Please Advise: How To Get "True" Amp Sound/Bypass Cab Room

[james.k.lisowski]

Hello,

I'm relatively new to using Amplitube. I love everything it has to offer, but at times it can leave me feeling overwhelmed. I have yet to devote some quality time to do a real deep dive into it, but plan to soon.

My question is this: How do I get the "true" sound of an amp?

By this I mean, if I turn everything "Off" in the Mic/Cab room so they have no further influence on the tone and then dial in my settings using just the individual knobs on the amp only (and not using any stomp boxes or effects), is that the best way to hear the natural character of the amp?

The reason I ask is that I like to dial in my tone on the amp without the influence of mics. Often times, I'll dial in the perfect tone on an amp and then turn "on" the mics/cab room and the tone completely changes. I then spend what seems like an eternity trying to replicate the tone I achieved initially with just the amp by adding the mics, but it never sounds the same.

Should I just not use the mics/cab room at all if I already have the sound I want when using the amp only?

Thanks

[dmitch]

Should I just not use the mics/cab room at all if I already have the sound I want when using the amp only?
Thanks

I don't mean to be glib, but why do you feel you need to use the mic/cab room? If you're fortunate enough to find the sound you want, however you got it, I don't see any reason not to just use that sound.

I'm sure some folks may complain that it's not "realistic" or proper or whatever. Me, I'm in the "whatever works and sounds good" camp.

[carlaz]

It is perhaps a little difficult to answer the question. In the real world, one obviously can hear a amp + cab without a microphone (just by standing near enough with functioning ears), but obviously all recorded sounds -- and this effectively includes cabinet impulse responses, whether those of the cab room built in to AmpliTube or a 3rd-party IR -- require a microphone.

Moreover, guitar amplifiers are intended to work through guitar cabinet speakers, which sort of serve as a kind of EQ. The raw sound from all amplifiers generally sounds horrible if you send it to relatively flat (in the EQ sense) speakers.

Obviously, you can bypass Amplitube's cab room entirely and send the signal to your computer's headphones or speakers (which will almost certainly by much flatter than any guitar cabinet's EQ response), enabling you to hear that horrible sound. However, this is not likely to get you anything that you want.

Any speaker (even without a microphone) is going to shape the sound of the signal from the amp. A speaker with a relatively flat response will shape it less, while a speaker with more pronounced EQ curves (as typical in guitar/bass cabinet speakers) will shape it more. So, although you can bypass AmpliTube's cab room and send the raw amp signal directly to your own speakers (of whatever kind, including headphone speakers), obviously the result will sound at least slightly different in different speakers.

And, then, any recorded guitar sound you've ever heard has gone through guitar cabinets (real or simulated!) as well as microphones (real or simulated) and quite probably a variety of other post-processing (potentially including mic preamps, analogue consoles, and other gear, tape machines, and tape itself, etc.). Even live guitar that you've heard in concert has (almost certainly) gone through cabs/speakers (real or simulated!), mics (real or simulated!), and in all likelihood a bunch of PA equipment (as quite likely other processing).

Bass may well be recorded (or sent to the PA) as DI ("direct injection"), and you can also do this with guitar, of course, though this entirely bypasses traditional "amps" anyone (and the sound is still generally processed in various other ways).

Ultimately, "the 'true' sound of an amp" is a bit of an illusion -- or at least a chimera. You will seldom hear anyone's raw amp sound because it is so nasty and is expected to be processed through at least cabs/speakers, while microphones are just an unavoidable part of the recording process or the use of digital IRs since you can't record real, physical soundwaves (or capture impulse responses) without them.

Effectively, speakers, cabs, mics, etc. are all just EQ curves applied to the raw amp signal to make it less nasty. You could, of course, synthesize any such EQ curve into an IR that you wanted, but you are inevitably processing that raw amp signal in some way. cabs, speakers, mics, etc. -- and their digital simulations -- are all just ways of adjusting the final EQ curve in different stages.

[carlaz]

All that said ... probably the majority of guitar tones have been recorded by sticking an SM57 mic right up next to the center of a speaker cone. Thus, doing the same in the Cab Room (with the Dynamic 57 mic model) will get you as close to a "generic" guitar recording configuration as possible.

Still, it's just an inescapable fact that cabinets, speakers, and mics have a huge influence on recorded guitar tone. I suspect that many, perhaps most, recording engineers would consider the cabinet/speakers to have more influence than the amp itself!

[james.k.lisowski]

It is perhaps a little difficult to answer the question. In the real world, one obviously can hear a amp + cab without a microphone (just by standing near enough with functioning ears), but obviously all recorded sounds -- and this effectively includes cabinet impulse responses, whether those of the cab room built in to AmpliTube or a 3rd-party IR -- require a microphone.

