MCabinet feature suggestion

[DarkStar]

Why am I thinking that users of MeldaProduction plug-ins have some link with Keith Emerson jamming knives into his Hammond keyboards - to get to sounds that no-one else could?

Nice

[Dewdman42]

Well what I really like about MCabinet is the whole prospect of creating a small set of synthesized cabinet profiles which are basically sounding the way I want...and can be tweaked...rather then trying to sort through thousands of IR files and trying to find the right combination of IR's that sound the way I want. most IR loaders provide a little bit of EQ on top of it and not much else. They are probably internally doing mostly what MCabinet does, but MCabinet exposes all the tweaks you could want to do to the EQ curve so that you can basically create what amounts to an algorithmic guitar cab. Resonators, wideners, smoothing, tilting, dynamic EQ, harmonic filter...etc..all built into one plugin...and I think once I have a couple of base profiles that sound the way I like, I will end up doing very little tweaking here or there but will basically have something molded the way I want... It just exposes the guts of IR processing in a way that makes it tweak able... I personally think its a pretty cool product and nothing else like it. Looking forward to using it and developing some profiles perfect for me.

I also look forward to playing around with non-linear capabilities to see how that may bring some life into my guitar sound..not quite a static as typical IR's. We shall see. This plugin can easily get into creative territory where it won't really behave like an actual guitar cab anymore... but then again, if it sounds good who cares...

[tylerdedera]

Well MCabinetMB would be exactly what I’m looking for. I know the resonators give endless possibilities to the sound profile, however as a starting point it would be cool to have 2 or 3 blended together with different levels, pan angles, dynamic eq etc..
Really this is one of the most groundbreaking plugins i’ve used in a long time. The imaging possibilities under the width tabs are insane. It has inspired me to start playing guitar more often. I even made a decent guitar emulator device in MXXX based mostly around MCabinet. It can be downloaded on the MXXX preset exchange if anyone is interested.

[Dewdman42]

I guess we can more or less do parallel processing easily enough in our daw with two parallel instances of mcabinet. If it made sense to actually do multiband processing of different cabs on different bands then the mb version could be interesting but generally I think that would be overkill for guitar cab work, and kind of overly complicated. I probably would not spend more money for that.

I did find another ir loader that can load multiple IR’s and export a blended IR from that. Redwirez mixir2 can do that. So it should be possible to use that to build up a combo hybrid IR of several speakers blended together and then load that into mcabinet in order to create a synthetic version of it and smooth it out, clean it up a bit, etc

In the few experiments I have done using the ir folder averaging, I have not come up with anything good and interesting at all. But never know, maybe I will eventually.

[tylerdedera]

The multi band versions of Melda products go way beyond frequency bandwidth though. You could run 6 sound profiles in parallel. Yes you could separate them by frequency as well as dynamic, but you can also run them in parallel by configuring the band crossover

[Dewdman42]

I hear you, but I don't need all that "way beyond" stuff and I feel it would be overkill for a guitar cabinet plugin. But being able to blend several cabinets together is common feature of nearly every IR loader out there. Just sayin'

[jmg8]

The multi band version WILL let you blend several cabinets together. The bands can be set into parallel mode. This would do what you want, unless you need to export as a single IR to use in some other software, but you already figured out how to do that with mixir2 (you could also use MConvolution)
BTW did you try the analog parameter in the EQ to create non linearities?

[Dewdman42]

I don't care if the multi band version will allow that, I'm not going to buy it End of story. That feature should be in MCabinet. Thanks.

[jmg8]

You might not have to pay. You see some of the plugins like MTurboReverb and MTurboDelay got a multi band version for FREE, for existing users. So you never know.....
And the analog parameter in the EQ? Did you try it?

[Dewdman42]

fair enough.

