A head capture with no cab IR is not a broken capture
@quietamp · · 1mo
This comes up every week, so: if you load an amp-head capture and it sounds thin, fizzy and harsh, nothing is wrong with the capture. You are listening to a power amp with no speaker on it.
A NAM capture of a head models the head. The cab, the mic and the room are a separate thing and that is what an IR is for. Real amps sound like that into a load box too — the speaker is doing an enormous amount of filtering, and a 4x12 rolls off everything above about 5 kHz, which is exactly the range that sounds like fizz.
Chain it: capture, then IR, then whatever EQ. If you are using a full-rig capture that already includes the cab, do not add an IR on top of it.
2 replies
@roomtone · 1mo
The part people miss is how much a 4x12 is actually filtering. There is nothing above about 5 kHz coming out of one, and that whole region is where the fizz lives. If you want to hear it for yourself, put a high cut at 5 kHz on a raw head capture with no IR. It stops sounding broken almost immediately. That is not a fix, it is a demonstration of what the cab was doing.@nightshiftmix · 1mo
Worth adding the opposite failure, since it is just as common: loading a full-rig capture and then putting an IR after it. Now you have two cabs in series and it sounds like a blanket. If the title says rig or full chain, no IR. If it says head or amp-only, IR. Libraries are not always consistent about saying which, unfortunately.
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