The Gmc Guide To Free High Quality Tone |
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The Gmc Guide To Free High Quality Tone |
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Apr 15 2012, 06:35 AM |
So we all want that Mesa Triple, Engl, 6505, Diezel, 5150, AxeFx, or whatever. We also would all want it for free - BUT - we unfortunately live in reality and this is not an option. For those of us who lack the often thousands of dollars to purchase high end equipment, there are solutions such as Native Instruments Guitar Rig 5, Overloud TH2, IK Multimedia's Amplitube 3,, or Peavey's Revalver that can all be bought for a couple hundred dollars.
These products essentially emulate many of the high end equipment we love and know, and with recent releases, often times do it remarkably well. They also offer different mic positions, cabinets, stompboxes, and other processing alongside its guitar amp emulation. I will personally testify that these products are worth your money, especially Guitar Rig which produces brilliant lead and solo tones, and exceptional cleans. Now, there is still yet another option. And this is the best part, everything mentioned from here on out is free. Do not make the mistake and assume that this freeware cannot stand on its own against the might of NI products or Peavey's legendary tone, these not only hold their ground, they often times exceed them. With a guitar amp, there are many deciding factors such as room, mic placement, mic type, dual mic'ing etc. This is not only expensive, but most of us do not live in studio conditions. These freeware programs ( and the aforementioned ones) emulate the room, the mic type and position, and many other nuances home studio artists might struggle to achieve. These programs are simple VST's that can be opened in your signal chain inside your DAW. Now, lets begin! ________________ ________________ The Amp ________________________________________ ________________________________________ LePou Lecto LeCto is a guitar amp simulator inspired by an american modern high gain head. This simulator has 2 channels with 3 modes on each channel. It can go from crunch (raw mode) to modern high gain (modern mode). Features : -oversampling : determines the signal oversampling; up to 8x -mono/stereo : determines the signal routing -input : controls the magnitude of the input signal -drive : controls the amount of gain -low : controls the low frequency -mid : controls the mid frequency -high : controls the high frequency -presence : presence control -resonance* : controls the amount of resonance resulting from the interaction with the speaker cabinet *Only active on modern mode LePou Legion LeGion is a high gain preamp simulator. This is an original design, it's not based on any hardware gear. My goal here was to build a high gain sim that doesn't need any booster in front in order to be tight. Features: - 2 channels, actually two completely different preamp circuit - 2 modes on each channel, rhythm and lead - 2 tonestacks assignable to any of the 2 channels - the usual drive and tone controls Thanks again to requietus for his great job on the GUI. Thanks also to the testers : Alu, daxliniere, cococo, shogger, Dimi, onqel and HOTRIFF. New version 1.01: - more output volume - less volume variations with coutour changes LePou LE456 It's a preamp sim roughly based on a famous German gear. It has 2 channels and 2 modes per channel. Each channels/modes share the same features. Apart from the usual tone controls (drive, low, mid, high and contour), each channels/modes offer two different tone stacks that can be accessed via the focus switches. Bottom and bright switches can be used to boost the low and the high frequencies respectively. On the low gain channel only (Clean/Crunch), the effectiveness of the bright switch decreases with the gain settings. Nick Crow 8505 Controls: POWER - Power ON/OFF. HQ - Oversampling ON / OFF. Use OFF to reduce CPU usage, use ON to get the quality sound without aliases (more CPU). When a project or the track is exported to a wave file (mixdown, bounce, render, freeze) oversampling is always automatically enabled regardless of the position of the button. GAIN - Determines the amount of gain applied by the Pre Amp. LOW, MID, SWEEP, HIGH - Tone Stack controls. POWER AMP - Determines the amount of gain applied by the Power Amp. VOLUME - Output level. TSE (The Serina Experiment) Products There are many more but these are some of the widely used and highly acclaimed products. The amp will be first in your signal chain, but an amp by itself is nothing right? You need the cabinets, and this is where things get interesting. _____________________ _____________________ The Cabinets ________________________________________ ________________________________________ Now the cab emulation is where the variety comes into place. What do I mean by variety? Well I mean almost 700 plus samples of mic'ed cabinets. These however, are in the form of something called an impulse response, which in short and without getting technical about it, is a small .wav file that emulates a certain condition such as mic distances, type, room etc. To use these you need something to load the impulse, which is know commonly as the "cab sim". LePou LeCab2 KeFir V3 These are two amongst many, although the best and easiest to use. LeCab 