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Capturing IR

Lesson 6 from: Axe-Fx Master Class

Cooper Carter

Capturing IR

Lesson 6 from: Axe-Fx Master Class

Cooper Carter

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Lesson Info

6. Capturing IR

Next Lesson: Using IR Packs

Lesson Info

Capturing IR

We're going to get into capturing I ours using I ours everything having to do with I ours. So before I get started on this, I want to make sure that for those who are following along, if you could show my computer screen for a second, you need to go to fractal and get a cab lab got by cab alive. It's awesome cab lab allows you not only tio in one program capture I ours on dh. Send them to the scratch pad in the expects it will also allow you to take up to eight I ours and mix them so you can take an I r from an s and fifty seven and I are from a four twenty one and I are from a one twenty one and I are from eu fifty seven er are you eighty seven? Rather and mix them all whatever level you want said that the scratch pad test it tweet as much as you want. Said that a scratch pad and finally burnout and I are that has up to eight separate I ours inside of it. I should mention that if you mix in any third party or fractal I ours into that you cannot post those I ars online because they inc...

lude copyrighted by arts um, we go the first slide here so for those of you don't know an impulse response or an I r is the signature of aa lot of things, but in this case a guitar cabinet is what we're going to be doing and essentially we're going to send some to sign tones that are very obnoxious and very useful through this cab expects is going to listen to that and it's going to give us a wave form graph essentially of what is going on in that cab along the frequency spectrum from the very lowest the very highest, which will allow us to then play through that cabinet simulated in the expects so all of the factory cabinets that aaron the axe effects were made by fractal and I want to mention and we go back to slide this graph only shows our insides graph that's not a ground it's very fancy graph this picture rather on lee shows two of the cab packs that have been produced by fractal actually produced the second one along with cliff chase and map the cone and our engineer of the new hampshire but they're now seven official fractal I our packs and this is less a a plug for those that it is a high recommendation that if you want the very best in ultras I are technology in your expects beyond what's in the factories go download those person they're totally worth it and they kick ass there hundreds and hundreds of irs honestly, there are more cars than anyone knows what to do with on their all distinct dozens of cabs doesn't the different mike's dozens of different making positions different mike preys everything in the chain effects how the I r comes out as a result and so being able to choose different variations whether it's a different kabir different mike is immensely powerful and then again, you could mix them in cab lab just can't post those if you've got those, they're also third party I ours from companies like own hammer great stuff there highly recommend checking out the cab packs, though, and cab lab I'm going to be using here to capture if you don't have cab lab, I go to the front screen of the expects for second we're going to be using in the utility menu if you go over to I r cap, you could do everything that I'm about to do with cab lab hello uh in this screen right here so it's possible to do that I'm going to using kabob that's a little bit easier on it allows you to see mme or what is going on so let's talk about the actual eye are capture process here's, a beautiful graft put together by the illustrious med, the cone, uh, senora peony and essentially that's showing how I r capture works what we're going to do is use the ax effects as a signal generators all we're going to be doing is using expects essentially is a synth and they were going to be using the second half of the expects a za listening device to capture the I r so we're going to make up this cab here and I'm going to go over there and I'm gonna put on these in years so that I can't really hear the cab in the room but I'm going to be able to hear what the microphone is hearing so I'm going to pick a good sweet spot on the cab where I think the mike sounds best and as anybody who's ever might to guitar amp knows uh the tiniest variation and where you put a mike on a cab, whether the tiniest creation and where it is versus you know cone to the edge of the speaker or the tilt of the micro how far away it is obviously the type of mike vastly affects it so I'm gonna go in there and make some little adjustments I'm going to play into the looper if we go to my computer here I have ah I r capture test preset basically what this is is it's a looper which allows me to do this on my own in an ideal world I should mention you will put the cabin isolation in a studio environment you would be in the control room the expects will be in the control room so you would be able to hear the cab you'd be able to hear what the mic is hearing on the cab you have one guy out in the room moving the mike uh any of some headphones on so I can hear what's going on you're sit in the control room trump trump trump trump trunk and when it sounds good to you through the speakers you tell the guy in the room to stop you leave it there then you shoot the I r I don't have another guy to move the mic I don't have an isolation