MLSoundLab

Tell me about it. I still keep getting recommendations from POD HD users to make my IR's usable with the HD.

The educational side is exactly what this is about and it's a great time to be a guitar geek when reaching "professionals" is relatively easy. There's one thing I think we need to discuss that I'm a little bit afraid of talking about but here goes: much of the IR length being good/bad has to do with the quality of the IR itself. Bare with me - I'm not hear to bash other IR producers but rather talk about the tests that I've made and the findings. A full length IR f.ex. 500ms in this example contains raw data of a mic up in a room. Now let's say that the room is in many ways no ideal for miking cabs and there are many reflections and almost like a really loud reverb in it... this would happen if you shoot IR's in a small room with no treatment. This kind of an IR will most likely sound better when you're only hearing that 20-40ms instead of the full 500ms. This does support what Pete said that it's better to control the tail of the IR with a reverb. However the situation with IR's that f.ex. I make is that my room is built to be the perfect size for a cabinet and treatment has been added where needed but not so much that the "air can't move naturally". So I pay a lot of attention to make that tail very nice. Remember that the highest quality reverb plugins are IR based reverbs like Waves IR-1. This is what we're essentially talking about here - you're cutting away that super realistic room sound and replacing it with a reverb effect that will not be the same quality. Yes we're talking about a very small thing here. Still I believe that the only way to get to the next level of modeling is to do multiple small enhancements everywhere you can and in the end the enhancement will be much bigger.

I'll try and steer this conversation back on topic. :D When posting this I didn't even think about the video being taken as a "Helix doesn't support long enough IR's" type of thing. I'm cross-platform with my gear so I'm always just thinking about technology in general and what can be done to make it better. @brue58ski said it best. We as guitar players enjoy gear and technology and that's always been a part of being a guitarist whether we're talking about advancement in tube amps, pickups, modelers or even guitar strings. Choosing to ignore this is a subjective choice which you can make but I think I was at least capable of proving that there is semi-important information that's missing if you're using IR's shorter than about 200ms. The limitation in modelers is processing power. I'm sure that with Pete's Suhr amp this is also what it came down to - having more power to run a longer IR would've made the amp more expensive. Same thing with the Helix and 42ms - how much more expensive would the Helix be if it needed to be powerful enough to run 8,192 sample 170ms IRs to get most of the IR sound. I'm more of a problem solver so I'd rather dive in and play around with the tools available like trying to find a reverb setting that simulates a longer IR tail.

So today I saw a video of Pete Thorn talking about his new IR loading Suhr amp and he said his amp supports 20.5ms IR's. Helix supports IR's up to 42ms which is twice as long. Now why does someone like ML Sound Lab (that's me) have IR's up to 500ms in the Cab Packs? I wanted to show you what this is all about and here's a video so you can find out too: Now I understand that we're not all used to listening to the snap that the IR makes but this is the raw data that you'll find in the IR and it's the best way to demonstrate this. Playing with a shorter IR will feel "tighter" while a full length IR will feel "smoother" and the poll results I got years ago were 50/50 meaning that half of the people actually preferred the tight feel of a short IR vs the more realistic and smoother full length IR. Have you guys ever tried an IR loader that uses more than that 42ms of IR length?

@aaronbrito No one has at any point questioned whether your story is true or not. I'm actually very happy about you being honest about what happened now because I did give you the best customer service and went to lengths to make you a happy customer. Once you started posting on forums about me being a bad person even after I was very kind to you, that's what I have a problem with. There are two things that you're saying that are dishonest 1) you didn't originally tell people that you got a special deal from ML that was almost exactly the same deal that you're mad about and 2) there has never been a 50% off sale. There was an easter egg hunt on the website and that was by design - an "easter egg". Here's the official definition of an easter egg: "An unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software or on a DVD, included as a joke or a bonus."

Okay that does it - since you really wanted to take part in the egg hunt that you missed out on I'll create you a different kind of hunt and the prize will be A FREE CAB PACK!!!! I will give you a Cab Pack for free with one condition. This condition will be the hardest thing I've ever asked of anyone but here it goes - find one person on this forum who agrees with you after hearing this full story. Just one real person will do. The person has to be someone neither of us knows and not a fake account person. We need a real name and personality behind this one mystery person. Let the game begin.

So far I've been lucky with getting the existing amp models matching the real tube amps. They just need to be tweaked in a weird way - many will have middle on full and bass on zero etc. but it's doable. Right now I'm working on an amp that's proving to be a bit trickier so I might have to using some additional blocks but I try not to use IR blocks for CPU and block space purposes. Thank you for your kind words! For audio I use Cubase 8.5 - (didn't get along with Cubase 10) and video is done using Premiere.

I'd like to thank everyone for sticking up for me. There are a couple of details that were left out by @aaronbrito 1) He got a 5€ discount when we didn't have a sale going on as an act of kindness on my part - that's 1€ price difference to the 20% Easter Sale 2) I offered to make things better by giving him another discount but he didn't accept it - I assume he wanted something for free His message to me: I kindly told him that this is not true. No company would ever have a sale if it meant they'd lose 20% off their last months profits. Also it's against social media policies to spam thousands of customers when you have a sale going. This would lead to a ban/restrictions on social media. Again - I try to do my best when it comes to customer service but people asking for free stuff is unfair for the people who pay full price. Thank you so much for sticking up for me - you guys are the best.

Hiya it's Mikko from ML Sound Lab chiming in. We've received quite an overwhelming response from the Helix crowd. What we do is match the Helix to sound like real tube amps from my personal amp collection. We've done a Mesa Boogie Mark V and a Marshall Silver Jubilee and a bunch of cabs as well. If you're interested I highly recommend you check them out here: https://ml-sound-lab.com/search?q=helix Here's a quick video showing how great our results are:

Thank you so much. :) The feedback for essentially all packs has been completely positive.

That's 20% off the second pack, not the third. So that should make it ~$60,67 for two packs. I wish we all just had the same currency. :S

There's actually a discount going on this very moment. Get two packs and the second one is 20% off. But I'm sure you meant the price is too low right?

So happy to see you guys talk about one of my personal favorite amps of all time. Timing couldn't be better as I just matched the Helix to sound exactly like the real amp from 1987 and released a pack for both the cabinet and amp sounds. Here's a demo of the amp sounds completely raw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGWlsWnNtqo And here's me going through the Cab Pack (which is also from '87, remember that the design of a modern V30 is radically different sounding to these actual cabs from over 30 years ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c8AtFWISS4

Your guitar tone consists mainly of 1) guitar 2) amp and 3) cab and out of those three the cab is actually the most powerful tool in shaping your tone. You don't need to dislike the stock cabinets to be interested in IR's. After all the option of loading in IR's is what took all modelers to the next level as far as realism goes. With a good IR you'll spend under 5min tweaking a preset and it'll sound a lot better than tweaking a preset with a bad cabinet section for hours. That's the simplest way I can put it. :)

Download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bfibnuenvsp7bwo/ML Sound Lab FREE Recto.zip?dl=0 Try it with this better free IR as well: http://bit.ly/MLSoundLab So I've been tweaking modelers for a long time and the way I build presets is pretty unique. I have a bunch of real tube amps around and there's nothing quite like the satisfaction of capturing that sound and recreating it perfectly with a modeler. Anyways have fun with the free sample of an ML Sound Lab Amp Pack and if you want to hear more about it please visit: http://www.ml-sound-lab.com