Long story short, I'm building out a studio in my house and I'm trying to keep the volume down so that I don't blast my family with my nonsense. I've been looking at amp modeling hardware, which seems cool up to a point. I went down the rabbit hole of load boxes so I could use my amps and quickly discovered reactive load boxes.

A brief lowdown of what I'm talking about here:

A load box is a piece of hardware that can take the power load of your amp and dissipate the energy, in place of a cabinet. There are different kinds of load boxes, but here we are concerned with reactive load boxes. These can simulate the impedance curve that happens with a speaker cabinet. If you've ever plugged your instrument direct into a computer or amp modeler and it sounded stiff and cold, it's because it lacks the natural impedance curve that you would get from your speaker cabinet. That's the way I understand it.

Impulse response software (or hardware) shapes the output of the reactive load. In other words, IRs simulate a speaker cabinet and in some cases the mic placement in a recording environment, utilizing the reactive load.

Back to the amp with a reactive load box in combination with impulse response software:

It looks like replicating the dynamic sound of an amp directly into a computer using a reactive load box can potentially get you to the edge of the real thing. From the audio clips I've gone through, difference really is slight, where you really only know if you are the engineer doing it. (For example, Pete Thorn has some informative youtube videos where he compares an amp and speaker cabinet with two mic placements against the same amp through a reactive load box and an IR designed around that speaker and mic setup.)

A caveat here is the reactive load box you end up using. It will have it's own impedance curve. One popular one is the Two Notes Captor. It's one of the least expensive reactive load boxes on the market, comes with loads of IRs to download for free (as an owner of a Two Notes product -- they also offer some basic IRs built into their reactive load boxes, hardware IR boxes, etc etc). Another one is the Suhr Reactive Load. Comparing both, the Suhr sounds a bit more dynamic and from graphs shows a higher impedance curve, whereas the Captor has a much flatter impedance curve. They are so close, though, it comes down to preference.

I was able to pick up one of each of these. The Captor can take up to 100w @ 8ohms, and the Suhr can take up to 150w @ 8ohms. I will be using them with my Traynor Reverb Master (50w) and my Traynor YBA3 (approx. 120w -160w, from what the specs say, though it's debatable, I'd have to measure the wattage to be sure).

My ultimate plan here is to be able to forego the speaker cabinets and practice/record direct. If this works out, I might even spring for a midi drum kit, pushing the drums to the computer as well. At the very least, I'll be able to practice at home with a 3-piece band in a tiny room at minimum volume. At the most, I'll be able to record music in my studio that is worthy of being mixed and mastered.

This post is mostly informative for those interested in the topic of home recording at low to no volume and I will do my best to document the journey. I thought this was interesting and worth giving it a try, so I might as well share what I learn. I should be receiving those reactive load boxes in the mail this week and will be setting them up in the DAW in the following weeks.

My setup

- Computer Ryzen 7 3.5ghz @ 8 cores, 32gb RAM, SSD high speed NVME storage
- OS pop_OS! (though, will probably move to Windows due to lack of IRs in Linux)
- Montiors Presonus Eris 5xt
- Audio Interface Behringer UMC404 - 4 port + midi + usb
- DAW Bitwig Studio

I would love to hear what others here have experienced with reactive loads or IRs in general. It seems like home recording is really starting to mature and I'm really excited to see what these options can offer.

cakes wrote: Thu Jul 22, 2021 10:07 am
I would love to hear what others here have experienced with reactive loads or IRs in general. It seems like home recording is really starting to mature and I'm really excited to see what these options can offer.

The reactive load thing sounds intriguing, I'll have to look up any demos. Honesty though, I've been able to make dry/cold/sterile guitar or bass tracks (recorded with D.I. or just dead sounding) passable with some judicious plugin stacking. There's the Native Instruments Guitar Rig plug that does pretty well, but I tend to use the amp modeler that comes with Reaper a lot more. Just stick whatever fuzz/dirt/OD/FX before or after it.

(I still just mic stuff old school because there's no real substitute...having a tolerant family helps, and I usually record when they're out of the house.)

weezy wrote: Thu Jul 22, 2021 10:59 am (I still just mic stuff old school because there's no real substitute...having a tolerant family helps, and I usually record when they're out of the house.)

You sly dog. It's possible with these options that it is a real substitute. That is my quest to find out anyway.