room here s o this eyes not perfect conditions but we're going to do our best to get a good eye are here again I'm going to use and you guys can have this if you purchase the class you guys are welcome to use this thiss preset it's a looper someone use that generated junk chunks I've got the uh got an amplifier right here I'm going to use that to generate the tone I've gotten effects loop and a cab, you'll notice that the cab is empty and it's also set to scratch pad zero zero one which is the default position into which cab lab places any eye are that it captures before saving that's just cab lives default behavior in scene one this cab it's empty and it's seen eight I've got the effects loop here and the effects loop is going to be sending out the tone of this amplifier to the cab so let's, go ahead and hook everything up and go back to that diagram and basically what I want to do is obviously the mic is already somewhere near the cab here um and I'm going to go and put that mike into the pre ambush that already is so we're going into the pre empt here uh and then out of that pre empt have this cable which I'm going put into input to left the effects return of the expects ah and then I'm coming out of the ax effects via this cable from output to left, which is the effects send and this is going into this power amp, which I've got a pretty good volume and this is a again it is very important to use a neutral power amp because everything in the signal chain I's going to affect the tone of this eye are I'm not sure I'm looking here, but somewhere the tone of this I r is going to take into account the amp the mic the pri I should know that as far as the pre goes because a lot of guys don't have mike priest, you know you don't have it if you're a guitarist, record vocals or something the pre on a super inexpensive mixer like a tiny little barrenger mixer something is totally fine uh it's really him or that it's doesn't have you know any cue on it or anything like that also with the power and a chief power amp that solid state is going to be fine for using and I are because the quality isn't as important as the flatness and most answer going to be pretty flat if you can use you know really nice pre and a really nice power ramp on really nice mike all the better but you can get great I ours without him so what I'm gonna do now that everything is hooked up eyes I'm gonna go into cab lab on basically just going to run a little test to make sure that everything is set the way should be worth so we hear that wonderful little sign tone there and that's going through the cab and I'm gonna check the input meters of the expects in the utility as well as the output just to make sure we're hearing and receiving and sending everything we should work hold on right there we go so we see the two lighting up that's good input so we're sending out a signal and he expects is listening to the signal you want to make sure that on these front panel inputs that you are kind of getting near the red maybe tickling it every once in a while but you don't wantto want to hit it too hard. So, uh let's now do some do some liking so it's going to get a little allowed here for second? What I'm going to dio is on my mfc gonna hold down reveal for a couple seconds and looper control mode is going to come out and I've put a jason m eight hundred kind of thing in here. Um let's go toe number eight where we've got our effects loop on uh, I'm just gonna go ahead and chunk along here for a second. All right, so, uh, a little basic cut that and, uh, off the master of it I'm going to do is I'm just record some stuff so that I could go over there and move the mic around. Listen to what kind of guy are we're shooting for shooting being upon since it's called shooting and I are guests that's enough of that? I think so. For those of you listening at home, you should have just heard the the sound from that microphone and essentially what I've done is put the microphone in a position to where if I were recording through this cab without the expects if I were going to run if I were going to run this microphone into a board and take this as a track on a song that's the sound I would want so what I'm going to do now is take a perfect copy of that of that situation really going on there where it is on the mind on the cab how the mic his position, how far away it is uh how it's running into the pre and we're going to copy that in the expect so then we can turn off power if we could turn off the cab uh and then we can sell the cab because we've captured it and put it in there we don't need it anymore so I'm going to go into cab lab here and just one more time for fun I'm going to test it and here we go everybody super quiet again I want to stress that being in this room with for one hundred million watts of studio lighting and three million watts of cameras is not ideal and the cab is in an isolation all of that I just want to stress that when this is done in ideal conditions and not even just ideal when it's done in conditions where you don't have a lot of studio lighting it's impossible to tell the difference between these I ours we're going to shoot this one it's going to be damn close it's probably going to be way closer than I'm even caveat ing about because uh because this stuff works really well so if everybody could just be quiet for a little bit we're going to enjoy the dulcet tones of the increasing frequency scientist all right so as you can see on my screen and also on the front panel we have a beautiful I r