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IR's to simulate different guitars?


twpmeister
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SO, my Helix can let my PRS and Strats make excellent impressions of Acoustic guitars, using readily available Acoustic IR's - is there something similar that can say, make my Custom 24 sound like a 335 or lucille or other hollowbody, or maybe a tele etc. Kind of Variax ability from any guitar using Helix - Can't be that different from how the Acoustic ones work can it? Maybe Line 6 could adapt the Models they already have for Variax into Helix useable IR's?   Failing that, how would I make my Custom 24 sound more like Lucille or a similar guitar? Fancy playing some B.B.  Thanks

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I think you're misunderstanding what an acoustic IR does.  It simply simulates an acoustic guitar cabinet.  It doesn't modify the tone of your guitar.

 

Beyond Variax guitar modeling you really can't change the nature of the basic sound of a guitar (other than some acoustic simulator pedals, none of which are really that good).  That's determined by the pickups and general electronics and construction.  The Variax accomplishes this through the use of the piezo-electric pickups and some fancy DSP processing.   You can get close on some guitars depending on your pickups and such, but even the Variax sounds "like" a Gretsch, or a 335, but there are some audible differences if you've played one of those guitars.  It's very good, but not exactly the same.  But short of buying different guitars, the Variax is by far the best bet for accomplishing what you're asking for.

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There's no reason you couldn't apply the same "tone match" tech to a guitar signal as is used on amps/cabs. It won't be anything like perfect, but it's way cheaper and handier then buying a budget of guitars. If you have or can get hold of an EQ that can do matching, you might as well try it.

 

That said, if you can't get the effects​ you're looking for with manually set EQs, it's unlikely the automated version will be radically better.

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I think you're misunderstanding what an acoustic IR does.  It simply simulates an acoustic guitar cabinet.  It doesn't modify the tone of your guitar.

 

Shure? I think, there's a bit more behind ;)

 

Often, an ideal acoustic cab is FRFR, and that's what's often used behind the Helix. Following yout theory, choosing "no cab" should get a sound wich tends to acoustic. But it doesn't.

 

As i understand, an IR represents a complex impulse response of the first milliseconds of an acoustic signal. This response is containing informations about frequency response, attack, the first decay and phase.

 

Even if intended to simulate a speaker response, it could (and i'll bet ist is) used to simulate a part of acoustic guitar characteristics.

 

Simulations of other electric guitars should be possible to. The problem could be, that every pickup/circuit/cable has it's own frequency response defined by resonance frequency and Q. First you had to eliminate this to get a clean base, but you have to know these values of your pickup first. With this flat line, you could add characteristics of the desired guitar sound as (another) resonance frequency an Q, some attac and decay, where the decay is limited to some milliseconds.

The main problem in doing this will be the unknown characteristic of your magnetic pickup.

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If it can do this with a humbucker neck pup surely it's not impossible?

 

Well that's just downright awesome! I've come across a number of attempts at making an electric pickup sound like an acoustic, and IMO, that's far and away the best I've heard.

 

Do you know if that's a commercial IR, or one he did? Is the patch available anywhere?

 

Are you by any chance @cambersands?

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Well that's just downright awesome! I've come across a number of attempts at making an electric pickup sound like an acoustic, and IMO, that's far and away the best I've heard.

 

Do you know if that's a commercial IR, or one he did? Is the patch available anywhere?

 

Are you by any chance @cambersands?

Hi Zooey this is my recording and my patch, using one of the taylor Ir's that have been freely available for a while, not sure where I originally found them as I got them for an atomic amplifire I toyed with a while back. Lot's of eq and fx too. If you pm me your email address or message me on fb (the vid is on the helix group) I'll forward the patch and IR to you. 'Cambersands' is shorthand for the title of the piece this excerpt is from 'On Camber Sands' by Gordon Giltrap.

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BTW it's all one take, with just the guitar - no overdubs or multitracking, just a quick and dirty recording into audacity this morning to demonstrate my patch, hence the slips. The overlapping parts are created with a 1000ms delay and the particle verb creates the pad behind the guitar.

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Thanks for sharing that. Interesting that others have similar ideas. I'm thinking it shouldn't be that hard to somehow take a humbucker in a solid body and make it sound like a humbucker in a hollowbody, using an ir of the hollowbody resonance in very much the same way as how acoustic ir's are made already.
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When I think on how you actually make an IR, though (which I have), I don't see how you can possibly do this accurately. You have to push sound through the thing you are capturing and mic it. How do you do that with a pickup? Easy to capture an IR of the actual acoustic sound of an arch top, but the electric sound?

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I think you're misunderstanding what an acoustic IR does. It simply simulates an acoustic guitar cabinet. It doesn't modify the tone of your guitar.

 

You mean "Acoustic Guitar Body" not cabinet, don't you?

Also, it does in fact modify the sound of your guitar. That's what it's supposed to do and tries to make it sound like an acoustic guitar.

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Maybe someone here with a Variax JTV59 (closest to a PRS C24), Helix, and some IR creation chops could try capturing both the mag signal of the Variax and the Variax ES 335 model simultaneously and deconvolve them into an IR. I have a JTV69, so I don't think the resulting IR would work quite as well. Not sure how the IR would turn out since the mag signal isnt used to create the Variax modeled sound, the piezo bridge is. But it could be fun to try.

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I think you're misunderstanding what an acoustic IR does.  It simply simulates an acoustic guitar cabinet.  It doesn't modify the tone of your guitar.

 

It DOES modify the tone of your guitar and yeah, even a cabinet does modify the tone of a guitar, since the tone it's a product of guitar+amp. It's all about frequencies.

 

I do personally use a couple of commercial acoustic strings iRs to shape my tone to a Viola/Fiddle/Cello, using the eBow, and it does indeed shape the tone in a impressive way. A raw piezo output would work better for that, and I hope one day we will see the raw piezo output available in the Variax guitars. :)

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I would think the way to do it would to be to capture an IR of a known signal, such as a single note, through the amp using a mic. Then you capture an IR of the guitar playing through the amp. Then you would need an algorithm that would subtract the differences between the two ir's to figure out what difference the guitar made to the IR compared to the single note. But further more then, you would need to capture the ir of the guitar you wanted to use and make sound like another guitar and use all three irs to figure out the differences between the guitar to play, the single note and the guitar to create an IR of.... maybe? 

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Back in my AxeFx days, I used a tone match block to get a single coil sound from a humbucker. For those not familiar, it uses match eq to create an appropriate IR. While the tone was in the ballpark, it wasn't as convincing to me as an acoustic IR but where I really found it lacking was in feel. YMMV, of course.

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Interesting how he tries to demonstrate making a strat sound like an lp by playing a PRS 513. Unfortunately no semis or hollow bodies included in his.

 

I noticed that but at least he used a 513, which has 5 single coil pickups.

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