Try to copy a certain GuitarRig Amp(works also with other virtual guitar amps)

What we need

Basic Setup

In Ardour

Ardour Channel Setup (sort of)

The Ardour Mixer

Procedere - the noise conditions

First put everything together so that on every channel there is the same white noise from the generator bus. White noise is used because if you want to find out what frequencies are pushed or filtered you need a signal that have every frequency with the same amount of energy in it - so I think white noise the best for that.

The white noise must be connected with GuitarRig and GuitarRig back to Ardour

The white noise need also to be connected with out guitar modeling channel. My modeling channel is called “SwankyBus - Rock” This modeling channel is connected to the analyzer bus.

GuitarRig has an Gate. This should be deactivated since we we want both (GuitarRig and the modeling channel) with the same noise to compare both equally

Take a look there is on the right side a -2.7db .. this is the output of GuitarRig turned down.

That need to be on 0.0db.

So WolfSpectrum now shows nearly the same noise floor. Obviously GuitarRig filters some high frequencies around 20khz but they are not important in our experiment since will be filtered by the EQ anyway.

Matching the Speakers

First we try to match the speakers. The GuitarRig Impulse Response Plugin (further called IR) should switched to the cabinet mic and have no “room parts” like that

Because it turned out that I can’t find any matching IR file in my archive I just try to make a IR of GRs “Speaker”. For that I try qloud.

It seemed that qloud generates some sort of inverted IR which is not useable yet since I don’t know why and what that means. The signal looks like this

So after some searching I found a windows freeware called deconvolver. You have to generate a test tone file and have to route it through the GuitarRig and record the response and than you have to add this to this deconvolver programm.

Now the the signal looks like that … the upper is GuitarRig and the lower is the IR of the GuitarRig speaker. Pretty similar ey?!

The Amp

I try to use SwankyAmp for matching but I didn’t find any preset and can’t match the tone so I tried the GXAmplifierX plugin from Guitarx and play around with the preamp emulation as well with the overall character of the amp. So the matching one is a Huges&Kettner style one which makes sense because GuitarRigs Amp is also a heavy-style amp. Than I try to matched the parameters as good as I could.

Looks like this:

In GuitarRig I have the following setup:

I try to match it up while playing something on the guitar. Because the frequencies are nearly the same while the signal is distorted (yeah I know it’s not correct because of the harmonics) it’s better not only to relay on the noise signal in the spectrogram but also on real guitar playing.

That’s the noise signal:

Playing something on the guitar looks like this:

This is pretty decent and sounds also pretty decent. The lower part is a bit more defined in the GuitarRig signal.

the EQ

So here comes the fine tuning. The GuitarRig signal seems to be a bit more heavy so I try to match it with the EQ.

Trying to match up with my favourite plugin - the Calf Equalizer;

Conclusion

It’s possible if you have the right impulse response. It’s not 100% perfect but that wasn’t the goal. The goal is always to have decent tone. In my opinion the default sounds of Guitarx are not as good as the GuitarRig ones.

What else can be done?

GuitarRig has also a room speaker (as mentioned). The cab speaker can be crossblendet to the room speaker and that also sounds nice. A IR of the room and a crossblending to nice up the sound can also be a interesting goal.