Hey there slutz,
Please allow me to introduce myself... I'm a computer programmer and sometimes musician/audio engineer. Like many of you, I've experienced the painful burning and itching of crafting killer guitar tones in less than ideal environments... bedrooms, basements, and tiny boxes filled with equipment scrounged together on the cheap... wives, girlfriends and 9 month old babies that just don't understand your commitment to abusing 60 year old radio technology.. and let's not forget the neighbors with the cops on speed dial.
Like you, I've had the obligatory, brief, and ultimately unsatisfying dalliance with that little, red, bean-shaped doxy we all know, a summer fling with a PDI-03 that I'm still friends with, a torrid two-week affair with a hot piece of Italian code and a drunken one-night stand with an isobox that I'd rather not talk about. But, true audio love had eluded me... until now.
Nowadays, I'm fortunate enough to have access to a first-class
studio space in Soho crammed with some of the best gear available. I tell you this, not to gloat. Nay, dear brother, I have not forgotten my less fortunate comrades, plucking away in the trenches. On the contrary, I've expended a considerable amount of time, effort and electrons finding ways to bring an extensive gear collection, a sweet live room and my technical know-how to bear on solving the problems of the home studio and project recordist. Who knows, I may even have something that you pros will find useful.
You see, I do it all for you. Well, you, and the fact that I'm most productive when working at home, just me, my clumsy, sausage-like fingers, a guitar, an amp, and my laptop, so I could use a few solutions, myself. And, oh yeah, the money. I plan on making tens, perhaps hundreds of dollars on this. Well, hopefully, enough to cover the cost of bandwidth.
Which brings me to the point of this rant. Today, I'm proud to announce the launch of
Red Wire Impulses, the culmination of many, many months of work and more than a smidge of personal sacrifice...
Using a collection of industry standard mics and a few extraordinary specimens just for fun, we painstakingly captured 9 legendary speaker/speaker cabinets, using up to 9 mic positions at up to 9 different distances. We ran each mic into a Neve 1073, or 1084, preamps expensive enough that your wife would probably divorce you if you bought one yourself, then finally into a Lavry Blue or Prism Sound Orpheus for A/D conversion. We gave the whole glorious mess to buckaroo and perfectTommy, our twin super-computers, who worked tirelessly for weeks crunching the numbers and voila...
...we've produced, for your discerning ears, what is perhaps the greatest Speaker Cabinet Impulse Response Library lower Manahattan -- dare I say -- the New York Metropolitan area, has ever known.
"What's an impulse response?" you ask. Basically, it's a little wav file you load into a convolution plugin to route your guitar signal through. The signal can come from your amp's preamp, the line out on your amp, a guitar DI box, or a dummy load box with a line out to safely get the direct signal from the power amp. The plugin uses the IR to make it sound like your guitar is being played in the space and using the equipment that's sampled in the IR. In our case a well-mic'ed speaker cabinet, in an acoustically treated live room, run through a Neve 1073. It doesn't capture every aspect of the signal chain, but for speaker cabs, it gets really close.You can run your amp on 10, 11 even, and listen to the results at any volume.
If you want great recordings without all the mess, then saunter on over to
Red Wire Impulses... sashay if you must. However you get there, just get there. You owe it to yourself, and generations of your progeny. Plus, we have a really nice tutorial and naked pictures of Megan Fox. Ok... so no pictures, but we do have a pretty decent tutorial on how to use your amp with speaker IRs.
Anyway, we hope you like our IRs and find them useful and for the love of all that is Alex Chilton, please use them responsibly.
Yours truly,
--mike... and Red Wire Impulses