Create your own acoustic guitar IRs

[Chandlerhimself]

In this video I'll show you how you can create your own acoustic guitar IRs using MFREEFORMEQUALIZER and MCabinet. I'm using acoustic guitar here, but you could do something similar with many instruments. I hope you find this useful.

[MixFix]

You are the best teacher ever known!

[Chandlerhimself]

I don't know about that, but thanks.

[MeldaProduction]

[mccy]

Would be cool to Export a standard-ir from mcabinet... Yes, I know, of course that would be something different, more static. But would make sense to feed mooer radar as external processor...

[Chandlerhimself]

Would be cool to Export a standard-ir from mcabinet... Yes, I know, of course that would be something different, more static. But would make sense to feed mooer radar as external processor...

You can actually do this. Of course most hardware can't process stereo IRs, but you can certainly export IRs easily from MCabinet and use them in something like the mooer radar.

[mccy]

WOW, cool, found it in the menue, that's great !!!! THANK YOU!

So exporting Mono IRs would be cool

Or will it export mono if I set the plug to mono or leave all wideners out?

[mccy]

UUUUaaaaa ! It's scary!!!!!!!! I just thought: Do not discusss and ask. Just start. I scanned my violin IR folder which I am proud of and which I hate, because of the endless hours of work which has gone into it,never being perfect enough for me. Just plugged my Yamaha E-Violin in and thought: I have to start somewhere, let's see. f**k!!! I want to turn down the speakers, the neighbours will wake up my monitors are still on... äh? ... No, they are off, but I'm standing in the middle of the full sound. It's so real!!!! The image is so real. I still have to tweak the sound, but it is a very very pleasing sound, right from the start!

[mccy]

Analyzing the IRs, does this lead to a just a frequency-curve? I am missing the feeling of resonating wood compared to my pure violin IRs... This is what the Resonators should do? Do they take their 'knowledge' also from the scanned IRs or are they the same for every source? It seems to work better for cabinets than for E-Violin so far. Don't know why.
I'd like to have the Free-EQ instead of the Parametric one to edit anyway.

This machine is great and the sound I am getting from the violin is very cool, but a bit less violin like, as with my IR experiments. I will look further into it...

[MeldaProduction]

Yes, it leads only for spectrum curve. It hasn't really been designed for this "wood" thing. Normal cabinets produce nearly no ambience, since they are miked from close distances. You can try using some of the resonators and wideners to simulate it though.

[mevla]

Catching up slowly on Chandler's excellent videos, I tried the approach shown here, which starts by finding some acoustic guitar IR. Not so easy. I've seen a web page that explains what IRs are and give a few links for free IRs, all of them requiring to sign up on a advertising mailing list. But I did find one in there named acousticsim1.syx. Now, the MFreeform Equalizer will not see that file when using the analyze function. Running 'file' on this file gives:

acousticsim1.syx: SysEx File - Brooktree

The questions are: There's a company called 3 Sigma Audio that offers acoustic guitar IR for $10 each. Are these compatible with MFreeform Equalizer ? Is the .syx some kind of a standard IR format ? Are so-called "IR Loaders" working with a standard that's not one of the well-known audio formats ?

[Chandlerhimself]

If you have MFreeformEQ you don't need acoustic IRs. Find an audio recording like a wav or mp3 file. Analyze it using MFreeformEQ and then try to play the same thing on your own acoustic(DI) or electric. Analyze your own recording and then match it to the recording. Export that into MCab and go from there.

[mevla]

Yes. I know that's possible, as you've mentioned in the video, but the whole idea of IRs is about getting a high quality signal processing by having those specially-made IR files that can be loaded into a plugin and shape the signal to certain expectations isn't it ? And not just a EQ-curve analyzer that could perhaps analyze during 45 seconds some recorded acoustic guitar, to output a custom EQ curve based on an average that's built on the spot during analyzing ?

Maybe I'm missing something. Could it be that MFreeformEqualizer does not actually read IR files like they're made for "IR loaders" and rather only analyses audio files like other Melda plugins do, or like so many EQ plugins do out there ? If that's the case, then that would be the scope of the video, eg. as the title states, creating your own IRs, and not including starting from IR files that are out there.

And if that's the case, can MCabinet work directly with IR files that are found out there ? The 3 Sigma Audio IR files do 'sound' quite interesting - is there a way to use these with a Melda plugin ?

[Chandlerhimself]

Yes. I know that's possible, as you've mentioned in the video, but the whole idea of IRs is about getting a high quality signal processing by having those specially-made IR files that can be loaded into a plugin and shape the signal to certain expectations isn't it ? And not just a EQ-curve analyzer that could perhaps analyze during 45 seconds some recorded acoustic guitar, to output a custom EQ curve based on an average that's built on the spot during analyzing ?

Maybe I'm missing something. Could it be that MFreeformEqualizer does not actually read IR files like they're made for "IR loaders" and rather only analyses audio files like other Melda plugins do, or like so many EQ plugins do out there ? If that's the case, then that would be the scope of the video, eg. as the title states, creating your own IRs, and not including starting from IR files that are out there.

And if that's the case, can MCabinet work directly with IR files that are found out there ? The 3 Sigma Audio IR files do 'sound' quite interesting - is there a way to use these with a Melda plugin ?

I think you're getting a bit confused with the IR thing. The video is about making your own IRs from scratch, if you already have acoustic IRs there is no need for this technique. If you buy the 3 sigma IRs just load them into MConvolution and you're done. The problem with that is, you may not like 3 sigmas IRs, there isn't enough variety, or you just don't want to spend the money. Loading an IR into MFreeformEQ won't get you a better result than using an audio file IMO. An IR isn't going to necessarily be higher quality and considering there only seems to be about 10 acoustic guitar IRs floating around, there is a good chance it won't suit your needs. MFreeformEQ isn't an IR loader, so it isn't going to sound the same as using an IR, so if you're looking for that try just MCab or MConvolutionEZ.

MCab can work with acoustic IRs, so you can do that just as you would guitar cab IRs. The video is about making them from scratch, so you don't have to buy anything or rely on someone else's taste of what sounds good.

I bought and like the 3 sigma IRs, but I still want more variety, so that's where this technique comes in.

[mevla]

Thanks for the clarification. That's what I suspected, a misunderstanding of the purpose. I will try some 3 Sigma IRs and will certainly try also the approach you described in making an 'IR' from scratch, provided I find a suitable high quality audio file for an acoustic guitar.

I got the Takamine set from 3Sigma. Loads in MCabinet and MConvolutionMB although one question: both are asking upon loading a wav file something akin to 'are you sure you want to modify the file ?' Will they actually modify the original wav IR file ? For the moment I copied some IR files to a temp directory for testing.