signature there this is an ultra resume our as you can see I've selected ultras and for those who I don't know the difference between ultra isn't standard the standard I r is ah the I r that you've known and loved for a long time the expects it already is vastly more accurate than any other I are on the market I say that not to sell expects is since you guys already have them if you're watching this I say it because it's true it is vastly more accurate than anything else and the ultra is is even more accurate still iras have always been fairly accurate in the highs the mids even the lower mids as you get towards the lows the curve tends to smooth out a little bit in comparison to what the actual cab eyes doing has been able to capture that low end the real benefit of the ultra is that I see is a lot of times guys doing a full range far, far flight response say you know I don't feel the chunk throw that I feel standing in one of the cab you know it doesn't shake my bones and whatnot all the other euphemisms guys, come up for with, you know, for standing in front of cab, which is a great feeling, I think all torres really silences that debate because it captures that low frequency, so well, it really is a lot more accurate, and I think ultra raises really blow the doors off kind of the the I r industry, in my opinion. So now that we have this eye are I'm going to name it. May we'll give you thirty since that's what we have and their two ways to go about this one, I could send it to a user cab slot in the expects, or I could say that is a file. The benefit of saving it as a file is that you get not only the csx, which is just the standard cabin he load into the axe effects. You also are getting the raw I our file, the benefit of the rye, our file is going to become clear in a minute when we go into cab lab and we can actually imported into cab lab and mix it with another eye are there we're going to take with a different mike in a minute, so and they were going to find a whole new eye are so we'll have three I ours will have one and then another, and then we'll have the mix I am looking around and not seeing that second mike so if somebody out there wants to locate it uh that would be great it was in a box somewhere anyway uh cab allowed by the fall has already saved this teo user slot the scratch pad so as you can see if I go to the cab block what was once empty eyes still empty actually because we haven't actually saved into the expect but it's there in the scratch pad um let's take a listen to what we've got so I'm gonna be uh monitoring I could just hit the looper but I want to play because I like playing guitar uh we're going to monitor the difference between what we've got and sorry guys in the studio here you're just gonna hear the cabin the full range it actually should sound damn close anyway way that's the full range I are we just captured and here's the catch so I'm just going to hit the looper here and I'm kind of curious some of what one here in here but I think we got damn close I'm going to turn the looper on and switch between these scenes and let's see what happens wait it's like telling are you getting that you're hearing that you're here alone one second? Let me, uh actually just reconfirm here I'm just going to send this to a user cab just because ok, so I've actually just sent this uh just to confirm that we've got it here tio he's there slot ten and uh should have fifteen right? Okay, this should be interesting anyone on the forum what's the china and why this isn't reloading I'm happy tio I'm open to suggestions otherwise I'm just going to import it through acts manage cabs it's actually a good time to mention that you guys can just like you can manage presets there's a cab manager and you can go in here and drag and drop cabs from everywhere including this folder that we're about to go into um and it'll scan the folder and look for cabs and you can use this I'm going to show you in a minute to load in any cab packs that you want you can just pull in just like you pull presets in um here we go another couple thank you very much solid and there we go just like that here is our finnish thirty let's try that one more time you know I'm convinced that was working anyway it did write to the scratch pads because it sounds exactly same now so um yes let's take a another listen to it and kellen just guys at home marvelous to me one is a little louder than the other which may be fooling you into thinking that the highs are a little different the real trick tio making sure you can really ascertain how close they are is to hear hear them in a very close volume and again that's much easier when you don't have the cab in the room with you. So that was, I think, a pretty successful I are there what I'm going to do now is go and change the mike we're going to make a completely different sounding I r and we're gonna name it a b thirty two so let's go over there and I'm going to put these ears on again and mess around with, uh, with the mice again and again. The real beauty of this is that you can go in and mike the same cab with different mice you can like it. We could put this mike on access off access we could take a far field from a couple feet away and get a little bit of room, get a near field right upon the cone. You can, you know, go crazy if you want to take one hundred yards of the same cab because you really love that cab. Be my guest, I ours or I think seven kilobytes you're not going, you know, I could break the bank with him um here we go, the old tried