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Using IR Packs

Lesson 7 from: Axe-Fx Master Class

Cooper Carter

Using IR Packs

Lesson 7 from: Axe-Fx Master Class

Cooper Carter

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Lesson Info

7. Using IR Packs

Lesson Info

Using IR Packs

One thing I want to talk about is that in an ideal world we're assuming that the flat power and is flattened and its imparting none of its own tone to these I ours in reality there's nothing that's truly flat so recently fractal has developed a new method four subtracting the power and signature from the I r once you've captured the I r um it is yet to come out and it's coming soon a new version of cab lab cab three, which is a entirely new program that will allow you to take advantage of this it's attractive I our way don't yet have cavalli three no one yet has cab line three but for the sake of demonstration because it will be out soon and I highly encourage you all to get it because it is really, really a incredibly useful piece of software I'm now going to show you how to shoot a reference I r on what a reference I r is basically a signature of the amplifier alone you can then use that to just cancel out whatever pops up on that is what you need to take out of any eye are that you ...

take the issue of the speaker to get the resulting speaker completely separate from the power and you're still going to be this have the signature of the mike but you're gonna get rid of the actual power uh believe it's yes so what do I do now is some some wiring and yeah kellen again pat your inputs going about start pulling stuff uh this doesn't take a mike we're actually using a load box and you can use anything like a a direct d I box that has speaker level ah speaker level feature you do not just want to repeat this like fifteen times do not use the normal die to take a reference tone reference I r of a power and this is a thousand what power and if you put that into a die you're going to destroy your d I do not play your power and directly into the axe effects if you do that you're going to destroy your expects you need something that can accept speaker level speaker level input which is like a sir I so or a whirlwind hopley a whirlwind hotbox in this case we're using the palmer speaker simulator p d ay zero three we're not obviously using speakers simulation this has direct outputs that just jumped the the single down so what we're going to do is ah bitterness off real quick um going tio not send this into the cabinet were actually going to send the power ramp directly into this load box on then out of this low box from the palmer we're going to replace where we have the mic pre input too and we're going to put it in here so basically and I was very scared to connect my expects to anything with a power and in line with it thankfully this palmer works as it's supposed tio so we're going to turn this power and back on and we're going to take an I r of the power ramp itself so what we should see ideally is a very flat line with maybe a little bit of variation so if this amp is really quite flat you won't see anything at all in an ideal world you take the I r and you just see that uh that's likely not going to happen because we live in the real world all right? So I'm gonna go into higher capture now and if I have looked everything up right which I believe we have we're going tio we're not gonna hear anyone groups because there's nothing happening all right? And there we go it is pretty flat until the very lowest kind of register is a big old fat dip in the lows so we have ah illustrated where there's ah room for improvement in the flatness so again it's not like this is a bad power for something is just we live in the real world and we cannot actually do anything with this eye are now given the cab three is not out but I am going to save this and we're going to call this uh qsc uh ref I r so there we go. That's that's how? And I wanted to show you guys that because when you can buy cab lab live it's going to be incredibly useful way to get a really, really clear I are going to move on now to talking about using our packs, and we can actually talk about reference I ours because in the latest cab packs from fractal, they are actually included in the cab back so that in the future you can go and, uh, take, you know, take the reference are, um so I mentioned earlier that we have the knack said it not only acts manage presets, which allows you, teo, check out all your presets and drag and drop them and generally just, you know, mess around with everything but identical to that in the cab world is acts manage cabs way kind of ah, kind of alluded to this earlier when I was browsing for those I ours, but as you can see, I have gotten the, uh I bought the cab pack that was just released, um, which is the attic collection made from the cavs of a very famous american band and will remain unnamed. But playing these cabs makes me feel a lot of sweet emotions, so walk this way right over to fractal audio dot com and purchase this latest cab packed what I'm going to dio is load a bunch of these calves into my expects and this is just a wrote technical tutorial for you guys for those who have wondered there's been a lot of questions in the forum and what not how do I lodi ours in that I buy this is it right here? I just opened up in the browser and this is all of the cavs, as you can see there a hell of a lot of calves, I ours this's the same cab here with all different kinds of mike's, all the kinds of positions, and you've got all these different options, so what I'm going to dio is just pick a couple of these honestly, completely at random we're just gonna