Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
To celebrate the first 5 years of Guitar Nerding Blog we are presenting you a juicy 2 parts tutorial!
Today we are going to learn how to create a guitar cab impulse response (or IR, click here and here for two dedicated articles on how to use them) starting from a song we love.
The idea is to take a part of the song in which you can hear only the guitar, clone it and turn it into a convolution impulse, then load it into a cabinet simulator and use it with our favourite amp simulator, to get a result as close as possible to the original one.
Small premise: this method doesn't guarantee miracles, but in order to get really close to the sound we want to copy we should do a little research: using a the type of guitar, string gauge, tuning and pickups similar to the one the guitarist has played on that album, can make a lot of difference.
1) What we need is the free version of Voxengo Deconvolver, a standalone software produced by Voxengo that does everything we need also in the demo version, so we don't actually need the paid one.
We open it, and from the main interface press the Test Tone Gen button and save somewhere the generated wave file.
2) Now we need to open our Daw and load the song we want to copy. What we need is a song with a part in which you can hear only the guitar playing. We cut this part, even if it's just 10 seconds, and export it to 24 bit and 44khz mono, without touching the volume.
3) Let's open again Voxengo Deconvolver, load the generated test tone file in the first slot, the exported sample from your favourite song in the second one, choose the output folder and tick the 2 boxes "MP Transform" and "Normalize to -0.3 dBFS". Then let's click to Process and export our file.
4) What we have here is the raw impulse taken from our favourite song, which needs to be refined: let's create two new mono tracks: one in which we will import our impulse, and another one in which to load a guitar amp simulator that emulates some amplifier similar to the gear of the guitar player of the song, let's deactivate from it (if present) the internal cab simulator and load an external cab sim, and load our fresh impulse inside of it.
Let's try our sound: chances are that it will sound like we're playing in a cathedral, with the sound soaked in reverb.
CLICK HERE TO READ PART 2/2
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It is very great that I will give you the opinion of this article and use it, and the blog is also very good. tq u
ReplyDeleteHello, could you please explain step 4 in greater detail? I can't figure out what exactly to do with the raw impulse file. Thanks in advance.
ReplyDeletehi! step 4 (which goes on in the part 2 of this article) is not mandatory, meaning that you don't have to do all the steps written there: what matters is that the file is of the correct lenght (and you can tell it by trying it in a cab sim, if it sounds weird it's probably not the right lenght) and that it's at the correct volume, meaning it's not too low and it's not clipping. The eq part is optional, and you should fiddle with it only if you know what you're doing and want to correct something weird on the final sound.
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