....Profile-ing!

    Well


    Its been a LONG and tiresome week or so, as we only had limited time with the amps. but they are all done, and thanks to such a glorious room, they came out really bloody well!.


    I was trying to capture & recreate the sounds of some familiar amps.. such as: -[


    -TwoRock Crystal
    -TwoRock Cardiff
    -Jackson Briton 4
    -Jackson Fullerton
    -Supro ModelT
    -WEM (New valves) edition
    -Fuch FullHouse 50
    -Zen (Prototype amp that I cant name...yet)
    -1968 Fender Super
    -1967 Tweed Pro
    -Top Hat Club Royale
    -65 Amps Nashville
    -ToneKing Grande


    Simple chain, Multi Mics, Mostly u87 front, R121 Rear and either Cu29 or another U87 as Room mic, - all blended via Neve desk, and out to kemper, no post processing, no EQ, just straight up good mic positions and good sounding room!.


    Given the time restraints. I captured everything with a tele. - But then tweeked to suit a Les Paul perfectly (same sound) afterthefact.


    This pack is all about Rock'n'Blues and will be marketed as such. : )


    I will give a few out as a teaser, as the pack will be released very soon :)


    Those that are subscribed look out for the email.


    Be well
    Andy

    Fantastic stuff, Andy! Can't stop looking at that room!

    Yeah, enough of the room already. I can't handle it! :D


    Congrats on getting back into the swing of it, mate.


    Tell me, Andy, how does blending the room-mic feed in with the close ones affect the resulting Profiles? How do they sound different from those made with the identical setup with said source muted?

    Well The kmper cant actually deal with room mics too well, as the kemper "truncates" the cab part, in a nutshell, if the kemper sees a space before the signal it strips it, so you dont get the delayed response you would normally with room mics. - but thats ok, this time I used it as a sound source already knowing what the kemper can do. - this meant I can go more aggressive with closer mics and still leave some room freq on tap if I want.
    The room mic is only blended in very little, its never a dominant mic, moreso just a designer tool. - the most you hear are direct to the 87.

    Quote from Monkey_Man

    Yeah, enough of the room already. I can't handle it! :D


    Congrats on getting back into the swing of it, mate.


    Tell me, Andy, how does blending the room-mic feed in with the close ones affect the resulting Profiles? How do they sound different from those made with the identical setup with said source muted?

    I'm not Andy, but I rarely let stuff like "not being asked" or "not knowing what the hell I'm talking about" stop me from chiming in :D


    When you close-mic something, you focus on one small piece of the instrument or cab. Like with a narrow-beamed flashlight in a dark room, you "see" only part of the whole picture. Thus, the area of the speaker you point toward represents a certain blend of hi, mid and low frequencies that are not really representative of the cab as a whole.


    A mic further back is akin to turning on the ceiling lamp in the room - it gives you more of the whole picture (or having a flashlight with a wider cone of light).


    For comparison, think of an acoustic guitar. The sound hole booms, the strings chime, the pick clicks and the body itself is more mid-heavy. If you focus a close-mic on either of those areas, that's what you'll get. If you far-mic it, you'll get more of the complete sound of the instrument.


    Apart from that, there's of course the impact of the room and how the reflected sound waves recombine with the direct sound waves, influencing the overall sound (comb filtering (negative interference) or boosts of certain frequencies (positive interference). I would hazard the guess that the effect described before contributes the greatest, but that's probably dependent on the room.




    Edit: I'd love to try out some profiles of just a far mic to pick up the complete image of the cab.

    Oh, you poor thing, Michael. I'm an AE, so you could have saved your fingers, matey. 8o Very-generous of you to have taken that time nevertheless man. Good on you and thank you.


    The reason I asked Andy that question is 'cause my understanding is that, apart from the comb filtering you mentioned, room ambience isn't captured in any way by the Profiling process.


    If anything, I'd have thought that the recombination, with the primary source, of early reflections, low-level as they may be, would have an effect on tone and therefore be desirable in great rooms such as Andy's, but distant mic'ing?


    Hmm...

