Guitar Cab Emulator in Ableton Live

Started by bosetuno, January 21, 2022, 05:12:47 AM

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bosetuno

Hi!

I am an Ableton user. Although I also use Cubase and I started with Logic Audio back when it ran on windows, Ableton is the one I use the most. Is quite straight forward and relatively simple to use and faster to make quick compositions. And I´ve been using it for years so I have quite some workflow and presets adquired that I miss every time I moved to another DAW.

So, during the last weeks  I´ve been researching about how to implement a guitar cab emulator within Ableton, using its biult in modules, and NO IR. The reason I´ve decided not to use IR, is because at the begining I just wanted to see how close I could get to replicate a speaker frecuency response. And the project grew up from there where it is today. And, actually I´ve never felt that confortable with IR. They are a good alternative to micing an amp for recording, but my idea here was to make it sound as close as posible to an amp itself through my studio monitors.

So basicly it consist of an eq with the curve of the speaker response, then there is a speaker saturation emulation, that drives a Cab emulator (resonance, open back cancellations, speaker phase differences, etc.), and finally a Cab noise emulator (rattling, and distortion created by the front baffle). To round it up, I add a reverb module to make it sound in a room and an "Amp in the floor" eq to emulate the increase in bass frecuency when an amp is place in the floor. Thats the basic signal flow as for today, but this is evolving slowly everyday.

Anyway, just I want to make sure its clear there is no a proper method in this, and no measurements of real speakers or cab have been done. It´s mainly done by intuition and ear, so, please, take that into account. And there is a lot of things to improve and I would love if someone else feels like giving me some feedback and advice or even cotribute to it. ;)

I´ve attached some screenshots of the signal flow


So, for now, there are 3 types of speakers: A Celestion V30, a Celestion Blue Alnico, and a JBL E120. No real speaker bear that in mind, In the case of the celestion I used the published speaker response as reference, and the JBL is just an ideal. There´s not much info on that one. Each one has its own distortion characteristics, being the JBL the cleaset sounding and the Alnico the dirtiest one.

Regarding cabs, I designed a closed 4x12, and open back 2x12, an 1x12, and a 1x10. Those last ones have not the "back" block, since I think they didn´t contribute in a good way. And the 1x10 have an extra eq asociated with speaker distortion to make it more mid focused when pushed hard.

For the Cab noise part I used some Ableton Corpus Fx in parallel with eq and some extra processing.


Setting CabNoise And Spk Dist on max makes it sound unnatural IMO, so be kind with it. I´ve found a sweet sounding Vox cab with the 2x12, Alnico Spk, and  Cab Noise and Spk dist on 100. For a Tweed Champ sound change to 1x10 and choose either speaker to your liking. For a marshall roar 4x12, calestion and low values of CabNoise an Spk Dist sound the best to me.

The Ableton preset is attached. It works on Ableton Live 10 and 11, and Max for live is needed.

I made a video some days ago showing its capabilities, however is not the last version of it (no Blue Alnico Speaker, for instance).



Cheers