and true here fifty seven and, uh just do a little less to do engineering here and again with this I'm just going to move the mic around until I get a spot that I think sounds sounds good and again I mean this is totally a matter of opinion all right I'm going to start back up our our looper of annoyance and uh some do some positioning all right so there I kind of got a chunkier kind of sound and I've got it a little angle does well um trying to just go for something that's a little different than the other one so let's uh go ahead and shoot that one and see we got we're gonna run a test all right and everybody quiet here we go we're going capture wow ok so as you can see we've got a pretty different looking curve there was one with spikes up in there and uh pretty pretty different situations so um again I'm going to say this as number two come and it should have written to the scratch pad so I'm going to go up in there and see what we got don't panic and just to confirm I'm going to go ahead and import this one as well into the ex manage on duh go ahead and grab this one remember in the what we call it number two I believe we're not seeing it why don't we save it says uh yeah I see it there I'm looking at it oh boy finding a lot right now this is what we're doing in a couple minutes. We're gonna load all two hundred ninety of ah of these into. All right, let's, see here. Anybody again? One a chime in here. I'm just going to send it to a user cub. All right, now I'm gonna refresh like I was told to do. All right, now, we should be golden radio waves. Definitely a different kind of seven. Yeah, I think we're gonna have tio reshoot this one which happens. It's ah, little brittle. So, it's, just the hit this one one more time. Everybody can stand to hear this thing again. All right? I can already tell that work from the noise. Signature. All right, so wait. So again, if we want to compare kellen, I'll start up the loop of doing here. Anybody can tell the difference between those two. I'll give you a hundred dollars. I maybe maybe without cabin the room, you can tell the difference, but I was hearing the cab as well, but sounds pretty darn close to me. So yes, I noticed when you were doing the first her the first shoot with the second microphone during that shoot, you bumped something against the table, maybe a knuckler, something you think that could have caused that anomaly, yeah, probably. Um again you really want to do this in a pro studio or at least like a quiet bedroom or a lot of stuff going on in here? All right, so we now have to uh I ours that we've captured one from the first mike and one from the second and we have saved both of those uh to these files and again what you're going to get when you say that a cab lab um are not only the cis x files so the files that the expects can actually load into its memory so this one for example um you also get these I our files so we're going to do is load this vintage thirty and load vanished thirty two and basically what we have now is the ability to mix these two uh independently of each other he's going to be in parallel you khun syria's combine as well read this so you understand what that means but it's a it's a little different situation and so let's just say we want uh bringing probably down a little bit but uh let's say we want an even mix of both a menace in this the scratch pad as the thirty combo and I'm gonna set this to the scratch pad over here I suppose at this point I need to refresh probably and there's rv thirty combo we'll see what we got from mixing those two together I think that sounds pretty rage in anybody else happened I think that sounds pretty good. What I may do is I think I turned down the amfa's well let's see what happens if I do this what's at another cab block here and, uh let's uh see the difference between some of these again of this meeting these so that when we bypassed them they stop making sounds because you don't want to double up our our signal's um okay, so here's a few thirty and what I'm going to do actually switch this to stereo ultras and for those of you who didn't know that stereo ultras can happen it can and it's beautiful thing um so now we have both of these in here and what I'm going to do is bypass this so let's listen to the two separate I ours wait that's the wrong one area some panning these so we can hear them independently here is the first one here is the second one wait. All right, so we now have three separate cabs and one of them is a mix so again we could do this all day I could go over there and shoot a completely wild one in fact, we're actually doing pretty well on time let's uh why don't we shoot one that is a far field has a little bit of room uh and this is actually it could be interesting it's definitely a different sound, but a lot of guys looking for that amp in the room tone like to mix a little bit of of a room far field I are in and we can actually go into the cab picker here and you guys can see all these different calves have obviously made of different cabs off during caps that some of them have far field next to them, which means they're made not right up on the cone generally, you don't need to go back very far very far at all really to introduce a good bit of room into and I are as you see here there's some of these ultra raises that I've loaded into my two that come actually standards some of them in the xl but all of these that's a room the's air all mixes of various mikes in the room can just add a really a different character to it. So