 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. All of the instruments in the jam that you'll listen to here have one thing in common. You can probably guess what that is based on the title and thumbnail of this video, but in case you're in any doubt, it's that they are all being run through the cabs use from GFI System. Cabs use is a stereo cabinet and speaker simulator, a tool which is most often associated with guitarists, but, and this is my thesis for this video, can also be a fantastic way to alter the character of electronic instruments in ways that you can't really achieve easily without stacking a bunch of other processes together. And this can be quite transformative. The cabs use is the only processing I've applied to any of these tracks and without it, it sounds like this. So in this video I want to introduce what a cabinet simulator is, show you some of cabs use's features, and of course, provide some more sound samples so that you can hear its effect more clearly. Before we get going in the interest of transparency, GFI have kindly provided me with this cabs use for the purpose of making this video, but they haven't had any editorial oversight on the contents of this video. I just hadn't seen many people talk about this and I thought it might be cool. So what is a cabsing? As I mentioned, this is a tool most often associated with guitarists. Generally, a guitarist rig is made up of a guitar, which through its pickup creates a small electrical signal, often some pedals, an amplifier which boosts the signal, and one or more speakers which convert that electrical energy into kinetic energy which shunts air pressure around, which is what we hear. What then usually happens is that we put a microphone in front of that speaker cabinet and convert that kinetic energy back into electrical energy, which we either record or in a live environment convert back into an even louder sound through the front of house speakers. Now that's a lot of steps and a cabinet simulator like cabs use's to take the speaker and microphone stage out of that picture by simulating the physical processes involved in that stage, functionally allowing you to go straight from the amp into a mixing desk or audio interface. With some caveats, don't ever run your guitar on the fly without a speaker load attached, please. You might be asking the question, why bother with all of that? Why not just plug the amp or even the pedals directly into a desk? Well, it turns out that speakers have a massive effect on the tone and character of the sound. So if we take this guitar sound and remove the speaker from the equation, it sounds like this, which is not a good guitar sound. Furthermore, changing the type of speakers used can also yield very different results even without changing a single thing in the rest of the chain. Why is there such a drastic shift in the character of the sound? We'll take a look at this. This is a frequency plot from a studio monitor, not an entry level one, but certainly not the most expensive one going. It's Ripley, but within 3 dB or so between 50 and 20,000 Hertz, so pretty linear. Here's an example of a full range driver that you might expect to see in a PA system. It is okay up until about 1,000 Hertz, then goes kind of wacky and drops off pretty steeply at 10,000 Hertz. In practice, you typically combine this with a high-frequency driver to fill in the gap at the top and a sub to fill in the gap at the bottom, but it's a lot less linear either way. And this is a plot from a G12 Creamback, a very cool speaker designed for use by guitarists. Notice the significant bass roll-off, the wobbly upper mids, and the fact that it drops off really fast after 5,000 Hertz. Now, frequency plots don't tell the whole story. Loudspeakers are dynamic things and responses change as the output levels do, and a listeners position relative to the speaker has a huge effect. But either way, this is technically not a good speaker if precision and accuracy are important. And it will only get worse when paired with an oversized resonant cabinet, but our ears are always attracted to accuracy and precision, and with the right input, technically bad can sound subjectively cool. Right, I'm keen to get into some sound demos, but just quickly, let's round up Cab's uses features. Firstly, Cab's use is a stereo device, and it can run in one of two different modes, either emulating two speakers, which can be variously panned across the stereo field, and where the second speaker can be slightly delayed to widen that stereo image, or a single speaker in a room, which essentially means reverb. And if you know anything about GFI, you probably know that their reverb algorithms are lovely. If you plug a mono source in, it will be normal to the second inputs given us a way to create subtle or not so subtle stereo images from a mono source. If you're thinking that sounds like a lot of functionality to cram into three knobs, you'd be right. Most of the deep editing is accessed via an application with the Cab's use plugged in over USB, which we'll get to shortly. Rather, on the front, we have a preset knob in the middle here, which allows us access each of the eight presets and the bypass sound. I'll be scrolling through the eight presets, which I've made for the purposes of this video. We've got inputs on the front here, as well as through connectors, which pass on the unaffected input signal, so you can still record the dry sound or send it on to other processing. There's