    Hehe... yeah, I kinda figured you knew already, but wanted to put my thoughts down on digital paper, as it were. Partly hoping to have someone confirm or deny them :)


    I wonder how the kemper deals with recombination, though. It could be seen as a time-based effect, and if I recall correctly, those are truncated by the kemper during profiling. I wonder how this would affect the distant mic as well - and if adding a delay to the close-mics to make the signals coincide time-wise would alter the resultant profile. And how this could be used for the benefit of all :)

    well as I badly wrote above, and this is a very hard thing to put into words. - Imagine if you will 2 mics setup, one as room one as close. - now you record in protools and if you then zoom upon the timeline you will see the room mic is Ms's away from the close mic. - this as you know is the fact that the sound being transmitted hits he close before the room.. well yes! (science).. now, what the kemper does, is sees that delay between something, and flattens it/removes it/ignores it. - so that the psychical sound is time allinged (latency free) - you still get the benefit of the sound, but you loose the effect is offers if your actually recording mic to amps.


    something along these lines anyway. -= its the same thing when you capture IR files. and you need to use linear phase to sort the "distant" element.


    In my case Im only interested in the sonic information, once things are indeed phase alligned,


    The room mic situation, is a thing.. - where if you blend it in, you cant actually hear it.....untill you remove it. then you know something is missing.

    I think it'd come down to relative energy levels, Michael.


    If you recombine a set of ER's, the shortest ones should be captured because they essentially become, for all intents and purposes, a part of the sound of the cab at the mic's position... IMHO and in theory.


    By the same token, if you place your head where the mic is, anything that arrives at your ears discernibly-after the initial sound "event" (sounding like a modern-day weather man here), IMHO, should be thought of as ambient information. IOW, if it blends at the source, it's a part of the sound.


    I reckon that the time-dependant thing you spoke of would come into play where the distant mic is involved, and where such reverberant information appears at the close mic as well, albeit at very-low relative level due to the padding of said mic's gain level. It arrives, time-wise, disconnected from the real-time delivery of a performance.


    Thinking out 'loud here too, mate, just like you. Shootin' the breeze, as some would say, or pissing into the wind, as others might judge. To go with the latter analogy, tiny nearby droplets might be considered parts of the stream, whereas splashes arriving a second later in your face due to the strength and speed of the wind are disconnected from the "event" of the pleasurable pee. A Peefiler would likely ignore the delayed, mojo-ruining "information" and capture only the stream that included the droplets I mentioned initially.


    Most-ridiculous analogy of the year, right there, brother. Sums up the way I see this in theory until we receive clarification from a team member.


    EDIT:
    Damn you, Andy! Couldn't you have waited 'til I was finished constructing my literary masterpiece? :D

    Ah, so the kemper doesn't in any way REMOVE the signal that "lags behind"; it simply time-aligns it (as best it can judge)?

    Quote from Monkey_Man

    ... and removes the tail too, I'm assuming, 'cause we never hear reverberant tails on dry Profiles.

    Yeah - so it is dependent on being able to discern whether a given part of a signal is part of the original tone to be captured, or not. Everything is basically a "modified copy" of the direct signal, so there must be some sort of determination of "this is too different, I'm ditching that"...?

    Quote from Michael_dk

    Yeah - so it is dependent on being able to discern whether a given part of a signal is part of the original tone to be captured, or not. Everything is basically a "modified copy" of the direct signal, so there must be some sort of determination of "this is too different, I'm ditching that"...?

    Exactly, Michael. I walked away yesterday pondering this.


    There's a tendency for many to assume a Profile's some sort of IR, but the intelligence of Christoph's algorithms, IMHO, reaches deeper than I suspect many gave / give him credit for.

    This is such great news! TAF profiles are still the best, hands down!! This looks like a tremendous upcoming pack, looking forward to the release. Welcome back!

    Ok Here we go..


    See below attachment that contains a few sample rigs. - they are just the TELE ones for now. but you will get the idea!.
    Im not going to comment on them as I can vouch for the quality, thats for you to figure out : )


    But I will say this.. - Listen to the profiles, they have a extremely sense of realism to them that i was unable to capture before.. (All 130 Profiles have this trait) so its all good!. im pleased with the results. but its been a LOT of work getting here.


    So.. Look out for the Release, and if your a subscriber, then look out for the alternative free offerings!


    PACK11 - The Essential Rock'N'Blues is coming very soon!


    For now, I'll leave you in peace to play.. and hope very much you can enjoy it as much as I have done!.


    Be well.
    A


    P.S.. You will notice the rigs in the zip are not perhaps the ones I listed..yes.. thats because there has been more growth since then (that you get as a bonus set with the Pack 11 release)