EQ Matching for Impulse Responses is one of the many unique features of faIRmageddon. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to match the sound of your own guitar recording to a reference sound: in this case to the guitar stems of the song “American Idiot” by Green Day.
For the EQ Match you’ll need the following:
- a temporary recording of the sound you want to achieve, which you can recording within the Plug-in. This can be a guitar stem of a famous recording or a snippet extracted from a mastered song. Alternatively, you can also you a wave file containing the target sound (preferably without interfering
sound sources like other instruments, which you can select with the file browser in the EQ match section. - a temporary recording of your current sound with a length of about 10-20
seconds, which you can recording with the Plug-in
Step 1: Get a target sound sample
For my EQ matching example I’ve chosen the guitar sound of “American Idiot” from Green Day. It’s a simple, straight forward song with a punchy sound. Fortunately, the guitar stems for this song are available online making sampling the sound very easy.
American Idiot Guitar Stem
A sample of about 10 – 20 seconds is more than enough. So I’ve downloaded the guitar master track and cut only the first chorus out of it.
A 21 seconds snippet (guitar stem only) from Green Days song “American Idiot”.
Step 2: Try to match the sound with your IRs first
I’ve also downloaded the guitar backing track and recorded my own guitar track for this song. Let’s match the sound of my recording to the original.
From the documents available online, I assume that for the recording of this song a Marshall 1960B was used. Fortunately, I have our Marshall 1960 A IR pack here and the faIR – Modern Rock pack also has an IR named “GreenBasketCase”. With all of these options I’ve tried to get as close as possible with the X/Y pad.
Something that immediately gets clear: The guitar stem is, of course, taken out of a final mix with quite a fair amount of EQ and other effects, thereas our track is a raw recording.
Step 3a: Recording the target sound within the Plug-in
In this step we are recording the guitar stem of “American idiot” with-in the plug-in. I’m setting the song position marker directly before the chorus begins, start the playback in the DAW and hit the recording button in the plug-in. It will take about 10-20 seconds to finish, depending on the source material. The progress bar gives you feedback on how much data is already collected. After enough data is collected the Plug-in will tell you that you can proceed.
Recording source or target with-in the Plug-In.
Step 3b: Selecting a wave file containing the target sound
IMPORTANT: This step is not necessary if you already chose to do Step 3a. But if you don’t want to record the target sound with-in the Plug-in, because you already have a 10-20 seconds wave file with the desired sound you can also choose this wave file directly by selecting it with the EQ matching file browser or by dragging it into the EQ matching section.
Selecting the sound snippet of the “American Idiot” guitar stem track in the file browser of the EQ match section.
Step 4: Recording your own guitar recording the plug-in
Recording you own guitar sounds works exactly like shown in Step 3a, but by clicking the “Record Source” button. Easy, right?
After the recording is finished we can apply the match.
Step 5: Match
The plug-in tells me the EQ match is ready. Now I use the “Amount” parameter to shape the current output to our target sound. The output frequency display changes accordingly.
With EQ match being ready, the amount knob morphes your current IR sound into the target sound.
Sucess
With the help of the EQ match I was able to change the sound significantly closer to the original. That was fun!