What are you guys doing with IRs?

Stupid question time. I'm behind the trend....again

I've seen quite a bit of posts where some folks here are using IRs. Just recently I've seen it in context with cabinets as if it were a replacement or work-around. does anyone have an easy description of what you guys are doing and what it buys you?

A side question to that, of course, would be for what types of tones & music. Is it best suited for modern metal, or is it equally useful for a wide variety of things?

Have a look at this thread:

http://www.elevenrackpresets.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=39954#Post39954

A great option for IR loading and it can be used standalone.

Great question PB, and I'm in the same boat. That IR thread is so long and I sheepishly admit, it goes over my head and I don't know where to begin.

So if anyone can post here, in a few short sentences, the basics, that would be great.

For instance:

Why? Why add even more to the signal chain?

Is it like a stompbox? Do I just plug into Epsi and then 11R?

I take it there are two things I'd need - the Epsi and then the pack from Ownhammer to run the Epsi?

lets make thigs quite simple if i can.

ir's are kind of a "snapshot" of a rig,in this case lets say a cab and a certain mic in a certain position.

those snapshot can be used like "cab simulators" in various ways.

epsi is one of those ways (its a machine used to "read ir's")

depending on the quality of the studio wich make those "snapshot" results may vary from a decent cab sim to a super
accurate reproduction of a cab and a mic.

you can use irs in place of others cab sims like the ones on 11r for example.

lets say that ir's are the future of cab sim (even if its quite some time theyre out there).

the Epsi needs to be used either after the amp model or at the end of the effects chain, not in front of the eleven rack. though it's in stomp box size/format, it is a cabinet simulator and like a real cabinet it needs to be after the amp.

put it in the effects loop of the 11R.

Thanks so much Christophersad and singtall.

That was the best way of understanding it - that it's a cabinet simulator.

When you say it needs to be after the amp in 11R, is there a way to bypass the cabinet completely in 11R, or do you choose the most unaffected cabinet available and then go through Epsi?

Just wondering if the signal going through 2 cabinets would cause a problem.

Looking forward to hearing some samples if any of the members who recently made the purchase get a chance.

You can easily turn off (Bypass) the cabinets. In any patch, just hit Edit, scroll to the cab, tap over a page and turn on the Bypass.

You'll also have to turn ON the effects loop when using the Epsi and set the input and output levels. Singtall recommends 9 O Clock input and 3 O clock for the output. Which is just about perfect for most any patch.

IMHO, it makes a really big difference in tone. Also adds something to the feel as well. Worth every penny in my book to use the Epsi.

+1 on all comments on EPSi!

Note you can bypass the EPSi by just turning of the fx loop. To be clearer, you can set a preset to use the EPSi (11 Rack cab off/FX loop on) and the next preset to use the 11 rack cab (11 Rack cab on/FX loop off).

I personally have found the Ownhammer classic/modern IR's to be amazing on both clean and dirty.

The real plus is there really is not much need to do heavy eq (or any!;)) i.e more like a real amp/effects chain, IMHO Trick is choosing the right amp/cab for the sound you are after.

For my money the 59 Tweed works awesomely for clean/slightly, dirty tones. trick is to control the volume (remember that control )at the guitar for the clean/dirty.

Thanks guys, here's a few more questions.

So does one have to buy the EPSi and the Ownhammer? Does the EPSi have it's own IR's that the Ownhammer improves, or do you have to buy the IR's and the device to implement them separately?

Also, are these products only sold directly? Is there a way one can try before buying?

Can one make their own IR's, like one came make their own rigs on 11R?

EPSi has IRs on an SDCard included with it. I didn't try them, I've already made my mind up about using Ownhammer IRs because they make such a huge difference over other IRs out there. They're easy to find a good one because they include studio ready mixed IRs with all the mics in one IR & sound incredible. I'm pretty impressed so far after one day. Will have some sound samples this week sometime. My son keeps borrowing it to do his DJent stuff on. I'm doing some 80's metal sounding stuff I never thought I'd get on Eleven Rack. Getting some great Nuno Bettencourt Pornografitti, Jake E. Lee & Zakk Wylde tones I always wanted & the feel is completely different, what I would think I would get from the real thing or Axe FX II or something. My fingers hurt, but I got more I want to do. It's that good.

You have to buy Ownhammer IRs. I think the studio mix ones are $19. I got this one: http://www.ownhammer.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=104

You have to put numbers in front of other IRs, like this:
Small price to pay. What I do is once I find my goto ones, I change the first digit, so I can bypass all the 400s and go to 500 to get to the V30s, and 600s to get to the Scumbacks. After a while, I'll probably just use the Alnico Blue, V30s, and Scumbacks for everything instead of throwing all these on there. The very first Studio Mixes are always the ones I like, so I could put every speaker on here and only have 30 banks or so. From those, I can EQ anything and they seem to be the close mic/high presence ones so sound great off the bat anyhow.

