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  #31  
Old 08-03-2021, 05:19 PM
S.bowman S.bowman is offline
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Originally Posted by Doug Young View Post
They're sort of 2 different things. The Grace products are all wonderful - they cleanly and accurately amplify your pickup. ToneDexter is a preamp, but the real point is the "effect", the IR. TonerDexter does not accurately pass along your pickup, it "corrects" it to sound closer to the mic'd sound of your guitar. If you like the raw sound of your pickup, you don't need ToneDexter. For those of us who are disappointed in how pickups sound compared to the acoustic sound of the guitar, TonedDexter, (or competitors) are an answer.
Yes, I did come to understand that while researching. I should have mentioned it in my post, as not to add confusion to the subject. While I didn't feel the need for it, I think it would be a super useful tool to have on hand. Especially for those rooms that you just can't get your sound in when performing.
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  #32  
Old 08-03-2021, 05:45 PM
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Doug Young Doug Young is offline
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Originally Posted by S.bowman View Post
Especially for those rooms that you just can't get your sound in when performing.
We're veering far from Barry's quest to record with a pickup, but I'd say ToneDexter is useful in the opposite situation. The people I've seen not like it tend to be those who play difficult rooms, or places that are noisy enough or have bad enough acoustics that no one would notice the difference anyway, or where a "realistic" sound just gets lost in the noise. I tend to play "listening" rooms, where it's quiet, and the acoustics are reasonably good, not difficult to get a sound at all. It's just that in that situation - as with recording - people can actually hear your guitar, and I hope, at least, that they're listening. And if they hear a quacky pickup that's not going to be good. Heck, if *I* hear a quacky pickup, I'm not going to play well. That's where ToneDexer et al come in.
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  #33  
Old 08-03-2021, 07:53 PM
shufflebeat shufflebeat is offline
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I've been following the development of IR technology as a musician with a healthy obsession with(other people's) good ideas. As we've gone along together I've constructed my own way of understanding the process which may well be complete nonsense but here goes.

Imagine you're in a tiled bathroom where your fiddle sounds excellent, reflections bouncing around and coming at you from all directions. You may or may not be a fiddle player, I'm not. You would love to take this acoustic response to all your gigs but that would be impractical.

Really, you don't want to take the tiles, bricks and mirrors, you just want the effect they have on sounds you introduce in the space.

If you could add the mono or stereo reverb tail to every sample in a digital recorded signal then the end product would be a bit like the original sustained sound in the space.

So, you take a balloon and a recording device into the bathroom and record the sound of the balloon being popped and the resulting reverb tail.

Because the pop is such a short sound (an acoustic "impulse", so to speak) there isn't much of the original in the reverb tail, just what has reflected round the space and back to the mics, early reflections, standing waves and all (the "response" of the space to the impulse, do to speak).

So you go to your PC and edit the original "pop" off the recording and save the result. Now if you substitute the pop for a studio recording of the fiddle through the Impulse Response recording sample by sample you will synthesise the response to the fiddle using the response to the pop, crunch the resulting numbers and convert to analogue sound - Viola!

Now do the same by tapping your guitar with a spoon (or better still, someone else's guitar) and record what comes after.

Somebody may come with a much more technically correct explanation but this one has worked quite well for me so far.
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Last edited by shufflebeat; 08-03-2021 at 08:00 PM.
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  #34  
Old 08-03-2021, 09:53 PM
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TBman TBman is offline
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Originally Posted by Aimelie View Post
“Impulse response”, I do believe.
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Originally Posted by Doug Young View Post
Impulse response, Barry. It's a way of capturing the sonic signature of one sound so you can apply it to another. It's heavily used in reverbs - capture the sound of the Sistine Chapel, or someone's bathroom, whatever, and be able to apply it as a reverb on your own track. The reverbs are often called "convolution reverbs", because convolution is the process of applying an IR to another sound. You have a convolution reverb in Reaper, from what I understand. So all you do is load it up with an IR and use it like any effect.

A "recent" (as in the last 20 years or so) area of exploration has been using this technique to capture the acoustic sound of a guitar and apply it to a pickup. Momma Bear, ToneDexter, Aura, and Baggs Voiceprint are hardware devices that do this. Cuki and JonFields here on AGF have written software that let you capture your own IRs as well. The electric players have been into this longer, and things like the Kemper amp and AxeFX and others let you reproduce the sound of virtually any electric amp using a captured IR. If you read the amplification section of AGF, for the past severals years, every few threads are about IRs, so you can dig into all the details by reading that section of the forum.

My take on IRs applied to pickups is that they have progressed to where they're a game changer for live amplification, but are less likely to fool anyone for a recording. The sample I posted earlier (labeled "reverb test") is using an IR on my pickup.
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Originally Posted by S.bowman View Post
Impulse Response. A sonic measurment of a room (or any space), a speaker cabinet in relation to the sound source. There are a few IR loaders out there for free which allow you to load a chosen IR, and use it for live or recording purposes. I prefer to use a convolution plugin in my DAW for that purpose, as the free ir loaders I have used cut the length of the IR to fit, where-as the plugin does not. If you use Logic Pro X, you can load IR's into Space Designer . If using Reaper, I think REAverb is their convolution plugin.( if you decide to try it, be sure that you turn the wet signal to 100%, and dry to zero. It isn't limited to profiles of acoustic guitars and speaker cabinets, you can load some pretty sweet rooms IR's in there that you wouldn't have real world access too as well.
Hope that helped you to understand a bit better. Stuff had me confused when I first started learning about it, but they are not difficult to use at all once you learn a little about them. Very useful for electric guitar stuff when you can't plug a 100 water into a 4-12 without making the neighbors hate you.

Thanks! I'll play around with this!
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  #35  
Old 08-13-2021, 09:37 PM
lkingston lkingston is offline
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This is related to this discussion:

https://www.acousticguitarforum.com/...d.php?t=623239
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