Moreover, guitar amplifiers are intended to work through guitar cabinet speakers, which sort of serve as a kind of EQ. The raw sound from all amplifiers generally sounds horrible if you send it to relatively flat (in the EQ sense) speakers.

Obviously, you can bypass Amplitube's cab room entirely and send the signal to your computer's headphones or speakers (which will almost certainly by much flatter than any guitar cabinet's EQ response), enabling you to hear that horrible sound. However, this is not likely to get you anything that you want.

Any speaker (even without a microphone) is going to shape the sound of the signal from the amp. A speaker with a relatively flat response will shape it less, while a speaker with more pronounced EQ curves (as typical in guitar/bass cabinet speakers) will shape it more. So, although you can bypass AmpliTube's cab room and send the raw amp signal directly to your own speakers (of whatever kind, including headphone speakers), obviously the result will sound at least slightly different in different speakers.

And, then, any recorded guitar sound you've ever heard has gone through guitar cabinets (real or simulated!) as well as microphones (real or simulated) and quite probably a variety of other post-processing (potentially including mic preamps, analogue consoles, and other gear, tape machines, and tape itself, etc.). Even live guitar that you've heard in concert has (almost certainly) gone through cabs/speakers (real or simulated!), mics (real or simulated!), and in all likelihood a bunch of PA equipment (as quite likely other processing).

Bass may well be recorded (or sent to the PA) as DI ("direct injection"), and you can also do this with guitar, of course, though this entirely bypasses traditional "amps" anyone (and the sound is still generally processed in various other ways).

Ultimately, "the 'true' sound of an amp" is a bit of an illusion -- or at least a chimera. You will seldom hear anyone's raw amp sound because it is so nasty and is expected to be processed through at least cabs/speakers, while microphones are just an unavoidable part of the recording process or the use of digital IRs since you can't record real, physical soundwaves (or capture impulse responses) without them.

Effectively, speakers, cabs, mics, etc. are all just EQ curves applied to the raw amp signal to make it less nasty. You could, of course, synthesize any such EQ curve into an IR that you wanted, but you are inevitably processing that raw amp signal in some way. cabs, speakers, mics, etc. -- and their digital simulations -- are all just ways of adjusting the final EQ curve in different stages.

Thanks for the detailed response. I really appreciate it.

While I do understand the basic fundamental relationship between the amp + speaker to generate sound, what I’m trying to ultimately discern is if using the cabinet room + mics will result in a more accurate representation of the intrinsic tonal character of the amp vs not using the cab/mic room.

Obviously, using the plethora of mics and rooms and the placement of mics will further sculpt the tone.

Here’s what’s still a bit confusing to me: If I choose a Fender Deluxe combo amp and turn off the mic/cab room, I’m still hearing the amp+speaker of the Fender Deluxe, right? Or no?

Thanks again!

[dmitch]

Here’s what’s still a bit confusing to me: If I choose a Fender Deluxe combo amp and turn off the mic/cab room, I’m still hearing the amp+speaker of the Fender Deluxe, right? Or no?

Nope. Just the amp. Amps and speakers and rooms are all separate models. You can't have a speaker without the mic(s) and room.

[james.k.lisowski]

Here’s what’s still a bit confusing to me: If I choose a Fender Deluxe combo amp and turn off the mic/cab room, I’m still hearing the amp+speaker of the Fender Deluxe, right? Or no?

Nope. Just the amp. Amps and speakers and rooms are all separate models. You can't have a speaker without the mic(s) and room.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I will now proceed to crawl into the rabbit hole. Tell my wife I love her..............

[dmitch]

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I will now proceed to crawl into the rabbit hole. Tell my wife I love her..............

If having the speaker sound is important to you, you might want to just start your experimenting using the speaker that normally comes with the amp (via the link button in the speaker pane). That is a pretty good starting point for pretty much any AT5 setup I've used. I'm not sure I see (hear?) the benefit of tweaking the amp alone first, then enabling the speaker and tweaking more. Seems like starting the tweaking with the speaker connected would save time.

[carlaz]

But it's kind of fun down in this particular rabbit hole!

Seriously, back when I were'z a youngster just messing around with a little practice combo, I had no idea how important cabs and speakers were to the tone. After all, everyone fixates on the amp itself. Later on, I would start to hear a lot about the importance of speakers and cabs, but I couldn't really get to grips with it, largely because I just wasn't a recording engineer dealing with loads of speaker, cabinet, and microphone choices. I think it is AmpliTube itself -- once the Cab Room feature was introduced (in AmpliTube 4? I forget!) -- that made me realize this.