also an input pad switch per side so that you can dial back hotter sounds. As most since output line level, I've had this set at minus 20 and not had any issues with clipping. The outputs are on the back and they're XLR, which makes sense in a live setting going to a front of house mixing desk, but it's maybe a little bit of a pain in the setting that I'm using it in, as well as MIDI for preset changing, USB, power, and a dedicated stereo headphone output. Right, that's everything. Let's have a listen. So let's check it out with the Minilog here. So this is the clean sound, the original sound. Just a nice paddy kind of sound with a little bit of movement in there from the filter. Yeah, so like that. So let's try out the first preset that I've got set up here. It's quite subtle. There's some nice warming there. And if you listen carefully from the dry sound, we do get some subtle stereo spread there, even though there's no delay happening on there just by the nature of the fact that the two speakers that have been emulated are different. Okay, next one along here. So this one has some delay between the two speakers, which gives us even more widening. And I think immediately that's a really, really cool variation on what was our original there. Got the next one. So obviously a lot darker and some, or some thud at the bottom end there, which is really cool. Okay, next one, much more mid-focused if we compare it. This one's kind of like an old-defying mode. Everything just sounds a bit sort of sort of old and fuzzy and sort of like the capacitors had worn down and stuff. Okay, next one. Next one. Okay, so this one's got reverb on it rather than the two speakers. So it's one speaker in a room. Not like a massive reverb, but when you compare that to our dry sound, we've gone a long way. Really characterful. Like that one a lot on that synth. Next one. Okay, so this is like one of the megaphone or horn settings. So loads of Batman disappearing here. And then kind of like a furriness and resonance on the top end there. Obviously probably not like your main sound perhaps, but for an effect. Or even like a funky kind of clav sound that might be really, really cool. And last one I've got set up here. Another one with a room, but with more top end cut, bottom end cut this time. So this is Cabs Lab, which is the piece of software that's provided by GFI system to manage the presets on Cabs use and also sort of deep dive into the parameters. It comes either as a Windows or an Apple application, although you do need to install a separate driver to get it to speak to the unit itself. Once that's installed, everything works as it should do and it's been pretty solid. So to see what it does, let's just get an arpeggio going on the NTS-1. So here we have these settings for these stereo Cabs mode, which is where you've got two different cabinets and you can set them up differently. We can also just solo one of them, so we can hear just one of them. So just hearing one of the two cabinets here now, we can choose different cabinets from this dropdown here. So go to a different guitar cabinet, a different guitar speaker on there. You can hear how that's changing the character of the sound a little bit. We can also go to different types of speakers. So we've got speakers here which are bass speakers, which tend to be more bassy, I guess. More bottom, heavy, less top end as well. My favorite one here is this one here, which has this lovely midrange to it. Keep coming back to this one, like this one a lot. We've also got this gear setting here, which are emulations of other speaker cabinet emulations, but analog ones, I think. A couple of these are really cool. The five-tone one has a really good midrange to it. This ultra one has quite a scooped thing going on, which is pretty cool. And then over in Solanas, you've got the other types of speakers, which is where our telephone effect ones and the megaphone one all that lot are. I'll just come back round to my favorite here. We've also got this setting here for cabinet type, between sealed and opened. An open cabinet literally means that it's open at the back, and sealed means it's sealed. Generally speaking, if we move over to the opened one, the sound should open up. The midrange should become a little bit more open. A little less bottom end, maybe a bit more top end. So like the character of the speaker isn't as apparent. Sort of a lot more midrange going on there. We can then come back to hearing both of them. We've got two different speakers on here. We can then set up a delay between them to get some stereo width. Just do a little bit, then you just get that kind of fake stereo thing happening, or fake widening thing happening. But you can push it further and get like an obvious delay. If we go past about here, we'll have a really obvious delay. Is there anything past about here? Sound like a delay? Yeah, so you can get quite a while like that. And then you've got a blend control, because you don't need to have just one speaker per side. You can actually have things a bit more blended on each side. And then you've got controls for volume and phase, so you can throw one of them out of phase to get a different kind of fake stereo widening, or just have one quieter than the other. The other mode here is the stereo mics mode, which as you can hear straight away is introducing reverb. And it's a really pleasant reverb as well. And you've got controls over the time, and it can get pretty long, basically