2 is without a doubt my personal favorite as it allows blending of up to six IR's to create massive, unique tones. These will be second in your signal chain, just like in an actual amp setup would go, head first then Cab. With these two entities you can easily start to develop and experiment with tone, and I do mean experiment. This where the big difference between the paid software and the freeware comes in. Guitar Rig does not want you to spend hours developing a tone, they have many presets and its designed for easy use. These freeware programs do require time, but they pay off in much more colored ways in reference to your tone. They allow for a more personal touch that can give you a great sound. Next we need those impulses to load, and right off the bat I will give you more than 700 in one free easy download. ________________________ ________________________ The Impulse Response ________________________________________ ________________________________________ God's Cab Impulse Responses GuitarHack Impulses Once you download these, inside your DAW when you have LeCab2 for example, you will be prompted to select a directory for the IR's. Simply select the location these were downloaded and extracted to and scroll through the list. Each file is a different mic, at a different distance, on a different cab. So there is a lot of experimentation to be done! But we are guitarist here, and we love gear right? Of course, so here are yet some MORE free VST's that can be utilized to produce more varieties of tone! ________________________ ________________________ The Accessories ________________________________________ ________________________________________ Ignite Amps Placing this before your AmpSim in your signal chain can produce clarity and allow you to add subtle touches to it. Discovered this recently and love it absolutely! A tubescreamer, plain and simple. Placing this before your AmpSim will give that legendary flavor of TS drive and power Same as the NRR-1 although I have actually added this after my AmpSim to produce a massive boost in power. If you do this, be sure to use it on the clean channel so your drive/ gain channels from previous plug-ins do not collide. Otherwise, putting this before your AmpSim will add to the tonal customization options you have. TSE 808 A powerful, yet subtle tube screamer VST that is aimed to emulate infamous Ibanez TS9. Now all this might be a bit overwhelming at first, so I will show you some basic signal chain setups you can use, including my own. ________________________ ________________________ The Signal Chain ________________________________________ ________________________________________ TSE 808 > Poulin Legion > LeCab 2 (loaded with IR of choice) NRR-1 > Nick Crow 8505 > Kefir V3 (loaded with IR of choice) The Anvil > LE456 > LeCab 2 These are basic setups, which should provide the basis for the experimentation and show you how you could go about achieving a quick tone. However things can get more complicated once you understand the application and purpose of the plug-ins. Here is my own, that I am currently using. First I have the NRR-1, and using the rhythm channel I leave the volume and gain alone as they were. Boosting the bass all the way to produce punch ( I will highpass out excess later), placing the mids around 75% and the highs around 55 - 60% to brighten the tone. The "Bright" and "Boost" knobs are both active to add a little flavor of, well, brightness and boost. Next is Poulin Legion, the drive and low knobs are left alone as the combination from the NRR-1 will produce enough distortion for me. I am a fan of a lower gain clarity. The mids have a miniscule boost, I find boosting the mids in the NRR-1 sounds better. The highs are boosted more in Legion as I prefer them to be boosted in the amp itself, to create more presence. The contour and presence knobs sit at about teh same setting to open up the tone. Volume dialed back just a bit, as the the tone has a lot of power at this point. Next is The Anvil. I left this on the clean channel and dialed back on treble and volume. I trimmed off enough treble to the point where If I deactivated The Anvil in my chain, the high end remained almost completely unchanged as if it were on or off. The mids are boosted slightly again, and the rest is left alone. Here I have blended four different IR's to create the tone. Three different mics were used. First, the U87 and NTS were chose because of there low end, and dark definition. They had little high presence, almost none at all, but had lots of low frequency clarity. The next two, both samples of the C414, were the opposite of the U87 and NTS. Lots of high frequency clarity, but little low end at all. Combining these four samples gave a me a dynamic tone, with clarity across the low, mid, and high end of my playing. Now, after this is some minor EQ with a lowpass at 145hz, small boost around 3.5khz (.75 boost), and a lowpass at 16.5khz. Although the EQ at this point is just for personal preference. So now you have the tools, so get out and experiment. It takes time but it is well worth it! Here is a song of mine done using the aforementioned software (although the settings here are older) Nevertheless, this is an example of what can be done with no money http://soundcloud.com/lascailles-shroud/evolved-transcendental-cyber Any questions at all, I will be glad to try and answer! |
