Impulse Response (IR) Review - Recabinet, Red Wire, and Free!

**UPDATED BELOW**

If you don't know, an IR is a very small .wav file that attempts to simulate something. In this case a guitar amp speaker cabinet (cab). You load the IR into a program that knows how to use it. This is my layman's explanation. For a more detailed answer, you'll have to look elsewhere. All I know is that it acts like a speaker cab with a particular mic at a particular distance and I'm not really worried about the rest. The end result is that it gives digital amp sims (like the ones I'm using) the equivalent of the speaker section. It's probably better if you don't worry about the technical stuff and just pretend it's a 4x12 guitar amp speaker cabinet. These days, IR's have gotten pretty good and make it hard to tell between the real speaker and the IR.

I recently decided to bite the bullet and go out and purchase a few IR's. Recabinet sells a full set that's composed of several different cabs, with different mics at different distances. Red Wire sells separate cabs individually, but many more IR's for that one cabinet (more mics, different qualities etc). And then there a lot of free sets out there, some good, some not so good. So which are the best? Which ones sound like what? Do they really sound like the real thing? I've thrown together a quick listen to try and get a decent comparison and find these things out for myself. Listen to this following clip and you can hear the different cabs, explanations follow:


Click Here for the Sound Clips

The only "real" hardward involved in this is my Les Paul guitar. All amps, speakers, mics, etc are generated inside the computer. This is not a scientific approch to compairing the IR's. I have EQ'd them to taste to remove fizzyness and other unwanted frequencies. I tried my best to take some time to do this so that they sound as much like the real thing as possible. There are 7 sound clips. Each one of them uses the same amp settings as I'll describe in a moment. My goal was to get a decent sound that could be used on my recordings. Some came out better than others and a few could use a little more work, I admit.

Amp settings: Lepou's Lextac amp sim, 1 instance of the sim on each of 4 tracks - 2 on left, 2 on right with slightly different settings. The amps are hosted in Revalver MKIII with Simulanalog's Tube Screamer pedal sim before the amp. Revalver's IR loader (RIR) holds 1 IR file per track following the amp and then the EQ on each track. The EQ consistes of a low/high pass filter and notch filters for specific frequencies. One playthrough for the 2 right and and same on the left panned 100, 86, 86, 100 respectively. This approch allows for more frequencies to come out and also makes each side sound slightly different lending a "bigger" sound in the end.

For the IR's, I tried to use the same mics and placement settings for each clip. This consists of SM57's on the grill at the edge of the cap in the 100% panned positions and the Royer 121 on the cone of the speaker set back around 12 inches or as close to that as I could get it. This is a fairly standard mic setup for recording guitar I think, and made it easier to have them all be as similar as possible.

Here are my thoughts and the descriptions:
CLIP 1: Red Wire's Uberkab v30. Nice mid-range sounds. Tight and agressive. I think I really like this sound, however it took the most tweaking of EQ to get it to sound how I wanted it. It's a little different from the norm. Does the difficulty to get it to sound good mean that it's a not-as-good IR? You be the judge. After some more playing with this one I think it might be put into my arsenal on a permanent basis.

CLIP 2: This is a wild card. Why? This is the setup I use on all my recordings these days for basic rhythm guitar parts. As you might notice, it mixes with the drums the best. It's the most production ready clip and sounds the "biggest" by far. What I only noticed just now is how mid scooped the sound is. I'm not generally a fan of mid scoop tones as much. I didn't do the mid scooping myself, the IR's just came like this. There are actually 4 IR's here working together, one on each track. This one also has the least amount of EQ of all the clips. The kicker: these are the free IR's found around the guitar modeling community. Alu's Engl new01, Dimi's Bogner 4x12, Recabinet's demo marshall cab, and Brohymn's MesaV30 respectivly on the tracks - Volume mixed almost exactly what you hear on my songs on this blogs.

CLIP 3: Recabinet's 1960a Marshall. Not tight but a good classic/British presence like these cabs are known for. With a little more work, this could sound better. Not so good for the chugga chugga, but the picked notes in the middle section really come through.

CLIP 4: Recabinet's Mesa IR. Well, it sounds like a Mesa....scooped, tight and punchy and fizzy on top. That's about it for this one.

CLIP 5: a combination of the Uberkab's left and the Mesa's right. This one isn't bad. It could use a little something else, but for the most part the tightness of the Mesa mixes well with the mid aggressivness of the Uberkab.

CLIP 6: This is another wild card. This is my most recent "We Die Young" tone. You can find more about this tone on that blog post. I'm sorry for sounding like a fan boy, but this sounds so good to me. It's so unique and simply does something naughty to my ears. mmmmm....tone. To bad it wasn't my idea.

Clip 7: This is a mix of the Uberkab and the Marshall above. It's not my favorite. While I believe these cabs would sound good if mixed correctly, I didn't get there for this test. The mids clash and it's kinda honky to me.

So what does all this mean? Nothing really for most of you. On my first experiences with "paid for" IR's I've determined a few things for myself though. I now own enough of these things. It might just be the Uberkab, but with the difficulty I had EQing it over the rest, I'm not convinced Red Wire IR's are all that much better than the others. Recabinet sounds great and for the price of $15 for the whole library, I'm not sure the incremental "better sound" from they're competitors is enough for me to buy another 1000IR files that I don't really need. I'm hard pressed to say the store bought IR's are better than the free ones. With the free ones, I had less trouble getting the sounds I wanted at the time. The only real difference I noticed in the libraries was the shear amount of different settings, mics and organization you get with the paid for IR's. But if you're like me and find one thing you love and go with it, most of those will never even be touched. It will be very nice to have them when I need them though.

