I can tell that for me is much real . Bx_rockrack from plugin alliance ( this is for me , much real)
Nembrini audio, sgear.
I used guitar rig , amplitud, etc. But for me, this vst lost body guitar.

 

Now that I think of it, if you want to experiment, Helix Native would be my choice. Not only has loads of effects and presets, it's very easy and fast to add them and try because of its simple but easy GUI.

 

Last edited: Nov 16, 2019

Te respondo lo que me ha parecido entender. En resumen, no creo que sea posible lo que intentas. Me explico:
Un IR captura la respuesta para toda la frecuencia pero sólo la fundamental. Pero el timbre viene dado por los armónicos en otras frecuencias. Con IRs no se pueden emular los otros armónicos (timbre).

Eso es lo que hace Nebula y es muy complicado. También otros efectos como el reguitar usan algo más que EQ matching.

 

I went on a downloading splurge a while ago to see what cabs I enjoyed the most, the amount of options out there made my head spin at first but eventually I settled on a few models I liked the tone of regardless what I was inputting, since I tried running everything through some cabs just to see what would happen. My current go-tos are engl pro 4x12 mic'd with a 57 and mesa oversized 4x12 also with a 57. I was experimenting with a lot of the orange cabs but it wasn't really vibing with what I had in mind.
That being said, the free plugins from ignite are all great, some of the dsp is might be "dated" depending on who you ask but they are great colors to add to your sonic palette for a price you can't beat. The UI on emissary is 9/10 as well.

I haven't tried using any of the PA stuff since ~2014, I was too amateur to really understand them back then to be honest. Will have to check them out again it seems. Guitar rig was what got me into all of this so I am not too critical about it, its a great sketchpad to try out ideas quickly but I agree with you about the sound losing some body. Thank you for the suggestions!!

Helix is underrated, was actually just demoing it. The simplicity and intuitiveness of all the features is a major selling point for me so far. It may not be the "best" option but it has the been the quickest in terms of laying my ideas down and finishing parts instead of endless tweaking.

 

Exactly. That's why I recommended it to you if you want to experiment. And it sounds good, although I'm not an expert especially if you use real guitar.

 

https://mercuriall.com/cms/details_freestuff
I find myself going back to the JCM 800 Hot down the page. I really like these guys amp sims, and they would likely be my choice if I was using amp/cab sims for guitar. I primarily use them when scratch-padding/writing.

I've also used this:
https://pvdhp7.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/krank-krankenstein-preamp-simulator/
Mainly because I play out of one of these, and it did a pretty good job getting me close to it (couldn't find Texas Heat Nebula presets though)
Actually, he (Vadim) has quite a few amp sims of other manufacturers available.

I primarily use Nebula Ownhammer or AE cab presets for cabinet emulation. They were able to get closer to a mic'd cab than any IR's I've tried.

In the end, all guitar tracks (DI) eventually get sent to a real amp, and mic'd because I haven't found anything that truly gets me there in terms of tone.

 

Total Kaleidoscope of an amp , been using it for years , i love the way the controls are kinda counter intuitive its capable of endless unique tones , Nebula & Ownhammer agreed why would you use anything else lol , also vadim's Red Tone amp is pure brutality , use it solely in the centre of my mix for a mammoth chest punch of a sound ........

 

I'll have to check that one out.
My search for amp emulation kind of halted once I had the gear to properly record a mic'd amp.
It was hard for me to get the mic'd Krankenstein to sit right in the mix so I've been relying heavily on a Marshall DSL40CR for recorded amp tones (it is a beast for recording as well as small venue type work). But my amp recording skills and tools (I've got a tube preamp and several '57s now) have evolved, so I'm going to take another shot at it soon.

 

Super jealous alas i only get to hear my amps cranked when im live , you mentioned tube preamp is that still the Art MPA Pro II you were using a couple of years back ? Talking of Nebula & Ownhammer the OwnHammer Power-Amp Egg Twister 6V6 is a wicked little beast in the chain , the Mercuriall Metal Area (Zone) in front of the Twister 6V6 is a super surprising little monster . Just for the record my chain of priority = 1 keeping your chops up, 2 the IR's, 3 the Pre and last but not least the Amp lol

 

Still the same one. I've got one loaded with Mullards, and one with original stock Chinese tubes. This piece of kit makes it super easy to Reamp guitar DI's back through the amp on one channel, and capture the mic on the second channel. Plus you get a little tube saturation going both ways. Also, bear in mind that you can run effects VST's on the DI, so I may experiment with the 6V6 on the DI or the Metal Area.
The nice thing about the DSL40CR is it doesn't have to be teeth rattling loud to get great tone. In hindsight, I probably could have settled on one of the 20 Watt DSL models if I was only after recording, but I was competing with our other guitarist who had a Line 6 @ 120 Watts for small venues so I figured 40 Watts tube would be just as loud. He's since given up on the Line 6 as he could never approach the tone I was getting, and is using an Orange Thunderverb 50 Watt head coupled with an Orange 1x12 cab.
I'm looking for the Twister 6v6 now, haha.
Keep them chops up!

 

Oh the joys of playing in a two guitar band haha , Ownhammer Egg-Twister 6V6 For Nebula = sister site have fun ...................