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Apr 15 2012, 12:40 PM |
Wow. Excellent thread, I'll make sure to add this to our wiki
-------------------- Guitars:
Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster, Ibanez RG2570MZ, Epiphone SG G-400 Amp: Vox AC4TVH head + V112TV cab Effects: Vox Satchurator, Vox Time Machine, Dunlop CryBaby, Boss MT-2, Boss CE-5, Boss TU-2, Boss ME-70 Recording: Line-6 POD X3 + FBV-Express, Pandora PX5D GMC wants YOU to take part in our Guitar-Wikipedia! Have a good time reading great articles and writing your own with us in our GUITAR WIKI! Share your playing and get Pro-advice from our Instructors: Join REC |
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Apr 15 2012, 12:44 PM |
Awesome thread, Brett ! I'm a little confused by the 'Impulses' you refer to. What exactly are they ? I had experimented before with downloading some amp freeware like Le this and Le that and the 5150 sim but for some reason they didn't seem to work well for me, like they didn't have enough gain. It just sounded fizzy and weird so I gave up on them. I just had the 'amp heads' and nothing else. I understand that adding simulate distortion pedals adds to it but I thought the point of the 5150 and modern high gain amps was that they had enough juice on their own. I'm sure it was something I was doing wrong but I'm interested to know I don't know exactly what the impulses is but I believe, which I'm probably wrong here but it sounds good in my head. An impulse is when they take a real cabinet and microphone and record the sound it emits such as the static. Which when you use it you get that same color of tone. Also you can't use just the amp heads, you need to toss on a cabinet program whether its LeCab or Recabinet. It helps drastically in the tone and sound. I've got guitar rig 5 and I can't get a single tone that I like out of it I feel the same way as you Ben, not enough gain. For at night when I run headphones to play I use the LeGion with the LeCab running the SM57 mic voiced with the tube screamer and it works pretty good. -------------------- Guitars:
Ibanez S770PB (Natural Flat) , Ibanez XPT700 (Chameleon) , Sterling J Richardson Signature , Squire IV Jazz Bass (Sunburst) Gear: Neural DSP Plugins My YouTube Page. |
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Apr 15 2012, 03:31 PM |
Cool, thanks for clearing that up guys.. not having a cab loaded wasn't helping me at all
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Apr 16 2012, 03:31 AM |
Interested to see what instructors can come up with, or anyone with extensive experience with higher end amps
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Apr 18 2012, 07:17 AM |
Congrats! KILLER POST! For any MACINTOSH USERS who'd like to try these out, here is a link to the blog where you can get some as "Audio Unit" plugins for LOGIC, Garage Band, etc. The links are on the bottom right of the page, just scroll down.
http://lepouplugins.blogspot.com/2010/12/l...or-windows.html The IGNITE AMPS plugs are availabe as AUDIO UNIT also. http://www.igniteamps.com/en/audio-plug-ins Maybe a bit of a collab/contest where we all pitch in and make some tones/patches? BEN: Low gain on input is something that happens when getting in to this for lots of folks, myself included. I could never seem to get adequate gain in before the noise level was way to high. The solution, (for me at least) was to add an ACTIVE DIRECT BOX that adds 20 DB of gain to the input signal before it goes to the audio interface. The unit I'm using was less then $100 on ebay. It's the unit third up from the bottom with XLR jacks on the front. It's actually four Active Direct Boxes in a rack. I"ve never used more than 2 though. This post has been edited by Todd Simpson: Apr 18 2012, 07:17 AM |
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Apr 18 2012, 10:10 AM |
Oh man, I think I am missing out on things all these look very interesting, although I like my tube and analogue gadgetry a lot better than anything digital for now
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May 1 2012, 12:02 AM |
I didn't know that about you Coz!! I'm the same way, although I did purchase my first interface (line 6 kb37, which has a build in midi controller and effects!!) to start doing better collabs.
But before that, I was all about playing live funk, so tube/analog tone is KING! I must say, that I'm surprised at the quality you can get out of current digital units (even for live gigs), but I tend to waste too much time customizing all of the patches, whereas with pedals I just tweak a knob and rock. So far, I've only used the POD Farm 2.0 stuff that came with my interface. I've gotten some pretty sweet tones out of it for recording or practicing at home. Oh man, I think I am missing out on things all these look very interesting, although I like my tube and analogue gadgetry a lot better than anything digital for now -------------------- Check out my awesome Nintendo Cover-band, EMULATOR!! http://www.reverbnation.com/emulator Now.....go practice!! |
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May 1 2012, 09:02 AM |
I wish my computer had a faster processor.... 2.1 GHz... it hiccups a with Reaper and POD Farm
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