I haven't had a chance to work with some MCabinet features yet..including the Analog EQ. But I will. Trying to wrap my head around the harmonic control panel right now... Overall I'm finding that while mCabinet has a lot of cool stuff in it, I basically don't like most of what the resonator does. but maybe I'll stumble upon a a nice sounding seed by accident. I do however like taking existing IR's that I have, smoothing them out a little bit, dealing with problem frequencies if applicable and then saving it as a new IR, or just saving it as an MCabinet and preset using it there is fine. All of that can be done with traditional tools, but this just provides a nice self contained guitar cab that I can pull up and most importantly, slightly tweak on demand..but still figuring out how to tweak it. The say may come when a resonator i just what I need to pop it out of the mix, but we'll see.

[Dewdman42]

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[Dewdman42]

So.. Since the main idea behind MCabinet seems to be to craft our own speaker EQ curve, rather then wade through piles of IR's trying to randomly find one that sounds the way we want.... The next question becomes...HOW do we make MCabinet sound the way we want it to sound?

Looking at basic EQ curves is one thing, obviously its easy to see in a broad sense if a curve is scooped or if there is a bump somewhere, that matters in a good or bad way; and smooth it out with EQ. Ok, but we don't need MCabinet for that. Its the resonator feature that enables us to essentially create a completely artificial guitar cabinet in MCabinet, but the thing is I have no idea what to do other then hit the dice buttons repeatedly until it sounds "good", but you're always left with the question "if I hit the dice button one more time will it sound even better?". Its so hit or miss..

Does anyone have any specific suggestions about guitar cabinet simulation, what characteristics are relevant for different kinds of sounds and how do we go about crafting them using MCabinet?

I started playing around also with making some of my own IR's using Voxengo Deconvolver. Basically I can send a sine sweep through Amplitube's cabs...and move the mics around, swap speakers and other things..make it sound the way I want or close to it, and then capture the sine wave through it and deconvolve that into an IR. The next question becomes, what advantage is there to importing that into MCabinet to resynthesize it that way? Why not just use the IR I created? What is the point of MCabinet if we already have an IR that sounds the way we like? Does it add anything to the sound?

If we don't have an IR we like, and don't want to have to wade through thousands of them trying to find one we like, then we're back to needing to understand HOW and WHY to tweak the various knobs in MCabinet to attempt to synthesize a cabinet response from scratch or how to manipulate an existing IR as a starting place..other then just randomly hitting the dice and hoping for something good..what kind of advice or pointers can people provide about how to engineer that process, to intelligently create cabinet response that sounds as we wish? And in particular, how to best think about the resonators, or what if anything is better about using an MCabinet resonator, vs just using an IR that has resonances already present in the IR? What is the point of the "smoothing" features? I mean that obviously smooths out some of the resonances in some ways... but... is that a good thing? I don't really know. An IR that sounds pretty good already has a lot of jaggy resonances in it...and it sounds good. Why would smoothing that out be a good idea? For example...any advice and insights about how to use MCabinet would be appreciated.

Otherwise, aside from the mild curiosity it has been to import IR"s and have a nice look at what they are doing..I'm not really sure what to do with MCabinet, it still ends up kind of a crap shoot...I can either wade through piles of IR's looking for what might be the best sound, or I can hit the dice buttons over and over again in MCabinet hoping to find something that sounds good and never quite knowing for sure if I have found it yet.. As a pure IR loader, its not really optimal, there are the much better IR loaders...such as MixIR2, for example, and others, some free. MCabinet is obviously something completely different...its about synthetically creating and modifying guitar cabinet responses...but without more understanding of how to do that...its like giving a swiss army knife to a 5 year old and asking them to build a car with it.

[MeldaProduction]

MCabinetMB will be available in the next update

[Chandlerhimself]

That sounds great. A multi and version would be awesome. One small request(if it isn't already included), a button to export the the total output of all the bands as a new IR. That way sounds can be mixed together easily and used in hardware IR loaders.

[ElVincente]

Yes! Very good news!
I Second Chandler's request, it would be killer!