The EPSi has IRs on board, but everybody here who owns one says the Ownhammer IRs that you can/must buy separately from ownhammer.com are superior. I'm expecting to receive my EPSi these days, we will see.
Afaik there is no trial of downloadable IRs, but there are some free ones on various sites.

Ownhammer has some free downloads (http://www.ownhammer.com/free/public-beta-redux/), you could use a computer based ir loader (some examples:http://www.grebz.com/simulator_cabs_eng.php) to 'try before you buy'. EPsi eliminates the 'computer' part and is way simpler to interface to the 11 rack.

Ownhammer is simply the best ones that i've heard. they play nice with the eleven rack without any fuss.

I sat on this for a bit, both the responses and content from the link I clicked on (ownhammer). In that site, I saw the "convolution reverb" term used a lot. Is this like that, where the guitar signal sort of passes through this sort of filter type thing?

One other thought. There's that sense of being in the same room with your tube amp that keeps many people using both digital and analog. Does this technology make any headway to that end?

Of course that doesn't mean I can't run a little send to a convolution reverb. I think there's one buried somewhere in my Native Instruments Komplete bundle. Maybe in the rarely used Guitar Rig portion?

Thanks, folks, for all the responses and taking the time to explain. I'll dig deeper and find some audio samples now.

Ownhammer basically takes a test sound and runs it through a speaker (picked up by various mics) & sends that through a nice analog/tube mic preamp, then through an analog EQ (some with tubes for certain mics), then a program compares the two and injects the "extras" so you have an effect of just the speaker through a mic/pre/EQ to send your preamp or Eleven Rack through. They go a step further on some IRs and have multiple mics & room sounds, or a completely isolated dry sound or studio sound. It's good stuff. Reverbs are a whole new ball game, but you could make an impulse with an Ownhammer cabinet and your favorite reverb with Voxengo Deconvolver and a test tone in your DAW. Bounce the effected sound and load up the tone for the before and the new wav file so it can run a comparison. It gets very close for me, and helps with reamping stuff but doesn't always feel as good for tracking as just using the original Ownhammer IR once I change too much stuff.

in my opinion, the Ownhammer IR's give the 11R a much better in the room tone (for those of us that like that). and that helps the feel factor a ton. when using a guitar cabinet in the room; you can do stuff like squeal a note/pinch harmonic and have this sort of compression thing working because the guitar speaker rolls off at a certain frequency and the high notes have no where to go, so they sound like they are compressing. Ownhammer IR's will do that for you like a normal guitar cabinet.

the thing i like best about the mixes they created is that they totally captured the entire cabinet sound instead of just an sm57 in front of the grill.

what i'm looking forward to doing next is to make IR's using two different IR's panned wide to form a stereo IR. some of the best stuff i've heard was done that way.

now that TLTD is back in the mix with us, expect to hear some fantastic combos of IR's.

OK, so now I'm even more curious than just a simple "what are you guys talking about?" kind of thing. I've certainly tweaked my fair share of 11R rigs to get that over-kill hiss out. If this system adds some of that guitar amp feeling into the tone, I'd be one happy camper.

I was reading as much as I could digest in one sitting of that thread Singtall posted. I'm a bit bummed that it's only 44.1k. Not sure it really matters, but everything I've done for years has been at 48. I hope they expand their range. Is that still the preferred unit? (the logidy Espi)

The 44.1k thing doesn't really matter because (for owners of the EPSi) the EPSi does its own conversion outside the 11r, you would never be able to hear a difference in a live setting. For studio use, the OwnHammer stuff comes in all sorts of sample rates, they have 48k as well.

For me, the EPSi plus OwnHammer mixes really take the 11r into "wow, this is a real amp now!" territory, I haven't touched my tube amp in over 2 months now and I am seriously considering selling it. That is how convincing the IRs are. It might be weird to think of tube amp sound being so dependent on cab sound, but that is what I have witnessed and it seems it is the missing piece of the puzzle for me moving completely digital.. YMMV..

That EPSi review thread does a good job of addressing many of the questions you may have or yet think of, so check it out as well.

I will see if I can post some sample clips of the 11r with and without the IRs tonight.

I got through some of it last night. Listened to some samples, etc.

I've got all my Pro Tools sessions already in 48. My add-on unit (GT-100) is in 44.1K too, but In run it into the line-in ports on the back of the 11R. Not quite as nice as the original signal, but usable.

Quite under-rated that GT-100 and the small version GT-001 are, btw. At least for what I play. Even with losing a bit of tone going in to the 11R line-ins, I've getting some good driven old school Rock tones. I wonder how well that would match up with the IR platform?

downrazor11, what tube amp(s) do you have that the Epsi/IRs thing is getting really close for you?

Very simply put YES.

An IR or impulse response is the reaction of any dynamic system in response to some external change. This allows for the capture of characteristics of the given signal to its environment. Such as the reverberation of a concert hall, or the dynamics of the signal as it passed through a certain loudspeaker and microphone system.

The convolution part of it is the math that takes place on the signal.




The short answer is yes and no.