listen, tio, some of the differences grab a two with same mike and get that division thirteen essentially a z can see actually, if you look at user cabs thirty eight through forty five actually loaded some of those in already, uh, when I first purchased this god, um all right now I'm just going to drag these in, um, that work it's literally that simple guys not ah see, I get all of them, I didn't for some reason area basically now is just going toe to go through and right all these I'm actually going to write him twice, apparently, but again, this is just something that I've seen a lot of questions about anything important for guys to know what do you do with these three hundred thousand by him? I should mention this is an expects to and the reason I brought it expects to to this class instead of my excel eyes that I want to be able to share all these presets with you without having to convert the mall manually. Excel comm presents are not compatible with the two to presets through a convertible convertible they were convertible or maybe a convertible who knows are available on useful in the excel, so the xl has way more user slots so you could literally take that entire cab pack and drop it in your excel and have plenty of room left for other cabs. I just want to stress that it looked like we were filling up the user slots there were really really not if you have an xl one of the many reasons honestly too fine excel if you don't have one. So at this point let us, um go to somewhat c pic of fun preset all this do my, uh this is my standard gig preset for rock and stuff and we'll audition some of these calves through it so let's do this into normal snow altera's and we'll just click through these and here's some of the some of the difference got a one eight turn off all this jazz all right, what I'm actually going to do here is ah settle looper um and given the cpu I may need to um no, we're good all right, I said a looper here and, uh, turn this tub makes up to one hundred so that doesn't get quieter as we go and lower this and volume a little bit see yeah, I'm gonna start this looper playing and I'm just going to switch through some cabs as, uh as we go here, you guys can hear the differences and again, these are all ultras. I are these air recently taken from the sessions at the studio. So, um let's just see how they sound. I'm just gonna literally click through him, you guys, this is a good time to, uh, have headphones on or similar if you if you have him, if not no big deal. Well, uh, listen on good monitors. I just I shudder to think there's anybody listening laptops figures it's going be tough to tell the difference between these. So all right, hello ones like I have to save this because the nfc does not know that I have a looper on moment ah, wait says you can see it's a really, really wide range of tones in there we've got a lot of different cabs and even like the same cab with different mikes well, let's start the sort of liver back again we can listen to what this cab sounds like with two different mikes on it so we basically this is the same cab might in a different way basically what I did there while I was playing was I threw ah, the two different mike settings from that one cab into one stereo cab block uh and hardpan them so basically we get to hear if you take off one year or leave one of the other on you can hear what that cab sounds like with two very different I ours of the same cab and again this just goes toe like honestly, the number of I ours are endless. You could just sit for hours and click through these one of the really interesting things to do actually if you are playing through a track when you're mixing I actually did this last week I took a lead line and die from a song that I'm recording for my album that's coming out next month and I uh I took the die and I ran it through the expects while the song was playing down and I just sat literally like this and just turn this knob through the cabs until I found one I loaded up some like two or three hundred I ours and it sat there until I found one that sat nice in the mix and that's how I mix the lead line and then I just stopped it I recorded it with the d I and that was the guitar track so I tracked with something that sounded good and then to mix it I just went through all these I ours so the ira is incredibly powerful and if you ask cliff chase the creator of the expects he will be the first to tell you the ira is absolutely the most important thing for your tone so you can spend all day dialing an amp but then if you find out I r that really works well with that and and what you've been playing through it what you recorded for that part it's really when the expects comes alive so um we've got a bunch of time left so let's do some questions maybe what's ah what are some of the major differences and uses for the tone match opposed to the I r capture uh I don't like his tone can you do that? You do the tone matching from like I pre reported like large so uh I r capture obviously you need a cab tone matching you can actually use the way that you can use tone matching you can structure the tone match block so that you can catherine I r on basically you're doing when you're told that you're capturing and I are of a pre recorded thing, so when I in the first class showed had a match from like an acoustic guitar or solo guitar track, you can now in the latest from where when you do a tone match they uh they're the capture in ultras quality, so basically you're getting the same kind of file it on and you can actually as you see if I load up this defaults um this gig preset I've actually got a tone match right here as a user cab I captured off the solo of joe don rooney's