what I'm going to d'oh is take this combo, which is our too close mikes ademas set this tow ultras and what I'm gonna do is capture the far field and put it on this second mike and are the second kavlak brother and if we like what it sounds like, we can go ahead and mix it uh into our existing I r and make one that is composed of three different cars, so let's go ahead and move the mike a little bit and I'm going to turn back on our lovely song to record another loop just to keep us all going crazy but I won't and we're going to make a room tone and again this kind of an experimental thing stop for everybody but I like introducing a little bit of room into stuff yeah that's because guys that was an illustration of me being an idiot we're currently listening to the full range and it's also an illustration of how close the I r was because I couldn't tell with my own ears in my ears were in and I couldn't tell if I was listening to the cabinet or the fake cabinet so I think we did a pretty good job shooting the I r that said let's do it where it actually works all right? So if you're listening you can hear that there's a good amount of space being added to that and I actually I put it so that we got a little bit of bite to kind of make up for the fact that we're losing some of the clarity from being a back a little bit so let's do our well wolf groups here we're going back in a cab lab and I are capture what we're gonna call this uh thirty room and we're going ahead and capture that all right so as you can see it's a room tone we do not have a lot of base going on we're not close to speaker at all you see on the camera were actually good good good long distance away from it this is probably um I can't speak for everybody is probably not and I are most people would want to use alone the whole idea is that we're going tio we're going to mix it in through the beauty of cab lab just to make sure we've got it I'm going to do that and let's uh see what we got here bypassed that and uh do ye olde refresh and here we go here's our room also a good deal quieter which makes sense so I'm gonna use this up a bit so if you guys have headphones you're going to tell that there's actually a good bit of room in this space and it if you're listening on monitors and my nephew is clear because you're hearing it in a room to go but it is a lot more open, much less focused you now is uh threw the switch with looper and uh we'll hear the difference between ah between the sounds kellen I changed the levels a little bit so they might be a little different palin's going to ride the favors here from it for you guys and um and then we're going toe play our little game of trump trump trump so I don't have my thing on so I can hear it again sounds really close to me if there's a levels difference you might I think they sound a little different but all right so what I'm gonna do is the same drill go in and, uh going to cab lab uh and on here a two moment I guess actually we could we go here and check out our room and then our two years are ah combo combo go slow that one in um go back in the cab eleven just combine all three of these um so the thirty to thirty two and then going to grab this thirty room and on the room I want to bring it down because we want tio have that maura's a ambience oren indians literally so that's a that's a scratch pad and here um that one names like in a train with sounded like all right sounds good go ahead and write it to user cab we're gonna write it tio number seventeen and now we have after we refresh our names which I keep forgetting to do all right the thirty combo the new combo version I should have needed something differently but I didn't you could totally here so what I'm going to do now is that wipe out this second cabinet is we don't actually really need it anymore because we've just combined them all uh on our own and turned that on in this scene and that on in this one. So this is now a complete preset on scene one. And it seem to you have the ability to audition your cabinet.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Cooper Carter - Axe-Fx Master Class Slides.pdf
Cooper Carter - Axe-FX Master Class Presets.zip
Cooper Carter - Axe-Fx Master Class IR Files.zip
Cooper Carter -- Axe-Fx Master Class Bonus Q and A.pdf

bonus material

Cooper Carter -- Axe-Fx Master Class Syllabus.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Cooper is great! Knows the Axe-Fx inside and out, the class provides EXCELLENT insights regarding ways to maximize it's power (especially for live playing). Cooper is the real deal. A great investment to get the most out of your AxeFx

Bernie a5cffc
 

Another great tutorial. Every aspect of the Master Class covered informations that I can use. The Axe-FX II is a magical box and Cooper Carter is the right magician to deliver what it can do. I have purchase both Axe-FX courses by CC and it is now my goto bible to mastering this marvel. If more secret can be said about the Axe-FX II, I am definitely first in line for more. A great investment and must have for all Axe-FX users.

Razvan Cirligeanu
 

Hello there, This is the next step if you are serious about the AxeFX. It helped me to use features, great features, that I wouldn't EVER have the patience to explore by myself. Yeah, I am lazy... Coop makes it easy, I got more than I expected from this class. One demand: Please, Coop, upgrade the info, there are so many great updates since you recorded this class. Thanks, Razvan

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