IRs and Nebula programs of guitar cabs - Kalthallen Cabs released

Skaldir

Skaldir

formerly known as Unicorn
Nov 3, 2001
3,555
15
38
Germany
www.kalthallen.de
Some of you have followed the shootouts of real vs IR vs Nebula I did in the past.
All your input helped to come as close to a real cab as possible.

Now my first library is finally available and I decided to release it as donationware. :)

I hope a lot of you will like it and it would be great to see some sound samples using these IRs or Nebula programs posted here!

Since the Nebula library is rather huge (1,37 GB) you should first download the IRs and see if you find them useful.
The Nebula programs also only work with commercial versions of Nebula. (Pro and Server)
Also check the readme files once before you start.

There are also pictures of every captured mic position (you can connect them with the IRs in REVerence if you use Cubase) so you can see where the mic was pointed at.

I used amps and different ampsims to find good sounding mic positions with common 12 o'clock settings, so it should be easy to get a heavy guitar tone without huge amounts of dialing in amps or ampsims.

The used mics have been:
- sm57
- md421
- md21 (dynamic omni)
- i5 (didn't have much luck with it though)
- AT 4050 (a big surprise for me, sounded great. check IRs 018 and 019)
- sm7b

Speakers are Vintage 30 and G12T-75 and so far only a 4x12 cab.
I plan to add an open back 2x12 for cleans in the future.

Every mic position is captured in 44.1 kHz, 96 kHz and with a guitar tube power amp and a guitar solid state amp.

enjoy

http://cabs.kalthallen.de/

and excuse the 90s looking webpage ;)


Markus


p.s. Would be great if somebody could convert the impulses into axe fx formats. PM me for that
 
Red Phoenix said:
Your link to the Nebula readme pdf is wrong. You linked http://cabs.kalthallen.de/IR Readme.pdf instead of http://cabs.kalthallen.de/Nebula Readme.pdf
And i did no really understand yet what Nebula exactly does. Should it be a more realistic cab sim?
Click to expand...

Thanks!

Nebula offers some kind of dynamic convolution. Its like different IRs are played back depending of the volume of the incoming signal.
You can also choose to run the signal in a quieter or cranked cab that way.
It also captures some non-linearities.

Here's a shootout against a real mic'ed cab
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/equipment/745042-part-3-ultimate-ir-nebula-real-deal-test.html
 
Ah ok. :) I'm listening to your shootout. It's quite interesting. So Nebula trys to compensate the disadvantage of normal IRs which are only like static EQs? I should have a look at the free version. The only difference to the full/pro version is that you can't use external IR files and the downgraded "NAT"? Is NAT important for IR using? Or its only when emulating FX Processors? A bit confusing...
 
Its very confusing actually. You can't run my programs in Nebula Free. :(
NAT is only for sampling your own gear and make programs, so you don't need that when you only want to use existing programs.
 
A little off topic: (sorry)

Anyone here had luck getting Nebula to work properly in Pro Tools HD (or native) on a Mac?
 
I love how any thread that's in any way related to Nebula ultimately becomes a 'how do I get Nebula to do *xx*?' FAQ.

Congrats on finally releasing the library, Marcus. Was a pleasure to have a very minor role in the development of it.
 
Ermz said:
I love how any thread that's in any way related to Nebula ultimately becomes a 'how do I get Nebula to do *xx*?' FAQ.

Congrats on finally releasing the library, Marcus. Was a pleasure to have a very minor role in the development of it.
Click to expand...

Now that you say that, I didn't honour you at all on the website! I need to change that asap, because you really helped me a lot!
edit: you and the guy that borrowed me the 421
 
your player doesnt work for me... got any samples you could upload on dropbox for us ?
thanks!
 
I tried the free version of Nebula. Horrible and confusing gui =D not intuitive at all...and ..yeah..not useable for IRs. Tried to fool it with replacing factory programs/vectors/xml with your programs but didn't work..too bad :/
The idea of dynamic IRs catched me..but i guess there is no other software which does that. But your IRs are nice. Especially the once captured with solid state amp...because these are rare. Good addition to the redwirez free pack! :)
 
Great job Markus. I had nailed your test down to either D or E being the real cab the other week, and I picked nebula to be the real cab so that really says something for nebula The impulses were much more static.. For some reason, Cliff Chase the creator of the axe fx believes that there is no value in dynamic IR. Heres what he wrote in my thread about it:

"I've done extensive research into speakers and there is nothing to be gained by using "dynamic IRs" (i.e. Volterra kernels) vs. normal IRs and speaker distortion modeling. It just uses a lot of horsepower with no tangible improvement."

I know that IR is certainly inferior to nebula, (although my own personal attempts a few years ago were not great) but i'm not sure what speaker distortion modelling acheives or how.
 
kev said:
Great job Markus. I had nailed your test down to either D or E being the real cab the other week, and I picked nebula to be the real cab so that really says something for nebula. For some reason, Cliff Chase the creator of the axe fx believes that there is no value in dynamic IR. Heres what he wrote in my thread about it:

"I've done extensive research into speakers and there is nothing to be gained by using "dynamic IRs" (i.e. Volterra kernels) vs. normal IRs and speaker distortion modeling. It just uses a lot of horsepower with no tangible improvement."
Click to expand...

The problem is, Nebula is essentially still using static impulses. It doesn't (AFAIK) interpolate between them, and it doesn't truly replicate frequency response changes based on amplitude.

As I understand it; imagine you have a input mixer with 16 or so aux sends, and each send takes a copy of your guitar signal and outputs it through a static impulse loader. Each loader has a different impulse loaded into it, captured at different levels of amplitude. Now imagine your guitar signal was sidechained to control which of the aux's are used... softer playing sends the signal to aux 1, slightly harder playing aux 2, 3, 4, etc...

Each one of them coming back around and all merging down into a single return.

If I'm right and Nebula essentially sends the signal to different impulses based on input level.... then it isn't dynamic at all. Just a stacked load of impulses running in parallel.
 
Thanks for the comments so far!

drew_drummer said:
The problem is, Nebula is essentially still using static impulses. It doesn't (AFAIK) interpolate between them, and it doesn't truly replicate frequency response changes based on amplitude.
Click to expand...

But it does, Drew!
It even does that in splitted frequencies. That means if a palm mute has more bass, the bass has a bigger amplitude and reaches a higher step that gets played back.
The problem was to achive that this works correct. I used a trick to find out the dynamic range. There's a calibration program in the Nebula pack that can be used to experience this yourself.
The first tries I had have been only hanging on one dynamic step, so they were like a static IR on the lowest cab volume I captured. But the ones in my library all work like they should.

@kev
I also think the difference between an IR and the dynamic Volterra isn't that big, but it certainly has an effect. But if its worth the additional horsepower, everybody has to find out for himself. :)
 
Soultrash said:
stoked to hear the IR's. axe-fx format could get a bit difficult as it needs 48000khz :)
Click to expand...

Somebody could just convert the 96 kHz ones to 48 kHz and shorten them on 1024 or 2048 samples.
I could do that myself, but somebody would need to let this run through a certain program as I heard? Any experiences there?
 
I think the biggest difference likely lies in the resolution of impulse responses. That whole 1024 vs 10k 'point' IRs discussion we had regarding the Jocke box. Currently standard impulses seem to 'average out' wide frequency bands, and only approximate their sound. So what obviously suffers there is the clarity of the low-end. Also, for some reason they don't take processing as well as mic'ed signals.

With Nebula we hoped to get one step closer to true cab emulation - and I think that has been achieved. Most people who guessed in the final shoot out picked between Nebula and the Real cab.
 
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