Horrible Amp Match results
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I tried Amp Match with various high quality audio files (guitar only) and the results were HORRIBLE!! None of the Amp Match resulting patches sound anything like the original audio files whatsoever! Has anyone achieved good results using audio files?
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@dereksas Yep. It's capable of amazing results, and capable of crap results, depending on how it's used. There are lots of caveats and I suspect this is why some people love Bias and others say it sound awful and fizzy. Some tips:
- If you're using audio tracks of pre-recorded guitar, things like hiss/noise in the track will negatively affect the result., sometimes dramatically The amp match tool adjusts the frequency output of your guitar to match the original track, so if the track is full of high frequency hiss, your amp match will sound very harsh and shrill. I've sometimes carefully used de-noising tools on guitar stem tracks before matching and gotten better results that way.
- Do not combine amp matching with the "guitar match" feature also active (in Bias FX). Bias creates all these matched features with eq and I've encountered really ugly results when the internal eqs are working on top of each other (a 'guitar match' eq combined with the amp match eq)
- When you're amp matching, start with the amp that is closest to the sound of what you want. Also use the pickup and tone controls on your guitar to get that as close as possible too. If you're matching a plexi, use the plexi amp, for example. The amp matching will get the overall frequency balance correct, but to really match the amp characteristics you should start with the correct amp and dial it in as closely as you can first (don't forget to adjust the gain! get the breakup as close as you can before matching)
- Here's an annoying one: Some of the stock amp models in Bias are. themselves, 'amp match' models. If you start with these particular amp models for the match, I've found you often get much worse results with ugly harsh frequencies (for the reason I explained in 1 above, same thing).
- Related to 4: I've encountered an issue sometimes when re-matching, where it uses the existing matched sound as the input for the next round of matching, and again creates a horrible result. Same reason as above. I think there's some bug here (I've also noticed disabling the amp matching before re-matching sometimes seem to get 'inverted', where it becomes active when it says it's off and vice versa...) If in doubt, start fresh with a new preset instead of re-matching.
- If you're getting ugly harsh results, don't use IR cabs, use the built-in cabs. I've encountered this sometimes, particularly with the Celestion cabs (very annoying considering their cost). I'm guessing it's again the same overlapping-eq problem that is creating aliasing.
- Once you start getting good results with the above, here's how I've gotten amazing matches (you need FX2 also to do this): if you have a guitar stem track from a studio recording, and that track is stereo, split it into its left and right components and save each as a mono wav file. Match each of these individually, and save the matches labeled as left and right. Load them as stereo paths in FX2, and pan the left hard left and the right hard right. Then fine-tune the levels of each channel until the balance sounds like the original stereo recording. Once you get experienced with this, you can get fantastic stereo results that are verrry satisfying to play with.
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Thanks, JB, for all the helpful tips. I will try them out.