 

Didn't read the whole thread, maybe someone already mentioned: You sample a reverb by impulse. You sample smth like an eq courve with a sweep. You digitize whatever hardware by a combination of sweeps and blips and blops of different frequencies in all possible dynamic combinations. That way you would get i.e. the saturation fx of an eq. I don't know how phase would be 'sampled' and applied, didn't dive that deep into it. The most advanced system I know so far is nebula.

 

You're spot on, the clicks and pops are the equivalent of a theoretical "impulse".

In practice, Nebula uses exponential sine sweep that allows you to capture not only the eq-matching but several additional harmonics without additional "sampling". It's useful only for eq matching too. Voxengo deconvolver tool uses it. It's called non-linear convolution.

For the famous "gain staging": it just makes several passes with quieter exponential sine sweeps.
That's only the gist of it, of course. The rest is buried in patents.
And obviously you need extremely good equipment both in quality, sample rate and bit depth. Or else the harmonics response get lost/distorted past Nyquist frequency and too low bit depth accuracy.

 

Add harmonics? I didn't know that. But they're artificial harmonics, right? It would be interesting to add intelligent harmonics... I mean. Analyze the audio and according to its tonality and the timbre that will add logical harmonics. I don't know if I can explain. I have tried nebula. I always found it attractive and eye-catching. Same as the plugins that acqua. But in my pc I consumed a lot of resources and some things I didn't find anything as if the preset didn't have anything. And suppose that it was only a "disguise" like many plugins. Also at that time I wasn't so familiar with the armincos of a note. I didn't know what stopped a note there were more notes. This was recent for me to find that the note C had inside it E, G, F#, etc. Well, that note was from a piano. I guess those armincos vary according to the instrument

 

I was talking about effects, but we can consider an Eq-matching IR as the fundamental harmonic.
But unless it's a simple digital filter (EQ or reverb), a hardware effect produces more complex changes of the signal.
So, very roughly speaking and oversimplifying: "the change of timbre" of an effect like distortion/saturation/colorization/etc can be characterized by the change of the harmonics. Many times the effect just creates them, but always as a function of the input signal.

There are a lot of harmonics. But the most musically important ones (even, odd, I don't remember) can be sampled by the ESS. (exponential Sine Sweep).

But the second harmonic "works" at twice first frequency and so on. In practice, this means when applying the 5th non-linear-IR (sampled 5th harmonic) Nebula has to multiply 5 times by itself the input signal (with an internal sample rate conversion that can handle it). Thus, the exponentially growing huge CPU usage.
Add to that doing the same for different input levels (gain-staging), the tweakable parameters (EQ knobs for instance) and you still have to be grateful this is possible without using a f*ing NASA computer.

That's why nebula still can't sample in practice effects that produce heavy distorsions (very high number of important harmonics), like high-gain ampsims.

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2019

For the brave, this research paper analyzes the first version of the Nebula Sampler software:
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ing_a_Not-Linear_Not-Time-Invariant_Convolver

Two remarkable pictures in that:


Fig 6 (Left): Nebula Sampler Exponential Sine Sweeps (ESS) with different levels (multi-staging). They're not clipped. This signal is the one that you put in the input of the sampled effect. It's literally the sampling signal.
Fig 3 (Right): waveform and frequency content the "harmonic-IRs" you obtain for one ESS on the left after processing the output of the sampled effect.

The biggest one (right) is your average EQ-matching IR. It spans almost the entire frequency. This is the hardest thing to understand.
Look the frequency content of the harmonic-IRs. They start at multiples of the lowest frequency covered by the first (Eq-matching). They're the harmonics.

How cool is that? As cool as damned complex to make it work in practice. Trust me, I tried and cried

@ryck , this is the scientific explanation of the answer I gave you.

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2019

Very interesting everything you've said. I really love how sound goes hand in hand with science. De heho I have done some experiments with sound and water, etc.. It's really unbelievable and interesting (at least for me). Now I understand why nebula ate such resources, and yes, it's logical. And aslces, possible to use in a home pc. Maybe in theory, there are great things. But computers are not ready yet. Very interesting

 

IMHO

IR sucks
Well I do like it for reverbs that's about it,
It sucks for guitar cabinets it sucks for instrument bodies.
Just my take.
IR is basically EQ and reverb that's what it is.
If you want a single moment of time snapshot
Of EQ and reverb then IR can give you something of worth . However in music you rarely want 1 seconds worth of EQ and reverb .
If you can find a way to change continuously to a new IR file every .5 seconds seemlessly than it might have some value to it.

 

Of course, that was the problem for me when it came to emulating something. That it takes a long time for it to have a frequency range. I even tried to cut to a tenth of a second, but lost much of the frequency. I find it interesting that I can contenter information of what is being emulated. That's why I thought it would happen if someone went further. Maybe there are more things to discover or maybe just garbage.

 

An eq match, like izotope's. It doesn't take up time, it makes a copy of the frequency, doesn't it ? But, an IR takes the frequency, time and the timbre (which the timbre is the interesting part I see). The problem that an IR copying an eq also takes up "space" and that creates reverence ( sound to jar ). I thought so: What would happen if a program was able to take the entire sample with eq and timbre but did not occupy space ( reverb). Intocnes we would have a real hack of bass, guirarra, etc. It's just an idea