Technique: Making a DI'd acoustic guitar sound like its mic'd using IR's.

[Steev]

Another super DUPER ultra fun and great Fishman product that can be installed on ANY guitar without modifying it is the Fishman Triple Play MIDI Controller for guitars.

 Anyone here using one of those?

[William W. Saunders, Jr.]

YIKES!,  Thanks for the advice, Steve.  No, I would never take a hard tool to my Taylor, or to my 1975 K. Yairi.  I cringe when someone wants to use a pick on them.  Yeah, I'll just stick with the good old condenser mic and forget about shortcuts to the perfect recorded. guitar sound.

Edited January 27, 2019 by BRainbow

[Blades]

I like the idea of this and gave it a little playing around with my variax even though that guitar certainly tries to so something like this by virtue of it existing.

I went out and got a new 9volt for my ovation 1861 standard balladeer to see what happens when I record that directly.  I prefer to play it to the variax for acoustic but the piezo sound just doesn't work for me and the variax tends to sound better recorded to me.

Looking forward to trying this out.

[Jim Roseberry]

Blades, it'll get rid of the "quacky/smacky" piezo sound.

Had an Alex Lifeson Les Paul with piezo... and running that thru an acoustic body resonance IR sounded *far* better than it should.  

It was close enough to be useful for recording (albeit not a substitute for a great acoustic mic'd extremely well).

[Blades]

My reality is I don't have that kind of acoustic, that kind of room, that kind of preamp, or the ability to play guitar without moving around too much and recording that sound too.  ?

 

[Blades]

Had a little playing around with this and in just a few minutes, this transformed my Ovation into a mic'd guitar.  Sure, it still isn't a Martin or anything, but holy cow - I applied a few of these impulses (just the first set as a sound check), added an EQ after to cut a little bit of about 600Hz, cut the very bottom with a shelf, with a tiny boost right around 60Hz or so, then a really little shelf boost around 8k for some sparkle and "wow".  It really sounds night and day better than the original.  I can A/B the with and without the FX and it's really hard to believe it's the same instrument.

Impressed.  This is definitely going in the "didn't thing an effect could make something that much better" bin.  I will be searching for some other impulses now to find the best ones for me and my guitar.  Thank you so much for the pointer to look at this.  Woudn't have even thought of it!

[Base 57]

How would you folks go about creating guitar body IR's?

[Jim Fogle]

On 1/25/2019 at 7:00 AM, Steev said:

 Installing the PREsys in my beloved Alvarez was the scariest thing I ever did since getting married for the first time, which unfortunately didn't work out as I expected.

@Steev, which one didn't work out as expected, installing the PRE.sys into the Alvarez or getting married ❔ (running for cover!) 

Edited March 8, 2020 by Jim Fogle

[Jim Fogle]

@msmcleod, Thanks for your initial post.  The demonstration and explanation really helped me to understand how guitar IR pulses can be used.  I just couldn't wrap the idea around my head.  Now it makes sense.  Great tool to have in the musical toolbox.

[Craig Anderton]

I've been grappling with this for a while myself. I did an article for Guitar Player called Taming the Wild Piezo, but I guess when they changed platforms they lost the images and audio example.

The article describes using EQ to translate a piezo pickup into sounding more like a miked guitar. I did an FX Chain (no longer provided with CbB, unfortunately) that was designed specifically for guitars with piezo pickups. While I'd never say it sounded better than a well-miked acoustic guitar, it minimized the issues that make piezo pickups annoying. If you used Sonar, it may be in your FX Chains folder somewhere - it's called Acoustic Piezo, and is one of the CA-X amps.

The main idea is to use the Notch control and the Mid Freq, usually with Hi Q, to get rid of the piezo "quack." Body boom dials in the characteristic low-frequency boost an acoustic guitar has, articulation is more about an upper midrange boost to improve articulation. The Vocal Mode switch dips the mids a bit to make room for vocals. The other controls are "adjust-to-taste" controls.

Admittedly it takes more work to mess with EQ than just drop in a good IR, but lately with cabs,  I've actually been moving away from cab IRs and using equalization. I run a cab through white noise and measure the spectral response, then try to approximate the same response with multiple stages of EQ. With some cabs you can come really close; with others, you need the detail an IR provides. However,  with EQ you don't get any of the phasey/fizzy IR sound, which for me is a huge plus. I've replaced some of my Helix presets that used IR cabs with EQ-based cabs because the EQ sounded more natural.

 

[LarsF]

I just don't get why manufacturer keep installing these crap piezo's.

A couple of years ago I played a Yamaha A3R in a shop. lovely sounding guitar acoustically. But they put this stupid electronic system inside that do this IR thingy, and make it sound miked and a mix knob for that. Not all bad IMO, but still stupid thing when they could either create something like KKsound Pure mini or make a deal with them as OEM or something.

 

Yamaha ruined a perfectly nice build of an acoustic, put very heavy eletronics inside weighing like electric solid body, almost.

At least the LL series just have a small passive piezo you can just rip out and replace with kksound.

 

I have a Recording King RP1 with kksound pure mini that I installed. The same with Martin D16GT. Then do a DPA4099G on those as a second mike getting nice stereo and even little phase/chorusing effect from time difference for sound in each mike. Virtaully no room sound, all guitar and wood is what comes through.

 

Taylor ES2 are really good as well, and do DPA4099G on that too, same loveliness.

