How to make Impulse Responses from guitar cabinet plugins FOR FREE on REAPER 

Thank you, brother! I know the feeling and thats why I make videos the way that I do. Id rather be over-explaining things than under-explaining them.

I know your pain, brother. Thats why I learned how to do all this stuff and Im happy to share it.

Thanks, Tudor! Definitely 15 ways to do everything in Reaper and I know literally nothing about it besides what I googled 20 mins before this video :)

It really is amazing what we can do with convolution and a little bit of thinking outside the box :)

Aweseome, Michael!

Its a great way to combine a bunch of audio work into a singular IR. Thats definitely useful for NAM, especially for the standalone version. Since it can only load one IR and only has a basic EQ, this allows you to make that IR into something that works perfectly with your model :)

Sorry your DAW isnt giving you exact results. I would try adding some silence before the 1-sample spike as a way of possibly mitigating issues with your DAWs handling of transients or audio file truncating. Not sure what the problem could be as I dont use Cubase. Glad you got decent results, though! Libra is cool but it has its own issues. Primarily the way it handles IR alignment. I dont like how they require you to manually align IRs from different makers. If you have an IR from Ownhammer, one from Bogren and another from York, you have 3 IRs that have 3 different starting points. Without the ability to visualize that, you are left guessing with their "Delay" knob. To me, the best way to blend IRs is Melda MCabinet in Edit mode, or Fractal Audio CabLab4. MCabinet will automatically align all IRs and allows you to add EQ, though its difficult to use. CabLab4 allows you to visualize the alignment which is a lot easier to manage than Libra. The only thing with CabLab4 is that you have to extract the IR through manual means as they only allow export to their proprietary format (so you do what I show in this video).

Cheers, brother!

Try both ways and see what works best. But from a resampling perspective, all modern IR loaders will automatically resample whatever IR you give them to match your current settings.

IRs do not capture distortion, unfortunately. If that was the case, everybody would have already done that. They are "linear" so they can do things like EQ or Reverb but they cant do distortion.

Try doing the process without recording anything. Do you see the audio meter on the 2nd track displaying anything? If not, you havent routed your audio from the frist track into the 2nd track. Its either that OR you have somehow muted the first track entirely. You mentioned "auto mute" which I have not seen before. Im not a regular Reaper user so I cant say for sure whats happening there. Sorry.

Im sure there are 50 ways to do this.

@@jasonzdora thanks. Where did you find those dirac spikes? they are actually very good and they are not easy to find. I've downloaded a few others which were rubbish in comparison.

@@deans.4705 I made them in Audacity. Just create a second of silence then enable the pencil tool, zoom all the way down on the beginning of the silence and raise the 2nd sample up to some value higher than zero, then normalize to -1db. Some folks think the spike has to be several samples long but in my testing, a single sample works just fine. I also noticed that leaving the 1st sample silent and then making the 2nd sample the actual spike resulted in better copies of some stuff like reverbs and delays for whatever reson.

​@@jasonzdora thanks so much. I spent about 5 hours working with Audacity last night trying. Yours are still better. It's quite bizarre as your steps were very detailed and there's not much to mess up. I use Hofa IQ analyzer as my measuring tool. I load up an IR directly in it as my reference. Then in a DAW, I send a pulse through a vst IR loader with the same IR loaded and create a new impulse response hoping to match the reference. Once created, I load that IR into Hofa for comparison. All in all, from a vst perspective, for accuracy Lancaster Pulse loader beats GGD, air impulse, and STL Libra. By comparison though if I use the built-in IR Maker in Studio One and send it out via usb to my Fractal FM9 with the same IR loaded it's almost 100% accurate.

What does the audio file look like when you record it on the 2nd channel? If you dont see any audio information, have you tried playing ANY audio through your darkglass and re-recording it with the 2nd channel to make sure youve set that up correctly?

You did nothing wrong. Just edit the recording where the beginning of the file is the beginning of the upward swing and the end is about 100ms after (where there is total silence) and you will be fine.

@@jasonzdora Thank you! I did cut the beginning of the resulting IR so that the first sample is right where the first peak/wave starts. The IR works in itself on my Quad Cortex but I saw something that was weird. I compared the IRs I created with other MPT IRs from named brands in Audacity. The peaks/waves of my IR are longer so that the IRs are slowly going out of phase with time. Have you seen this before? I used 48kHz sampling rate throughout the process.

@@fraenkiboii Yes thats normal. All IRs are different. Thats why they sound different. If you want to manually align some IRs from different places, your best bet is to align them all with their peak loudest points all in the same place. This means some IRs will start earlier or later than others but so long as the very peak is aligned, they will sound their most in-phase as they possibly can. You would do this work by dropping all of the IRs you want to blend together into Audacity or your DAW. You cant hear the result until you export a master of the blended IRs so you cant manage your volume/mix of each IR but its not difficult to re-export the files after adjusting the volumes.

Another method for easily blending IRs is Melda MCabinet. It auto-aligns the IRs perfectly and allows you to listen to the resulting mix as you adjust the volumes. Its a great plugin but wait for it to go on 50% sale.

The process in my video isnt for NAM. Its just for IRs. I have other videos for NAM but I would suggest going to their Discord or Facebook or website to get more information on how to make NAM models of your tube amps.

I would start by looking at the IR you created in an audio editor like Audacity. Take a look to see if you actually have any information in the waveform. If you play the IR you created like an audio file, do you hear anything? Like a click noise?

​@@jasonzdorai actually made it to work😊 but the problem is that the IR volume is so low..could I add gain in the IR to make it louder?if so..how?thanks for the response btw

@@dietcoke8114 in the video at @8:54 I show how to normalize. You can also simply turn up the volume on whatever it is that you are making an IR out of. You can also add a gain plugin.

Most of the time, its the automatic crossfade issue. Did you make the change to the settings that I show at the beginning of the video?

@@jasonzdora yep it wasnt the exact setting as in this video i guess because of the updates since but i believe i did those changes

LOL use another EQ.

And you would do that because you absolutely positively paid for all those IRs with money.... riiiight?! ;p

@@jasonzdora of course. I have a 4 cab mix of cabs that I own that I really like and want to use elsewhere without having to load WoS and be connected to the internet. The IR that I made isn't stereo of course, but still sounds pretty good and has the power amp stuff from WoS baked into it. Mostly I just wanted to see if it would work.

@@orionktulu Right on. I was just joking but of course it is possible to "abuse" this workflow on IR systems that let you demo paid stuff. If you want to capture a stereo IR, its totally possible. You just need to record a stereo channel and I guess you would also need to utilize an IR loader that can accept stereo IRs.

​@@jasonzdoraI'm not sure what I did wrong but my IR sounds quite different from my source. It still sounds good, but quite different. Tried with a different cab source and it wasn't even close.

@@orionktulu I dunno. Did you leave any distortion on in the chain? Turn everything off except for the cabinet and EQ.