Taking this much further, it is possible that your entire rig is a preamp and an IR that bottles up "your cab sound." You can then take that to the venue, where the sound guy loads the IR into the computer and sends it out through the PA. Or, take it to a studio and have the sound guy load up your cab into the computer.

Obviously, this isn't the case for most venues, but I can definitely see this being something in the near future. In a professional setting, with a band that has it's own sound team, this is definitely a thing right now.

I found this particular video informative:

I use a Mesa Boogie CabClone occasionally when I want to work on an idea without the noise. It's also pretty easy to throw in the mix as another "cab" choice along with the microphone on the amp. I had a Line6 Helix for a while that I really liked the sound of... just didn't like dealing with the menus and such on the device itself. Every now and then I consider buying one again, just haven't yet. I do still use the Helix Native plugin for some things and so far it's what ends up being my "amp sound" for bass guitar. The line6 stuff sounds great, in my opinion.

When I was living in apartment I had an electric drum kit that I setup to basically act as a fancy midi controller for Superior Drummer. It's may be easier to do now, but it was a pain to setup in the DAW (Logic). The catch was figuring out how to take the midi beeps and boops and have them sent to an actual audio track as audio. I think I ended up with like 24+ tracks (AUX/midi tracks + audio tracks) just for drums since superior drummer lets you have control over pretty much everything.

The flow was: Roland V kit -> midi interface -> Logic track with superior drummer plugin -> SD piped the commands to respective AUX tracks -> AUX tracks sent to audio tracks.

The built in drum machine for Bitwig can be assigned any controller pad, and go strait out of one track as a group. Or, you can assign one drum sound per track and assign a pad and build a 3d space with it. I have to look a bit more into it, but the drum machine might even have panning. Either way, it seems much simpler and you can save templates in Bitwig.

I've tried a few ways of implementing Impulse responses to emulate cabs and it can sound... ok. The problem for me seems to be the "sheen" phenomenon. Kinda the way an older 1st or 2nd generation line 6 pod just has a plasticky funk hanging over the tone. I know these things have gotten a lot better in the last few years but I never have really gotten a lot out of it. I know it's huge in the Metal production world. I imagine Bunny Ben has some insight if he is still around.

I went two ways with home recording guitars, the outboard way, blu amp 1 into blu box, and amp simulation plugin. the blu amp is a fully analog amp that you can also use as "real" amp, the blu box simulates different cabs. the amp gives you the classic fender, mashall and boogie sound. I like this quite a bit.

I also have the overloud THU plugin installed. you can get a lot of amp and cab simulations for this plugin. sounds pretty good too. and as Kniferide pointed out, it does a great job for metal guitars.

I think what all those simulations lack is the sound of the room you'd record your amp in. not necessarily a reverb, just the feel of a room.

and while I quite dig the guitar sounds I can get out of these things, I can't get a satisfying bass sound out of any of the plugins I've tried.

bassdriver wrote: Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:57 pm I can't get a satisfying bass sound out of any of the plugins I've tried.

weirdly, the Neural Cory Wong sim has given my decent results for bass.

bassdriver wrote: Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:57 pm I went two ways with home recording guitars, the outboard way, blu amp 1 into blu box, and amp simulation plugin. the blu amp is a fully analog amp that you can also use as "real" amp, the blu box simulates different cabs. the amp gives you the classic fender, mashall and boogie sound. I like this quite a bit.

I also have the overloud THU plugin installed. you can get a lot of amp and cab simulations for this plugin. sounds pretty good too. and as Kniferide pointed out, it does a great job for metal guitars.

I think what all those simulations lack is the sound of the room you'd record your amp in. not necessarily a reverb, just the feel of a room.

and while I quite dig the guitar sounds I can get out of these things, I can't get a satisfying bass sound out of any of the plugins I've tried.

Have you tried Kuassa? I really like their stuff, not least the Cerberus bass 'amp'.

I am INCREDIBLY biased. Ever since I started using the modeling products that I've designed, I've done almost all of my recording DI'd using digital amp sims and cabinet sims/IRs.

I've used a two notes unit because I wanted to see how the competitors were stacking up. It's quite good. If you have amp heads that you really love and want to record them quietly, these can be great tools. I've heard good things about the Fryette load box as well.

As an example, no air was moved in the bass and electric guitar in this recording.
https://tinypeloton.bandcamp.com/
It might not be to a person's personal taste, but it's not objectively bad in any way.