I will wrap this up by saying that if you like having options and really know what you're doing when micing guitar cabs, Red Wire and Recabinet will certainly be for you. The more I get into trying different things, I'm sure that I'll appreciate them more and more. But I'm positive someone that has a good ear can do the same thing with a few hours to collect some from around the internet.

Please do not take my opinions personally. I'm very happy I've purchased what I've purchased and I think that both Red Wires and Recabinet have done an excellent job and have an excellent product. Feel free to leave comments and thoughts about your favorites or why you like or dislike any of these sounds. Thanks for reading!


*UPDATE*
Re-tracked a “little bit” cleaner and purchased the new Soldano Ir's from Red Wire, and Mr. Red Wire himself was gracious enough to drop the 5150 cab on my account. So I decided an update was in order. Here's the update before EQ: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3406793/IR%20testing3.1.mp3

And after MASSIVE eg: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3406793/IR%20testing3.2.mp3

VERY brief explanations:

All same Lextac settings for the most part, I did adjust here and there on a few of them though. I wasn’t going for so much a comparison this time. Instead I just wanted to make them sound as best I could without spending too much time.

Clip 1 - Same as clip 2 from the first test but this time with some mids added to the EQ. I think it's very smooth and powerful...Free Ir's, still my favorite but only more so now.

Clip 2 - The new Soldano cab. It's airy and a little strange, but I kinda like it.

Clip 3 - The Ubercab, much better in my opinion and quite useable now. A little more surgical eq might do it a little more justice in the mids.

Clip 4 - the 5150 cab and Lextac. This cab doesn't sound bad at all. In messing around I found that it's high end could be used to give some brights to parts/cabs that don't have so much high end.

Clip 5 - The 5150 through...the 6505+ in RV MKIII.... :D I just had to see what this would sound like. I think it's usable and might mix with something else for a great combination, but there is something still just not right about it. This amp is simply fizzy when it’s turned up to 11 (listening back to old recording of my real 5150 I’m not sure I realized back then how much high end noise this amp really has if you’re not careful). Embrace the fizz until I find time to mess with this one more… and I will.

Clip 6 - Since they seemed to be the crowd favorite from above, the 1960a and Mesa cab from the first test mixed. These cabs work well together for real, and they do here as well. This tone, including the post eq that’s been added took around 6.2 seconds to come up with. These IR’s are simply easier to work with. They sound good and give a nice powerful tone.

Feel free to tell me my ears suck or something, I can take it.


Ps sorry, there was something going on my machine during the tracking that created some high end spikes and odd ambience, almost siren like. I’m lazy and didn’t feel like re-tracking. Deal with it.

*END UPDATE*

Alice In Chains Tone

UPDATE: NEW ATTEMPT
having recently purchased uberkab v30 from Redwirez, this is the newest attempt and the best sounding yet.

We Die Young Final Attempt.wav

The difference hear is only in the IR's. The amp settings are the same as below. Matrix's IR's on the left and right panned 100%. Uberkab v30 Royer 121 mic at 12" from the cone Panned 86% left and right.
END UPDATE

I just thought I'd share this quickly. This is a tone test where I try to recreate a certain tone. In this case - "We Die Young" (WDY) by AIC. The Idea came from this thread on the the Guitar Amp Modeling forums:

http://www.guitarampmodeling.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7829

This is probably my all time favorite tone. What makes this tone so unique I think, is that you can hear tons, and I mean A LOT of air being pushed by the real cabs. It's real hard if not impossible to fake that using sims. We know this already, but out of anything I've ever heard recorded, I don't think I've ever heard a "real" tone where you can hear it as prevalent. Listen carefully to the album version, it's almost like someone using their mouth and lungs and blowing across the tip of the microphone.

I came across something I haven't thought of yet while doing this and wondering why my tone doesn't sound quite right to me while listening back over all these samples and listening to the real "We Die Young". I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but oh well....

There are 2 "we die young" tones. One from the album version, one from the demo version. Both very similar, but by themselves actually have some distinct differences. When creating my tone from the shootout thing above [below], I was listening to the demo version without realizing it. Matrix I believe has been listening to the Album version. [Matrix is from the Guitar amp modeling forums and has created some wonderful IR's based on capturing the EQ of the master recording instead of a particular speaker/cab type. For more info on Matrix's work, visit:

http://www.guitarampmodeling.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=8461

In the below quick test, I compared all versions so that you may hear them. If you can't tell much difference between them, you probably need a good set of studio headphones. I'm not sure desktop speakers will do this justice. I'll go ahead and do the customary apology for the horrible playing on my part, I'm in a little bit of a rush to get this done this evening.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3406793/We%20Die%20Young%20Tones.mp3

clip 1, Demo Version of the real song
Clip 2, My Original WDY tone - Lextac in Revalver, TS, New 01 IR, Bogner 4x12 IR, EQ to taste
Clip 3, Album version
Clip 4, Matrix's IR using my above settings with Lextac - small eq adjustments, but for the most part, I just added his IR's. I think I actually do like this one the best. Matrix, your IR really does sound great, Thanks!

But now so we've got some pretty good stuff going, what does it sound like if you combine them all together? You get this:


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3406793/We%20Die%20Young%20Tones%20allinone.mp3

Which if I do say so myself, sounds pretty awesome.