Guitar Gear Forum

Decided to grab this cheap IR loader for late night silent practicing to use with either the 5153 or Mark IV. Built in IRs are ok, its an improvement than just getting the recording/headphone outs into my IEM pack on its own. Any good free IRs out there, or should I be looking at buying some?

Interesting little gadget. How are you running it?

Vladimir Putin wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2024 7:22 pm Interesting little gadget. How are you running it?

End goal is just semi decent sounding ability to silently practice late at night mainly. So far I've only tried it Mark IV recording out (silent recording pot pulled) > Sonicake > behringer P2 (my IEM pack). I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be some degree of "cabinet simulation" on there but it definitely sounds significantly better with the IR on top than without. I guess I can also experiment with the slave out as well as the FX loop send still be able to be silent with the output pulled

Haven't tried it with the 5153 yet, but that has headphone out and preamp out. I believe the headphone out has some sort of crappy "analog cab sim" and the preamp out does not. In any case, I'll try both. I think if the preamp out sounds better I should be able to still silence the amp with a dummy cable plugged into the headphone out simultaneously

I’ve never used paid ones, I have a bunch I’ve downloaded over the years. One I’ve been using lately is free from Celestion , the cenzo , it’s a v30 in a 1x12 cab , I think it’s the better sounding v30 over my other v30 IR’s

So storage space is pretty limited on this. I got the $1 mesa pack demo from York to get started. I was going through trunkating all the IRs manually in audacity so they would fit on the pedal before finding out that sonicake has a converter on their website that automatically makes any IR the appropriate size for 1/11th of the unit storage lol. Had a number of other mindnumbing issues getting the IRs loaded, not sure if thats the unit, me being an idiot on this sort of thing or a combo of both

But anyway, this is working great for my desired use in turning mrak IV into glorified headphone amp

I take back what I said about the stock IRs sounding ok, they are complete trash compared to the random York ones I picked to load I'm a little scared of the wormhole I might've opened up with this IR thing though

Honestly for this situation the Two Notes Captor is a far superior option for completely silent recording through your DAW. You can use a full size IR loader, their included Wall of Sound is solid, and you get the full tone of your amp including the power section.

I do this with all of my amps, and 99% of my clips are recorded silently and direct.

Vladimir Putin wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 4:21 pm Honestly for this situation the Two Notes Captor is a far superior option for completely silent recording through your DAW. You can use a full size IR loader, their included Wall of Sound is solid, and you get the full tone of your amp including the power section.

I do this with all of my amps, and 99% of my clips are recorded silently and direct.

Yeah, but I don't care much about recording at home and absolutely don't want to have to be using a computer to do what I'm trying to achieve with this, which is basically just late night playing


That said , the main thing thats kept me away from the two notes stuff is that I want captor X features but dont want to pay captor X prices. Seems like if I wanted to, I could grab a used regular captor and combine it with this for significantly less than what a captor X would cost and get the same functionality I want

Yeah man, I use a regular Captor.

I'm not using it to record most of the time. Just running through the IRs in to headphones or my monitors for late night playing. I think you're on the right track with the Sonicake unit being run after the Captor though

Yeah if you already have the IR pedal any load with a line out will do. The regular Captor is a good unit for that purpose.

Vladimir Putin wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 4:37 pm Yeah man, I use a regular Captor.

I'm not using it to record most of the time. Just running through the IRs in to headphones or my monitors for late night playing. I think you're on the right track with the Sonicake unit being run after the Captor though

Guitarbilly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 4:54 pm Yeah if you already have the IR pedal any load with a line out will do. The regular Captor is a good unit for that purpose.

Yeah, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't already peeping at used captors

I'm hate spending money on "non exciting" gear, and it looks like I could get a mesa cab clone for a fair bit cheaper than a captor. I feel like I've heard that the built in cab models in these were not good, but the line out skips the speaker emulation so I could just go from there into the sonicake