Question about Q-Clone

[Affair2k]

Hi guys, after listening to some cool clips on this forum of people making use of the waves q-clone plugin as a speaker simulator i am considering selling some of my studio gear to buy it.

I always record my dirty guitars with my amp and a tube condenser mic, im getting very good results, if i can capture that sound with q-clone so i can start recording with the line output(i have a palmer that can make the dummy speaker and provide me the line output signal) and get more or less the same sound i will be very happy. I have seen people here that had great results and that is taunting me to buy that plugin

But the question is other...its a very expensive plugin, i dont have any good external eq hardware, so 1000$ is a very expensive cabinet simulator :/ but maybe i could use it like a mic simulator for piezo acoustic sounds.
What do you think?

I had the idea after watching some of the fishman aura videos, it seems they use the same concept with the guitar images, i really need some way to record my acoustic guitars and get a good sound, so i was thinking in buying an aura system.

I know its a very hard request, but since i dont have access to any friend with that plugin i would really love someone to try to capture an acoustic guitar mic'ed and save the preset in q-clone for a later use.

If that is possible and the results are good, for sure i will be more than happy to buy it...speaker simulator of my setup for dirty guitars and also piezo "modeller" for acoustics...it sounds too good to be true, but 1000$ sound too expensive to be possible

PLease, excuse me for my poor english, i hope you understand what i try to say.

BTW, i dont like using mics recording acoustic guitars, my recording room is full of noises and my neighbours are a pain with the damn TV so loud all the f****g day.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Orren]

I'm afraid you'll have no luck trying to use Q-Clone to create an acoustic guitar sound. What Q-Clone does is basically send a sign wave into a device that has an input to accept a sound (such as an equalizer, a reverb, or a speaker) and then take the resulting sonic output and generates an EQ curve from it.

There is no way you could send the sign wave from Q-Clone into an acoustic guitar. An acoustic guitar is an instrument that only produces sound when played; you don't plug in an input cable, send a sound wave through it, and then hear the soundwave from the guitar.

Orren

 

[Eoin]

Q-Clone is basically a limited preset-orientated convolution processor. Convolution works by extrapolating the parameters involved in a linear sound transformation.

You feed a sine sweep (usually 20hz-20khz over 20 seconds or so) into a system - such as an audio processor like an EQ or a speaker with a mic in front of it - and record the output of the sound through that system. This causes time/frequency changes from speaker cone colouration, room reflections, signal loss or gain in the circuit etc. You deconvolve this recorded output into an impulse which you can apply to any audio signal - you've effectively "sampled" the colouration of the environment recorded. For example, if you applied that impulse to a sine sweep, you should (theoretically) make the sine sweep sound like the sweep you recorded. It doesn't work for non-linear effects like modulation or harmonic distortion, but is quite effective at capturing room sounds, reverbs, delay, phase changes, speaker colourations and EQ.

Now, why you'd pay $1000 for Q-Clone when you can get the fully controllable and multi-impulse Pristine Space by Voxengo for less than $200 is truly beyond me.

I'm not sure how the impulsing in the Aura was done (assuming that it works by convolution), since you can't really accurately take a sine sweep or spike of a piezo pickup. But given the mediocre results, I suspect Fishman never quite figured it out either.

 

[Affair2k]

Originally posted by Eoin


I'm not sure how the impulsing in the Aura was done (assuming that it works by convolution), since you can't really accurately take a sine sweep or spike of a piezo pickup. But given the mediocre results, I suspect Fishman never quite figured it out either.

So, are you saying that fishman aura is not good? i heard good things about it in some forums.
I was about to buy a sansamp acoustic DI or a Para driver DI, they are cheaper than the aura, but everyone says the fishman is great.
What do you think?
Thanks.

 

[Eoin]

I recorded a Lowden with a Fishman piezo through the Aura (I used about 20 different settings) and compared it to the same acoustic miced up. It sounds nothing at all like it, even after matching the frequency spectrums. I don't know how much the Aura is retailing for at the moment, but when I looked at it, it was around €500 here. That's €350 too much, imo. It a nice versatile EQ modeller, but it really didn't seem to succeed in doing what it claims to do - make a piezo pickup sound like a miced acoustic. The sound that comes out is still undeniably and very distinctly a piezo signal with heavy EQ.

Personally, if I was spending that kind of money on a DI, I'd get an Avalon U5.