plexi 50W Treble, stripped it out of everything other than amp/cab, and added the M/S cab thing.
I also made a screenshot of the layout and the parameters for each block.

Another thing I found is that increasing the L/R delay on the second cab block to 1ms, gives you a different stereo feeling, just make sure that the left and right delays are identical (I put that on the Y channel of the second cab in the preset).
You can also keep that delay on 0 and increase the main cab delay to 1ms.
Another thing you can do is put mic sims on the second cab and experiment with that, you can even blend different mics on the left/right channels.

MS Cab.png
 

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Thank you very much for this man .i'm going to check it out tonight.
Stay safe
Cool! Let us know how it works for you.
One thing I forgot to mention is that I listen to my Axe through a pair of studio monitors (if that wasn't clear).
It should work on headphones too I believe though I haven't tried it.
 
Thanks for the Preset it's Very Interesting, I changed the center cabinet to F69 and cut at 70 Hz and 7000 Hz. I added some gain to the amp with the boost switch in the amp block. I also cut at 120 Hz and 12000 Hz in the M/S cabinets and added some room tone. I've added my modded preset and FYI it's in II XL+ format. Cheers, Techboy 57.2020-04-06.png2020-04-06 (3).png2020-04-06 (1).png2020-04-06 (2).png
 

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