Perfect Space as an amp simulator

Hi all
Just a quick tip for using perfect space, and this may be old hat to some, in fact, it may have been the point all along, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd throw it up here for others. I've been using various sampled bass guitars for a while for projects where I didn't have an actual bass player. Lately I've been using UBK in Kontakt2 and sending those direct mic'd samples to an amp simulator (Nigel, et. al), but have always been somewhat underwhelmed with the results. For me, sampled basses have always lacked a sense of three dimensionality...it always sounds too much like the bass guitar was sitting squarely on my forehead instead of having a warm open sound...it just always sounded a bit too present. Last night I was playing with some scratchpad composition stuff and decided to drop perfect space on a bass guitar line just for a little ambience and noticed they had bass cab impulses. Till now I had always wondered what they were possibly for, but last night I put it on just for kicks. I threw it on, killed the dry signal entirely and *poof*, it sounded like a mic'd cab! Its sonic qualities were changed entirely! I added a bit of offset because the impulse seemed to have a bit of a pre-delay, threw on an LA2A, EQ, and a little ambient reverb (UAD Plate) and got probably closer than I've ever been to a live bass guitar sound without actually having one. It leaves my various amp sim's completely behind.

Now, at this point some folks are probably saying "nice work Einstein, what did you think they were there for?", (and in hindsight, they're probably right...not the first time I've been a little slow) but I had never thought of using a reverb as a replacement for an amp sim, and so perhaps maybe others haven't either....then again, maybe I should begin cohabitating with chimps to be among my intellectual equals :)

Anyway, if ya haven't yet, give it a try, it's pretty cool.

Good luck
Dean

www.broadjam.com/deanwinter

Cool idea! Cheers.

ORIGINAL: Razorwit

Hi all
Just a quick tip for using perfect space, and this may be old hat to some, in fact, it may have been the point all along, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd throw it up here for others. I've been using various sampled bass guitars for a while for projects where I didn't have an actual bass player. Lately I've been using UBK in Kontakt2 and sending those direct mic'd samples to an amp simulator (Nigel, et. al), but have always been somewhat underwhelmed with the results. For me, sampled basses have always lacked a sense of three dimensionality...it always sounds too much like the bass guitar was sitting squarely on my forehead instead of having a warm open sound...it just always sounded a bit too present. Last night I was playing with some scratchpad composition stuff and decided to drop perfect space on a bass guitar line just for a little ambience and noticed they had bass cab impulses. Till now I had always wondered what they were possibly for, but last night I put it on just for kicks. I threw it on, killed the dry signal entirely and *poof*, it sounded like a mic'd cab! Its sonic qualities were changed entirely! I added a bit of offset because the impulse seemed to have a bit of a pre-delay, threw on an LA2A, EQ, and a little ambient reverb (UAD Plate) and got probably closer than I've ever been to a live bass guitar sound without actually having one. It leaves my various amp sim's completely behind.

Now, at this point some folks are probably saying "nice work Einstein, what did you think they were there for?", (and in hindsight, they're probably right...not the first time I've been a little slow) but I had never thought of using a reverb as a replacement for an amp sim, and so perhaps maybe others haven't either....then again, maybe I should begin cohabitating with chimps to be among my intellectual equals :)

Anyway, if ya haven't yet, give it a try, it's pretty cool.

Good luck
Dean

www.broadjam.com/deanwinter

I've wondered whether the Impulse Response / Convolution technology will lead to better guitar amp modeling in the future. I beleive that Wave GTR uses it in some way.

I love when folks post example .mp3s on these types of topics (hint, hint for Tombo and Razorwit)!

Someone clarify this if I'm wrong, but convolution is a linear, time-invariant process, meaning in principle that it can't model nonlinear things like compresion and distortion, nor can it model time-varying things like modulators/flangers. Do teh convolution plugins have "extra" stuff added to make them do more than reverbs, spaces, and filters?

Dean!

you'll be Einstein and I'll be the monkey. That's a good tip. I'd never check that out... at least not yet. It sure sounds damn nice. Thanks

Dean & Tombo,

Cool, guys! I'll do some listening! Thanks!

[on edit]Interesting, Tombo. Liked the bass sound on Secrets. Liked the acoustic on Susan in the Fall.

OK, as requested I've posted a couple of examples of using perfect space as an pseudo-amp sim. Go to http://www.aros.net/~razorwit and you'll see four wav files (cause mp3's aren't as cool...don't worry, they're relatively small). Two of the files are played with UBK/Kontakt2 (one with perfect space and one without) and two are an actual real live bass player going direct in (again, one with PF and one without). A couple of notes:

All samples are completely dry with the execption of the additition of PerfectSpace on the specified files. No comp, EQ, ambient verb etc. This means they're going to sound...um...well...dry :)

The sampled bass was done with no regard to performance realism...it's just me playing 8ths on my keyboard and sounds like it.

Live bass stuff was recorded with a 6 string (some German manufacturer...I forget what the player told me) going direct into a focusrite pre and then into a MOTU 896HD. In my opinion the live bass was affected by the addition of perfect space less than the sampled version, but I still like the improvements. YMMV.

You should theoretically be able to achieve the same effected results I did by importing the dry samples into Sonar and adding PF with one of the included bass cab impulses and using a completely wet signal. In fact, there's probably an interesting test of Sonars rendering engine somewhere in that process but I don't wanna think that hard about it right now.

Ya probably wanna right click and download instead of stream....wav's don't stream very well across WAN links.

Have fun
Dean

I am fond of my line 6 pods sounds. If I have a amp/cab tone dialed up on my pod with the pods distortion as well, can I sample this and convert to an impulse? Would it sound virtually identical if I play the DI back thru perfect space with the impulse? I realize that the distortion would be "hardwired" into the impulse and thus not tweakable, But to have a bunch of the pod's presets as plugins would be fantastic.

ORIGINAL: Spinedoc
I am fond of my line 6 pods sounds. If I have a amp/cab tone dialed up on my pod with the pods distortion as well, can I sample this and convert to an impulse? Would it sound virtually identical if I play the DI back thru perfect space with the impulse? I realize that the distortion would be "hardwired" into the impulse and thus not tweakable, But to have a bunch of the pod's presets as plugins would be fantastic.

You have to figure out how to get an impulse into it. Try shooting it with a 0.22 handgun. BAM! Oops... I meant using blanks.

There is a clever piece of software called a Deconvolver which IIUC can accomplish the same thing using white noise instead of a gunshot. It's less violent, but more complicated to use.

Regardless, umless I'm badly mistaken, you won't be able to capture the distortion, just the "EQ" and "reverb" and "space" of the box. Edit: The cab simulator falls into that "capturable" category.

ORIGINAL: Spinedoc

I am fond of my line 6 pods sounds. If I have a amp/cab tone dialed up on my pod with the pods distortion as well, can I sample this and convert to an impulse? Would it sound virtually identical if I play the DI back thru perfect space with the impulse? I realize that the distortion would be "hardwired" into the impulse and thus not tweakable, But to have a bunch of the pod's presets as plugins would be fantastic.

Well, the impulse responce that you need to sample would have to be a string of zeros followed by a single "1" followed by a string of zeros. Not anything that you would play.
IIRC in theory you could sample a pure sine wave, but you would have to do some
really fancy pants correction to remove the harmonic content of the sine wave from the responce. If your pod had a digital input, it would be easy. But this all depends on the POD using a fixed transfer function, and not something that morphs dynamically based upon content.