Overloud Audio Tools recently released SuperCabinet, an IR (Impulse Response) editor, browser and librarian that allows you to access one of the largest collections or sample-accurate recreations of Guitar Cabinets ever assembled. Each Cabinet has been modeled in painstaking detail and a sonically accurate recreation of the originals. The SuperCabinet editor librarian, once opened, displays all the tools you need to open, edit and save your IRs. SuperCabinet allows you to choose the speaker, the microphone model, its placement as well as the PreAmps and power amp. Also included in the interface are a Low Pass Filter, High Pass Filter and a Stereo width control.
SuperCabinet comes with three factory libraries out of the box. You get a 4 X 12 Simms Watts, a Friedman BE412 and Dr. Z 2 X 12 cabinet. Each cabinet is a systematic recreation of the original and is created with 18 different microphones in 16 positions each along with two amps (tube and solid state) for a total of 576 IRs for each speaker cabinet. Many more libraries are available from developers, like Choptones and The Amp Factory on the ILIO (Overloud’s North American and European Distributor) website.
SuperCabinet can be accessed within TH-U, Overloud Audio Tools’ revolutionary amp simulator and effect processor, and together creates one of the most comprehensive sets of Guitar Signal Processing tools for guitarists ever designed. Because SuperCabinet is an integrated part of TH-U, you now have the flexibility to create just about any Guitar amp and speaker cabinet combination you can imagine. You can access TH-U as a standalone app and as a plugin – the installer allows you to install the most popular formats including VST, AAX and Audio Units (AU).
Once a speaker cabinet is chosen in the graphical interface, SuperCabinet automatically loads the corresponding IR. All the available IR’s are individually phase-aligned so that they can be combined without having to worry about phase alignment issues. The right side of SuperCabinet shows the position of your selected microphone model relative to the distance and position from the selected speaker cabinet. SuperCabinet also allows you to load and manipulate your own third-party or sampled IRs and load the adjusted IR into a compatible hardware device or software program.
An “IR” is the combination or two physical sonic events Impulse and “Response. The term Impulse means sound generated from any sound source, in this case the physical interaction of an electric guitar within a speaker cabinet. Response simply means sound bouncing off a hard service or, in other words, the physics of a Guitar Speaker bouncing and interacting within the interior of a speaker cabinet.
Being able to accurately capture the Impulse Response or “IR” for Guitar Players on a practical basis has been a moving target for decades, starting with amp simulators built into the first generation of Amp modelers, which were electrical, not physical recreations of the speaker cabinets they were emulating. The first generation of Amp simulators that came out in the 1990’s did allow you to mix and match Amps and Cabinets in the form of digital snapshots or “samples” but as guitarists learned there is a big difference between a digital recreation of a speaker cabinet vs. sampling and capturing the actual physical characteristics of how an electric guitar interacts with an amplifier and speakers.
What SuperCabinet does that is different from any other IR editor librarian that has come before it is the ability to load multiple different IRs using multiple guitar cabinets and combine them so that you can create your own unique IR’s and save them as a standard wave file, which can then be loaded into any compatible hardware device or software program. Also unique to SuperCabinet is the four-band filter that allows for complex and precise editing across the entire Treble, midrange and Bass frequency responses. SuperCabinet can be operated in single or multi-band mode. In Multiband mode, SuperCabinet’s powerful multiband Graphic Equalizer allows you to load different IRs on different frequency bands. SuperCabinet also offers an easy way to, in one click, convert a mono to stereo tracks. The one aspect that SuperCabinet does not try to capture is the room or acoustic space where the speaker cabinet sits in the recording space––in other words, the physical characteristics of the room itself.
TH-U by itself is one of the best amp simulators ever created and offers guitarists the ability to dial in sonically accurate recreations of some of the world’s most iconic guitar amplifiers. Add to that, SuperCabinet and you now have a truly flexible and comprehensive sets of audio tools for the recording or performing Guitar Player.
SuperCabinet is included as a free upgrade to users of TH-U Full (now called TH-U Premium).
For full pricing, how to upgrade, and available installation options, find out more at ILIO.com/supercabinet.