 

Just overall, why do they do this piezo that nobody wants?

Obviously real good guitarmakers - and they put the stamp "cheap" all over it - just don't get it?

- Ok, I feel better now doing this rant.....;)

[Chaps]

4 hours ago, Craig Anderton said:

 I run a cab through white noise and measure the spectral response...

 

I'm not sure I understand that. Wouldn't it be the other way around? Run white noise through a cabinet? What am I missing?

[Craig Anderton]

6 hours ago, Javadude54 said:

I'm not sure I understand that. Wouldn't it be the other way around? Run white noise through a cabinet? What am I missing?

Yes, I misspoke! Sorry. I meant to say "run a cab with white noise."

[Chaps]

That clears that up. It's an interesting process. Too bad Cakewalk can't generate white noise like Adobe Audition can (which can also generate pink and brown noise). That would make it much easier.

[User 905133]

2 hours ago, Javadude54 said:

Too bad Cakewalk can't generate white noise . . . 

Could you use a plug-in, or a loop, or something?

[Chaps]

5 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

Could you use a plug-in, or a loop, or something?

There are plenty of audio clips of white noise on the Internet so if you can't generate your own it would be easy enough to find and download one at the desired sample rate. Here is a 40 second long, 16 bit, 48 kHz mono audio clip of white noise I made with Adobe Audition.

white noise 40 seconds.wav

[User 905133]

5 minutes ago, Javadude54 said:

There are plenty of audio clips of white noise on the Internet so if you can't generate your own it would be easy enough to find and download one at the desired sample rate. Here is a 40 second long, 16 bit, 48 kHz mono audio clip of white noise I made with Adobe Audition.

Oh.  I have my own sources of various colors of noise. I was just responding to your "Too bad . . . " comment.  But for anyone who doesn't have their own noise, it is a good suggestion and a handy file.

It sounded like you didn't know about using other sources, but I realize on re-reading your post, you were just saying it would be easier if Cakewalk generated its own sounds (other than pings for beats).  My bad.

[Chaps]

8 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

Oh.  I have my own sources of various colors of noise. I was just responding to your "Too bad . . . " comment.  But for anyone who doesn't have their own noise, it is a good suggestion and a handy file.

It sounded like you didn't know about using other sources, but I realize on re-reading your post, you were just saying it would be easier if Cakewalk generated its own sounds (other than pings for beats).  My bad.

Yeah, I was thinking of people that don't have software that can generate noise, or tones. I got into that stuff decades ago when I was making stereo audio files to listen to while doing relaxation exercises. Years ago I read in Omni magazine that if you used headphones to listen to tones 4 Hz apart it would cause 'beats' inside the brain that facilitated relaxation, so I went through a period where I did that a lot. The concept is known as 'Binaural Beats' now. The number of cycles that the two tones are apart is supposed to have different effects on the brain. I can't vouch for any of that but it sure helped me fall asleep. Now that is something a person could do with Cakewalk.

[Tezza]

I'm thinking of getting one of these, since my Joyo American works so well, could use it with IR's as well I guess. I don't know that I would use the sound but it would be nicer to get a better scratch track down. The price is right as well of course. But it would have to spend 14 days in quarantine.

 

 

[Bill Phillips]

On 3/7/2020 at 11:53 PM, Craig Anderton said:

I've been grappling with this for a while myself. I did an article for Guitar Player called Taming the Wild Piezo, but I guess when they changed platforms they lost the images and audio example.

The article describes using EQ to translate a piezo pickup into sounding more like a miked guitar. I did an FX Chain (no longer provided with CbB, unfortunately) that was designed specifically for guitars with piezo pickups. While I'd never say it sounded better than a well-miked acoustic guitar, it minimized the issues that make piezo pickups annoying. If you used Sonar, it may be in your FX Chains folder somewhere - it's called Acoustic Piezo, and is one of the CA-X amps.

The main idea is to use the Notch control and the Mid Freq, usually with Hi Q, to get rid of the piezo "quack." Body boom dials in the characteristic low-frequency boost an acoustic guitar has, articulation is more about an upper midrange boost to improve articulation. The Vocal Mode switch dips the mids a bit to make room for vocals. The other controls are "adjust-to-taste" controls.

Admittedly it takes more work to mess with EQ than just drop in a good IR, but lately with cabs,  I've actually been moving away from cab IRs and using equalization. I run a cab through white noise and measure the spectral response, then try to approximate the same response with multiple stages of EQ. With some cabs you can come really close; with others, you need the detail an IR provides. However,  with EQ you don't get any of the phasey/fizzy IR sound, which for me is a huge plus. I've replaced some of my Helix presets that used IR cabs with EQ-based cabs because the EQ sounded more natural.

 

@Craig Anderton, thanks. I copied all of my Platinum 30th Ann, CA-X and Anderton FX presets into the Cakewalk Core FX Chain Presets folder to make them available in CbB. While I was at it, I also copied the 30th... ProChannel presets into the Cakewalk Core.

I wanted to look under the hood of the Acoustic Piezo FX Chain preset but couldn't extract the plugins. The extract plugins option (which works for other FX Chain presets) doesn't appear on the Acoustic Piezo FX Chain dropdown and the shift load option doesn't extract plugins. Any suggestions?

Edited March 9, 2020 by Bill Phillips
correction