In MY HUMBLE experience, it makes more difference on high gain tone, and much less on clean tones. Personally I tend more for clean to slightly over driven tones when performing with the band, but when I am doing overdubs, well I need whatever the customer/producer/track requires, which is sometimes high gain tones.




You CAN load a cabinet and mic IR into a convolution plug in such as SPACE (in ProTools anyway) to use on your guitar track, yes.




I used SPACE for a while with some free cab IRs that I got from someplace, but have since gone with the REdwirez Big Box Collection. With that you get the MixIR2 plug in thrown in. You can have up to 2 different mics on the same cab and blend them as you wish and one room mic. You can also load an impedance curves of the speakers, AND Neve 1073 style EQ impulses. You can take a look at MixIR2 User Guide

You can then save the entire thing and export it as a wav file to use with....the Epsi for example or share it with someone can load IRs into a convolution plug in.

Now, all of this said, I do plan on making the Epsi part of my live rig in the very near future, based on what I have heard. Especially since I can export my Redwirze settings as wav and use them with the Epsi.

Just My $ .02

Recabinet has a way to mix IRs, EQ, and speaker breakup and I'm thinking about making impulses through that. Even the speakers it comes with blended just right can be pretty good when you're searching for the right tone.

I like the idea of the widened IRs, when I did a reamp test, even though it was two tracks, I saved the patches with the numbers I used for those IRs and I'm really liking those two speakers. I want to use Freehaas or a good haas effect that just gives me the delayed signal to make the second IR delayed & then combine them. I just upgraded to Sonar x3, so hopefully there's a way to just split the wavs like in Pro Tools and I can mute the left one for the right side & just pan the left IR.

Or I can just make a "big" amp and pan in Recabinet with no haas effect, but wont get that signature Mark Day widened sound.

One thing that works good is the Fabfilter compressor on gentle widening. I might try that just to see if I like a more compressed & wide sound for leads or something.

So many things you can do now that you used to have to go into Pro Tools and dink around with lol

Now that I know what sounds work with IRs, I could record some Eleven Amps with the cabs & FX off and play around more and get some cool stuff.

I often route the dry signal to one or more Aux busses with MisIR2 plug in on each Aux.

I can have as many cab, mic, Z Curves and EQ impulses as my 'puter can handle. However I have not found a need PERSONALLY to use more than three different cab configurations for each dry guitar track.

Once I am happy with that, I send each Aux to an audio track to be printed, then make the aux tracks that I used inactive.

Works well for ME that way anyhow and I don't have to split stereo tracks. I just print to mono.

Yes I looked at Recabinet. It looks good and the GUI is really cool, but at basically $100 for another $26 I got the BigBox of IRs (a couple THOUSAND IRs) plus the plug in. Hey I can even load the Ownhammer stuff in if I want to but honestly have not found the need to.

Just saying, for ME and perhaps someone else, this was the best fit. Again, Just My $ .03 (inflation ya know.)

lol

I got Recabinet when it first came out, so got the discount. Many ways to get there. I got the big box, but only thing I liked was that 1073 IR along with them. Ownhammer already has some sounds that are better than I could ever get. HOWEVER lol...I haven't tried any Redwirez with Eleven Rack. I'd like to try what you have made if you make any custom ones from those, Bob.

i used to use 2 different cabinets in the axe-fx just like Mark Day (i even tried his presets) and the big tone was a combo of two different sounding cabs panned wide: one warm/dark cabinet and one bright cabinet. just the tonal difference between the two give a nice stereo effect.

I had a peavey 6505+ (until 2 months ago) and I have a B52 AT100, both used a Randall Hammett cab with Celestion V30s at 8ohms. I have also owned an Egnater tweaker 15, a Mesa Single Rec, and the Digitech 2101 with Peavey classic 50/50 way back in the day. Most recently I was using a Zoom G9.2tt in to the clean channel of the AT100 and I was happier than I'd ever been with my rig. It was just so heavy to take places and I couldn't get the mic'd sound close enough to satisfaction. That's where the eleven rack came in, with the EPSi and OwnHammer IRs it is much better than the amp rig for tracking, records true to sound, and is so much more portable (even with an EV ZLX-12p). I also have tried the Yamaha THR10X (still own it, good for what it is) and the usb out of the G9.2tt and both were ok for recording, but not as good as the 11r + EPSi.

For the record, I am in to high gain sounds (Deftones, Karnivool, Tool) but also medium gain bluesy solo stuff (David Gilmour) and I am very happy with the versatility in overall tone that can be achieved just by changing cab IRs, I would have never believed it had such an effect on what we call the 'amp feel'. I don't do too much with clean, unless it is effected (like 'the cure' or 'u2', chorus-y delay clean) so I can't really comment on the utility for low gain players.

I was looking back through this thread to get my bearings before hooking it up. It seems I had spaced the whole signal flow and sample rates thing. I made a big line of thought goof on running 48K sessions and having an audio generated by 44.1k as being a problem. Duh! Sorry about that one, y'all.