I play a lot of dense hard rock, so I often turn off the room mics in Cab Room and just use the "amp closet" room model anyway. The room choice, mics, and level can be more important for the overall guitar tone in more open, airy, and sparse genres. However, to get used to just the effects of different cabs/speakers and mics, you can just dispense with the room in any case. You can mute it in the mixer.

There are lots of useful videos on YouTube about how to mic guitar cabinets, etc. Watch these and apply the lessons to AmpliTube.

Like I say, probably the vast majority of guitar tones have been recorded by sticking an SM57 (Dynamic 57 in AmpliTube) right up close in the middle of a given speaker. This is a pretty good starting point for guitar tones.

You will see, in videos, engineers going through a process of test-recording all the speakers in a given cabinet because there can be very noticeable differences between one real-world speaker and the next, even if they are all the same make, model, and age. Vintage speakers may well have had difficult and complicated lives, and so can vary tremendously. Also, manufacturing tolerances were often wobbly back in the day, so two speakers could (though did not necessarily) roll off the production line, one after another, and already sound slightly different. Obviously, this is not an issue in AmpliTube, since a given speaker model will always sound the same -- though it will react differently in different cabinet models, and you can load every speaker slot in a cabinet model with different speakers, and then those will interact with each other (which is to say that an "adjacent" speaker model can affect the tone picked up by a mic model on a different speaker, depending on the placement!)

Cabinet choice is a good place to start experimenting since most amps have "recommended" cabinet( model)s, pre-loaded with speaker( model)s that AmpliTube will load by default. Then just try swapping different "default" cabinets in without changing your amp settings and see how the sound changes.

Further down the rabbit hole, you can try swapping different speaker models in and out of the same cabinet. Many guitarists will load a real-world 4x12 with two of two different speaker models arranged in an "X" pattern; you can also try this (and crazier things) in AmpliTube. I put together a rough guide to AmpliTube's speaker models that you can access as a pDF here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qaw4bafg150u8pl/Amplitube%20Speaker%20%26%20Cab%20Models.pdf?dl=0
I've not yet updated it for the latest Mesa/Boogie 2 collection, but though I think that adds new cabinet models, I'm not sure that it adds new speaker models (though I've not checked). In any case, that doc will get you a long way with speaker models.

Then you can go further with different microphone choices. Probably the most common approach that builds on the "57 in the center" technique is to add a MD421 (Dynamic 421 in AmpliTube) nearer the edge of a speaker and blend in the somewhat darker tone that gives to mitigate the brightness of a 57. Using a Royer 121 (Ribbon 121 in AmpliTube) is a popular modern choice, especially for higher gain tones. British studios in the '60s and early '70s often used Neuman mics (represented in AmpliTube by the Condenser 67 and 87) because SM57s had not yet become so common. Similarly, the Beyerdynamic Beyerdynamic M160 (Ribbon 160 in AmpliTube) was used on things like Hendrix and Zeppelin guitar recordings. These choices again tend to be darker than an SM57 -- but almost everything is!

[carlaz]

If having the speaker sound is important to you, you might want to just start your experimenting using the speaker that normally comes with the amp (via the link button in the speaker pane). That is a pretty good starting point for pretty much any AT5 setup I've used.

Yes, I'd agree that this is a perfectly good starting point.

I'm not sure I see (hear?) the benefit of tweaking the amp alone first, then enabling the speaker and tweaking more. Seems like starting the tweaking with the speaker connected would save time.

Yes, indeed. As noted, basically any guitar amp sounds fairly awful when not run through a guitar speaker (or simulation of one).

You could start just by picking an amp model that you like, leaving the default "matching" cabinet with it, use just one Dynamic 57 stuck right up in the center of one of the speaker models, set all the amp's controls to "neutral" (i.e., "noon", or 5 out of 10, or whatever) -- and see what you get.

Only then start messing with the amp settings. Start with the presence/treble, and work down to the mids and then bass controls, adding or subtracting what you want. Try making extreme EQ moves with each given knob/control, just to make it easier to hear the difference. Then move on to the gain/volume controls, and finally any more "esoteric" controls like bright switches and low-end thump switches and whatever else some types of amps have.

Then you can swap in a different cab model, hear the difference, and sort of repeat the process (going back to reset all the amp controls to neutral). Likewise, you can play this game using different amp models with the same cabinet model.

