easstudios
Well-known member
HI guys!
Thanks for checking out the sub forum, hopefully this is a cool place to post clips and discuss things related to the digital products I make. I'm also around to answer questions about anything and to try and help you get the most out of them.
https://mirrorprofiles.myshopify.com/
Thought I'd just explain the background of how this stuff came around for me. Btw easstudios is what my recording studio has been called for around 20 years (its just my initials) and I post on forums under that name. Mirror Profiles is the website that sells my IR's and presets.
This project started out a few years ago - my goal initially was to create cab IR's of my gear with the intention of getting accurate results to micing up normally, when using an amp with a load box. There was a lot of experimentation and back and forth before settling on a technique and process that I was happy with. I really didn't want to compromise on anything, so I settled on not only making sure that the IR's were sonically indistinguishable to micing the cab up, but also to try and give a close experience to micing up a cab in the studio. This meant capturing each individual speaker in each cabinet, using a robot mic stand across the horizontal width of the speaker with a variety of microphones and a high end signal path.
The above video shows using an amplifier and cab mic'd up traditionally, vs using a load box and IR. The IR was created on a different day and session to when the cab was mic'd up - I was able to get a similar position by using the robot mic stand to get it roughly in the same place.
It turns out that in making these IR's, they also work amazingly well with modern digital modellers (such as Fractal / Line 6 / Kemper / Neural DSP etc), and I've even managed to match some of these modellers to my real amps and cabs mic'd up. As a big fan of these digital tools, this kind of led me towards just using them for the amp emulations and using my own IR's with them. It made me transition to primarily using direct Kemper Profiles and using IR's after the fact - many times what makes or breaks a Kemper Profile is which cabinet and speaker have been used, and how its been mic'd up. Not only that, but its incredibly hard to predict the context that profiles are going to be used in. Perhaps a different guitar/tuning/song key/tempo is going to demand a slightly different tone?
The best solution to me was to make a handful of direct profiles, voiced around different guitars and tunings and made with the intention of being used with my IR's. This way, I could vouch for the accuracy of the tones and still offer a range of cabinet and micing options giving the user maximum freedom to shape the tones to their taste.
At some point, in verifying the accuracy of my IR's against modellers and profilers, I realised I was able to match the tones pretty closely between my real amps and the modellers. And in doing so, it was quite convenient having my familiar amp settings as a starting point when loading these plugins. I could load up the plugin and have my typical sound ready to go. Some friends suggested that these would be useful to them - to have a starting point that gives them some confidence that it matches closely to the real amp. The benefit of these is the modellers give you the same range of controls as the real amp, so you can adjust and fine tune as you see fit to find what you need. Often with my real amps, the knobs don't get adjusted to drastically beyond a typical range so all it can take is a little fine tuning to adapt for different circumstances.
These presets also led to some requests to try and recreate some famous tones with this digital gear - I always prefered making these in a more traditional way (rather than relying on brute forcing match EQ or other processing). So I'd read up as much as possible on the artists gear and find photos from studio sessions, and then try and find the closest corresponding gear I have and fine tune by ear. It's been quite a fun journey to understand different engineers approachs as many have their own quirks in achieving tones. It blew my mind how I was able to get so close to some of my favourite recorded guitar tones with very little gear, but just finding the right speakers and mic combinations (for instance Killswitch Engage's As Daylight Dies, or Tool's 10,000 Days).
So there you have it! Hope these are useful to folks here and help contribute to making lots of great music!
Thanks for checking out the sub forum, hopefully this is a cool place to post clips and discuss things related to the digital products I make. I'm also around to answer questions about anything and to try and help you get the most out of them.
https://mirrorprofiles.myshopify.com/
Thought I'd just explain the background of how this stuff came around for me. Btw easstudios is what my recording studio has been called for around 20 years (its just my initials) and I post on forums under that name. Mirror Profiles is the website that sells my IR's and presets.
This project started out a few years ago - my goal initially was to create cab IR's of my gear with the intention of getting accurate results to micing up normally, when using an amp with a load box. There was a lot of experimentation and back and forth before settling on a technique and process that I was happy with. I really didn't want to compromise on anything, so I settled on not only making sure that the IR's were sonically indistinguishable to micing the cab up, but also to try and give a close experience to micing up a cab in the studio. This meant capturing each individual speaker in each cabinet, using a robot mic stand across the horizontal width of the speaker with a variety of microphones and a high end signal path.
The above video shows using an amplifier and cab mic'd up traditionally, vs using a load box and IR. The IR was created on a different day and session to when the cab was mic'd up - I was able to get a similar position by using the robot mic stand to get it roughly in the same place.
It turns out that in making these IR's, they also work amazingly well with modern digital modellers (such as Fractal / Line 6 / Kemper / Neural DSP etc), and I've even managed to match some of these modellers to my real amps and cabs mic'd up. As a big fan of these digital tools, this kind of led me towards just using them for the amp emulations and using my own IR's with them. It made me transition to primarily using direct Kemper Profiles and using IR's after the fact - many times what makes or breaks a Kemper Profile is which cabinet and speaker have been used, and how its been mic'd up. Not only that, but its incredibly hard to predict the context that profiles are going to be used in. Perhaps a different guitar/tuning/song key/tempo is going to demand a slightly different tone?
The best solution to me was to make a handful of direct profiles, voiced around different guitars and tunings and made with the intention of being used with my IR's. This way, I could vouch for the accuracy of the tones and still offer a range of cabinet and micing options giving the user maximum freedom to shape the tones to their taste.
At some point, in verifying the accuracy of my IR's against modellers and profilers, I realised I was able to match the tones pretty closely between my real amps and the modellers. And in doing so, it was quite convenient having my familiar amp settings as a starting point when loading these plugins. I could load up the plugin and have my typical sound ready to go. Some friends suggested that these would be useful to them - to have a starting point that gives them some confidence that it matches closely to the real amp. The benefit of these is the modellers give you the same range of controls as the real amp, so you can adjust and fine tune as you see fit to find what you need. Often with my real amps, the knobs don't get adjusted to drastically beyond a typical range so all it can take is a little fine tuning to adapt for different circumstances.
These presets also led to some requests to try and recreate some famous tones with this digital gear - I always prefered making these in a more traditional way (rather than relying on brute forcing match EQ or other processing). So I'd read up as much as possible on the artists gear and find photos from studio sessions, and then try and find the closest corresponding gear I have and fine tune by ear. It's been quite a fun journey to understand different engineers approachs as many have their own quirks in achieving tones. It blew my mind how I was able to get so close to some of my favourite recorded guitar tones with very little gear, but just finding the right speakers and mic combinations (for instance Killswitch Engage's As Daylight Dies, or Tool's 10,000 Days).
So there you have it! Hope these are useful to folks here and help contribute to making lots of great music!
