Speakerphone is GO!!!!!!!!!!

[reid]

about bloody time...



Speakerphone

[duckyboard]

speakerphone looks way too fun

[intolerance]

For a guitarist, this could be revolutionary for direct recording. WOW.

[chrisj]

I dunno about that but it looks at least as good as any convolution guitar amp thingy I've ever seen.

If you want revolutionary for direct recording you have to try and get the sonority and physicality of live guitar amps- getting the color is easy, too easy. Color is just conv impulses stuck on, it makes sense that these guys would be great at that. What's missing is a whole other story.

I've been working in that area and I'd link to a sample but the site I'm using, MediaFire, isn't up at the moment... but to my mind getting the notes to jump out like they do in a small tube combo amp is a bigger deal than even the most sophisticated constant, unvarying coloration applied to the sound.

That said... if on the other hand you want to put a vocal track on a walkie talkie with a bad connection in a busy restaraunt which has a subway train running through it IN THE RAIN *AT 50 MPH*... *clicky* tadah!

That (especially the background ambience palettes) and not the guitar amp stuff was what made me go WHOA. Actually I was kind of floored. Do they have that 'background ambience button' stuff in any other products or is this new for them?

In spite of my complete jadedness about convo guitar tones these guys still managed to wow me (not with anything about guitars).

[intolerance]

Well, the idea is suburb!

Unlike any other 'modeled' direct guitar software out there now, they are using different technologies? Are they not? What other is company is using IR convolution speaker sampling? I may just be blinded by the hopes of the idea, but it seems quite different. In theory, you are running the signal of choice (DI or pre-amp of your choice) through a convolution IR of those cabs, in those rooms? Right? Forgive me if I sound too excited over this and perhaps I'm jumping the gun, but what if it sounds like it would if you sent your DI signal to these amps in reality?! Convolution Re-Amping, Audioease style, and I've been pretty darn impressed with their previous works.

*clicking my heals*

I've personally been extraordinarily dissatisfied with any sort of direct guitar recording technologies out there, (as you I'm sure) and continue to mic nice amps in nice rooms to get 'the sound'. For some reason, I'm optimistic about this one, and can't help being uber anxious to demo this product. What if it actually works?!!

Yum.

[initialsBB]

Originally Posted by intolerance

What other is company is using IR convolution speaker sampling?

I have downloaded a bunch of impulses online from places like noisevault and I believe there are even some that come with Space Designer. They sound pretty good. Although for me they work better on something like a synth or a fake rhodes if you want to give it more of a crappy, organic "real" feeling. They never sound right on guitar to me. The samples of guitar though speakerphone on the audioease site don't sound very good to me either though. What I don't understand is how they are adding things like distortion and chorus? Did they just build some additional basic effects into the plugin and stick them before the impluse?

[Energie]

Very cool product, though I agree the guitars didn't sound fantastic, but with some tweaking. This is a great product though...!

[chrisj]

It depends- and this is what I'm not sure they've advanced to 'revolutionary' levels.

You can distort before an impulse and the impulse will color the sound of the distortion, soften it. You can distort after an impulse and the distortion will change the solidness of the tone produced by the impulse. The same holds for distorting before or after EQ. The coloring- and this is all I've ever seen people working on- alters the color of the sound. The distortion, where you put it, and other aspects like signal purity, alter the solidness, upfrontness, sonority of the sound, which is quite different.

You get the cheezey 'POD' tone by altering the color a whole lot but without having exceptionally good-sounding EQ or tone shaping, and then aggravating it with a bunch of FX that are also not exactly mastering grade. The distortion only brings out the grain and plastickyness that's present.

What I heard of the Speakerphone cabs did NOT sound grainy or plasticky at ALL, but they're having some problems sometimes with the concept- like the amp in a closet, which sure enough sounded really screwy and colorful and loaded with flutter echo. Brilliantly done, and why would you want flutter echo? Often it seems to be all about really striking colorations which don't convey musical ideas.

On the other hand, if you compose using TEXTURAL ideas, clearly this is Xmas morning for you :D

What I'm working on now is a very different approach in which I'm trying to identify the minimum extra coloration you have to add to make a DI thing say 'amp'. I got Mediafire to work again so I'll toss out my work-in-progress as a counterexample. Interestingly you could use this and then tack Speakerphone on after it for ultimate, utter color tweakery- but the idea is that I should be able to make a 'guitar amp plug' that 'feels' like an amp in a mix but with NO color other than the necessary limitations of response.

http://www.mediafire.com/?9ztzxvrjmo1

This is 'BigAmp' which isn't out yet and I'm still working on it. It's getting the bigness through simulating nearby unmiked speakers, and various other crazy tweaks. This is the OTHER direction you can go- hope you find it interesting, it's coming out next week and I'm claiming that what it does, Speakerphone doesn't do, and what Speakerphone does it doesn't do. And yet they are both 'guitar amp sims'...

Oh, and this is 'LilAmp', which IS out already. It's just pretty new, and the thing about this other approach is that it ought to sit in mixes better but it doesn't have as interesting color since it doesn't HAVE color :D

http://www.mediafire.com/?1yd00j5twxm

[chrisj]

Originally Posted by intolerance

What other is company is using IR convolution speaker sampling?

Um. Me :D that stuff with 'LilAmp' and 'BigAmp' are what I did when I was UNHAPPY with convolution speaker sampling. You can download AU plugins off my Kagi webpage which are not only convolution speaker sampling, they're a step beyond that by modeling speaker cone breakup, which AudioEase isn't doing (yet). I'm doing it by saturating different parts of the impulse differently, it worked better than using a simple impulse, and I _still_ wasn't happy with it. I was working with guys on another site who were very tough customers and had a lot of experience recording REAL amps, and they were super quick to tell me when I was doing a good model of a lousy impulse... but even when I got much better impulses, I was still very unhappy with the results compared to a miked amp.

Hence, LilAmp and BigAmp. But dude, I may want to do better but I'm even still selling the guitar cab convolution model plugs. (note- they don't include an 'amp' model, just the cab sound!) They're in the Emulation section of my site, they're the ones that have the breakup modeling so they are at least bigger and gnarlier than straight convolution modeling. They're $30. So AudioEase isn't the first. I would be surprised if even I was- surely somebody else has done at least the ordinary convolution thing? I thought we all were.

[littledoodler]

been waiting forever for this.