How to create guitar cab impulses from a song (free plugins and IR included!) PART 2/2

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This happens because our impulse is too long, so what we need to do is to make it a little shorter, until it is half a second to one second (or even shorter: you will need 3 or 4 tries before get the right lenght, because it varies from impulse to impulse according to how dry we want our sound to be), and let's load an eq on its vst slot: since we are dealing with a produced and mastered song it will probably have certain frequences a little over-emphasized, so it's a very good idea to set a high pass filter starting from 50 to 100hz, and a low pass one at around 10khz. This way we will tame the excessive low end and some unwanted fizz in the high area.
An additional check that can be done is to compare the volume of our impulse response with others and see if it's clipping, if it's too high, or it's too low, and adjust it accordingly.

5) Now let's put this track in solo, export it in mono again, load it again in the cab simulator in our project and let's play again some riff with our guitar. Does our impulse still need some tweaking? If so, let's adjust lenght and/or eq again and repeat this operation until the sound is as close as possible to the original album, then save it with the name of the song and soon you will have a personal impulse library with the guitar tone your favourite songs!

Additional awesomeness: I have explained the simpliest version of how to clone a guitar tone to turn it into an impulse, but the truth is that there it would be so much more to say.
If you want to dig deeper into this world and for example fine tune furthermore the impulse you can also use an eq matching program to fine tune and copy even more the eq curve by following the procedure explained in this tutorial, this way you would combine two different cloning techniques into one.
Some producer also like to copy the overall response of a vst chain (or part of it), whether we are talking about a guitar, or a snare mixer channel, or a kick and so on, and use it in future projects to clone a certain tone print (this is also the way in which some vintage hardware modeler work), so the concept of impulse responses could be scaled in almost every aspect of our mix, but this is another story.


This sample impulse has been created based on one of my favourite guitar sounds of all times: Clenching the fists of Dissent from Machine Head.
I have tried it with TSE X50 II (but any other Peavey 5150 sim like the TSE X50 or the Nick Crow 8505 with a Tube Screamer as a booster in front should do), fiddling a bit with the eq and using the learn mode for input, and ROSEN DIGITAL PULSE as cabinet simulator.

Let me know what you think about it!

IMPULSE: MACHINE HEAD - CLENCHING THE FISTS OF DISSENT

Happy 5th birthday, Guitar Nerding Blog!


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