solo off life is a highway I tone matching the tone off that off the stem track from the master recordings and use that as my cabinet on the left fifty percent panned side of this of this lead I can just show you actually the difference between uh this is a I r um it was captured in the studio this one of the bottom and this is a tone match of the song this is this is actually a great exam well, that certainly this here's the should be just the tone match if I had it set right yeah and this should be just the I r hardpan it so again I'll just do like a trunk trunk so you can hear really distinctly and I'll turn off lists all these talent knobs here you know I just bring a lot of fires back in the conversation I'm gonna do this so we can really listen so is there a difference between a tone match and I are yes and how you capture it is there a difference in the results uh because you know you're taking out a recording of a recorded cab and you're taking a recording you know of a cab by you know, that's sweeping thie I r is going to be more accurate across a larger frequency spectrum especially you know, for example with this I told my solo which goes none of that there's none of that in there whereas when you sweep and I are you get the you get all of that so if you're doing a tone match from a live amp which you could d'oh which is essentially creating an I r while you're playing instead of using the science we've which is less accurate but you could do it if you want you actually just the way to do it it's tio and then hit stop because you want to get stuff up in there so I guess I can answer your question it's possible that the tone matches less accurate across the broader spectrum than the eye are in fact it's not possible probable but ah, it has a good enough idea of I mean, this doesn't I wouldn't say that this sounds bad here was just made to play the oh, they're so yeah so we have a question here you talked a little bit about finding tones for your new album and this isn't directly related tio I r but is there a different approach between creating a live sound and creating a studio sound great question I get it all the time let's talk about number one youtube question after do you have tabs on the answer is no and it's in the description of every single video thiss permit example this is my main in fact all this walking through him uh it's answer your question this is my main singer songwriter preset this's my main rock preset on this is my main solo van preset this is like like the wrong thing is my acoustic simulator which we actually learned to build in the last class. This is my soul of antoine except without that you know when it's on all of these are exactly the same when I track and when I play them live the reason being because I dialed up oh my in ears and my n eres air better than my studio monitors so they sounded also in my ears they sounded also in my studio monitors so I didn't touch him life uh yes, there are a lot of guys who have different presets for live in the studio uh I am not one of those guys your mileage may vary I do I'll show you actually really great example uh this preset existed before I tracked an album for one of the bands I play for on the engineer attract this uh attract this part like this well actually hold on and mixing the engineer went in and brought the highs up so for my life preset I went in and out of the g q so that changed because of how it was recorded so live I've played with it like this and then to reflect what I had actually tracked that it ended up on the track because I tracked this tone uh I went in and out of that so I think this goes back to the question we had earlier about where do you change if you if you get into a room that sounds different the global is really the place to do that honestly, because like, for example, when I play with my solo band, I use this preset uh this pre set and this preset and if they all sound too bright, I don't want to go in and change every single one of them I'm just going to shave some stuff off there but actually likely and I will actually admit this this preset is always brighter live than I wanted to be uh I think I've actually let's find out no some I excel that I've not sink my presets with myself I actually last week shaved the considerable amount of high end off of this one after playing a couple of gigs because I was just tired of going and doing the graphic every time so but really honestly I don't I don't really change stuff like that I don't have a process for life and the ceo and having worked with a lot of uh a lot of artists on big named rifle artists on their rigs this year uh there is a pretty good one to one relationship will dial them in the studio on then we'll go to into s I r or sound check whatever and crank it up in rehearsal space and ah a lot of the time the adjustments we make are very very small usually honestly they do what I do the factory process which is turn up the gain a little bit because you always need a little bit more alive than you think you're going to see just how it happens a little bit of queuing here and there but nothing major I really think if you if you dial tones in in the studio at a reasonable volume and I'm talking a tiny bit louder I like all this even like oh you like that volume that's loud enough to get an accurate portrayal of what you're going to hear live. I really think that a two least in my experience, I've had really good luck, maybe with having a great, ah great corollary between what I play in the studio. What? And when I take out to get with awesome, your mileage may vary.

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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