How to use Guitar Cabinet Simulators (with free Vst Plugins)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about Guitar Cabinet Simulators, in an article that should be taken as an evolution of our first article about Speaker Impulses, which can be found HERE.

After we have chosen our favorite Guitar Amp Simulator from this list, it's time to find a good speaker, and we'll be good to go for recording or even for live playing, if we have an audio interface that grants us a low enough latency.

Today there are essentially 2 ways of simulating a speaker sound:

- A way that tries to recreate how actually the cabinet works and that usually lets you play with the interaction between one or more types of microphones and the speaker.
Usually programming this type of simulation takes a lot of work and this is why you can find it mostly on paid plugins (like Amplitube, or Overloud Th2), but that sometimes some producer still provides for free, like the good Mercuriall CAB 2.1 and 3 which lets you choose among various microphone types and positionings.

- By using convolution impulses (IRs), which are basically a "photo" of how the interaction of a certain sound source, a certain ambient, and a certain tracking hardware respond to an audio signal.
These Impulses can therefore recreate easily the behavior for example of a Celestion Speaker on a Mesa Boogie cabinet, miked with a Shure Sm57 straight to the dustcap.
Convolution impulses are a way to "start from the end", from the final effect of the microphoning instead of going through the recreation of every single component, and they often lead to results which not only has nothing to envy to the classic approach, but also avoids the usual "digital grit" of the old way to simulate a speaker.


There are many IR loaders made specifically to load impulses for guitar, some of them are paid (like Redwirez MixIR2, or Kazrog Recabinet), and some are free. Let's see the best Free IR impulse loaders:

- Rosen Digital Pulse
- Ignite Amps NadIR
- Kefir
- Lepou Lecab
- Voxengo Boogex

And now let's see the best free guitar cab IRs to be loaded in the aforementioned Cab Simulators:

- Our Exclusive TRIDENT Ir pack made by Guitar Nerding Blog
- GuitarHack Impulses part I by GuitarHack
- Recabinet Demo by Recabinet
- Free Redwirez IR Library by Red Wirez
- Kalthallen Cabs by Kalthallen
- IR Library by Noisevault
- God’s Cab by SignalsAudio
- Fredman Impulses by Catharsis Studio
- Beamsonic Impulses by Nick Beamso
- Orange Cab Impulse by fearcomplexmusic

- IRs by le Châtelet

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