Eventually, with experience, you will learn how different cabs and their speakers sound -- and, more importantly, what you like. At that point, you can actually start building a tone by picking a cab/speaker combination that is going to get you closets where you want to go.

Obviously, you can also try moving the Dynamic 57 mic around, hearing how the tone changes as you move further from the speaker and further from the speaker's center. You can try different mics and see how they sound, and you can try blending mics, and mixing up the speakers in a cab -- and all that crazy stuff.

[james.k.lisowski]

:lol: But it's kind of fun down in this particular rabbit hole!

Seriously, back when I were'z a youngster just messing around with a little practice combo, I had no idea how important cabs and speakers were to the tone. After all, everyone fixates on the amp itself. Later on, I would start to hear a lot about the importance of speakers and cabs, but I couldn't really get to grips with it, largely because I just wasn't a recording engineer dealing with loads of speaker, cabinet, and microphone choices. I think it is AmpliTube itself -- once the Cab Room feature was introduced (in AmpliTube 4? I forget!) -- that made me realize this.

I play a lot of dense hard rock, so I often turn off the room mics in Cab Room and just use the "amp closet" room model anyway. The room choice, mics, and level can be more important for the overall guitar tone in more open, airy, and sparse genres. However, to get used to just the effects of different cabs/speakers and mics, you can just dispense with the room in any case. You can mute it in the mixer.

There are lots of useful videos on YouTube about how to mic guitar cabinets, etc. Watch these and apply the lessons to AmpliTube.

Like I say, probably the vast majority of guitar tones have been recorded by sticking an SM57 (Dynamic 57 in AmpliTube) right up close in the middle of a given speaker. This is a pretty good starting point for guitar tones.

You will see, in videos, engineers going through a process of test-recording all the speakers in a given cabinet because there can be very noticeable differences between one real-world speaker and the next, even if they are all the same make, model, and age. Vintage speakers may well have had difficult and complicated lives, and so can vary tremendously. Also, manufacturing tolerances were often wobbly back in the day, so two speakers could (though did not necessarily) roll off the production line, one after another, and already sound slightly different. Obviously, this is not an issue in AmpliTube, since a given speaker model will always sound the same -- though it will react differently in different cabinet models, and you can load every speaker slot in a cabinet model with different speakers, and then those will interact with each other (which is to say that an "adjacent" speaker model can affect the tone picked up by a mic model on a different speaker, depending on the placement!)

Cabinet choice is a good place to start experimenting since most amps have "recommended" cabinet( model)s, pre-loaded with speaker( model)s that AmpliTube will load by default. Then just try swapping different "default" cabinets in without changing your amp settings and see how the sound changes.

Further down the rabbit hole, you can try swapping different speaker models in and out of the same cabinet. Many guitarists will load a real-world 4x12 with two of two different speaker models arranged in an "X" pattern; you can also try this (and crazier things) in AmpliTube. I put together a rough guide to AmpliTube's speaker models that you can access as a pDF here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qaw4bafg150u8pl/Amplitube%20Speaker%20%26%20Cab%20Models.pdf?dl=0
I've not yet updated it for the latest Mesa/Boogie 2 collection, but though I think that adds new cabinet models, I'm not sure that it adds new speaker models (though I've not checked). In any case, that doc will get you a long way with speaker models.

Then you can go further with different microphone choices. Probably the most common approach that builds on the "57 in the center" technique is to add a MD421 (Dynamic 421 in AmpliTube) nearer the edge of a speaker and blend in the somewhat darker tone that gives to mitigate the brightness of a 57. Using a Royer 121 (Ribbon 121 in AmpliTube) is a popular modern choice, especially for higher gain tones. British studios in the '60s and early '70s often used Neuman mics (represented in AmpliTube by the Condenser 67 and 87) because SM57s had not yet become so common. Similarly, the Beyerdynamic Beyerdynamic M160 (Ribbon 160 in AmpliTube) was used on things like Hendrix and Zeppelin guitar recordings. These choices again tend to be darker than an SM57 -- but almost everything is!

Wow, thank you so much for this very informative reply. I truly appreciate you taking the time with this. This definitely helps out a bunch on getting me started. Yeah, I was checking out tons of mic placement YouTube videos and there was one from Rick Beato where he talks about the Dynamic 57 and Ribbon 121 as the "standards" of guitar mics.

I will definitely implement your cool recommendations into my "deep dive". So much to do, so little time!

[FlavioWolff7]

I would love to be able to defeat the microphones altogether, thus being able to reproduce the amp + cabinet sound on my headphones/flat speakers. This is why amplitube never sounds like playing in front of an amp. It only reproduces recorded sounds, like what someone hears in a mix room.