infinite. It's a really nice reverb algorithm. I think it's the same one they have on the specular reverb, which is fantastic. That's lovely, isn't it? Or we can go smaller and have more early reflections to make it a bit more subtle. You can change the tonality of the reverb as well. And we've also got a different mode here for medium, which is more about the early reflections than the length of the reverb. Again, we can go really long like that. It's a nice sounding reverb. I can see me using this a lot more actually. Yes. And then you can, again, you are still dealing with this idea of the left and right outputs so you can have, so at the moment, if we stick it like this, you've basically got a blend of both of them on both sides, but we could kind of throw the real speaker to one side and more of the room to the other. And now you've got the actual speaker on the left and the reverb on the right, which is pretty cool as well. What else? You've got the tone chart here, so you can get an overview of the different speakers and the sort of tone or characteristics of them. So you can see that my favorite one here is fairly rolled off, for example, with lots of high-mid character in there. Yeah, so... Yeah, and then obviously the user guide as well. So that's CabsLab, which is... It does the job, and it gives you access to a lot of different tones as well. Okay, so now we've got the drum root impact out on the desk, so the raw sound sounds like this. Got a little bit of distortion on there. I've intentionally made things a little bit on the brighter side just so that we have a little bit more to work with on the cabs used as well. So let's take a look some. Immediately this is a cool way to get a smaller sound that's still kind of punchy. Like, maybe you'd want to take the... the output for the kick and keep that low end in there, but the way that's brought everything else in is really cool. Next one. Okay, so on the presets where I've got a delay between two speakers, it's a little bit weird on the drums. But again, potentially if you took the kick out of the individual out there and put the kick down the middle still, we've got some spatialization on the rest of the drums here, which we wouldn't have otherwise. Which is going to be pretty cool. This one's a little bit weird on drums. I will admit. Maybe not that one. Now this one has taken out quite a lot of the top end, but it's made the lower mids and low end massive. I think on this one, I've got everything set right to the edge so it gets as much behind as possible. It's 3% in the middle. Yeah, a little bit more balance there compared with the dry signal. It's quite a long way off, right? I love what that's doing to the snare and the clap. We're going to bring out that spiciness in a really, really cool way. Again, like I said before, this would be a great opportunity to take the kick output and have that process separate, I think. Okay, now we're in a big room. Maybe not that useful in a lot of cases. It's a name. So this is the telephone and horn stuff, megaphone and horn, I think it's stuff. And obviously this is that classic lo-fi sound. And this is a situation where I think that delay, widening effect here is really working in the benefit because this is like an effect effect. And then you drop it back down to the last one. Again, back in a room, maybe a bit weird with drums, but pretty cool nevertheless. And the dry signal, that's what we started with. So with a mini-lobby choice of thing fairly classic sounding, let's try something a bit more obviously sort of digital and harsh. So this is the dry sound. Here's the first preset. Immediately, this is like from a VHS 80s synth sound, right? That doesn't sound real because it's too bright, it's too high-fi, but now we're on a VHS. Okay, perfect. So this one's got some spread on the delay side. It's a great alternative to like a chorus sound. It's not getting that swimminess, which can be great, but can also be a problem. And if you just delay two sides, you don't kind of get this same sort of feel, but because we've got the different sort of tonal characteristics of the two emulated speakers, I think that works really nicely. Darker still, still with that spread. It's a nice thing going on with the rumble at the bottom end though. Try going to the edge. Yes, good. A bit more mid-focused. This is one with the reverb on it. That's just sort of full of that sci-fi character. Yes, I like that one. I like this preset most things actually. So this is with the sort of small speaker setup. Dry sound is. This is the, I think the telephone and reverb. I love that one. Yeah. So again, really transformative from the dry sound. So you're an observant bunch, and I'm sure it hasn't escaped your attention, that we have two controls here, which are labeled edge and center, both in the same. So what does this relate to? This relates to the microphone placement or the virtual microphone placement in terms of the cab's use. So we're amplifying a signal. We've got the signal coming along the wire, and that goes basically, I'm paraphrasing, to a magnet with a coil around it. And it's the current of the amplified signal, which is going to induce movement in this magnet. This magnet usually then is connected to a speaker cone, usually made out of paper, but it could be something else like aluminium, like that. So if we were to point a microphone right at the center of this speaker here that we're imagining, the microphone is hearing a lot of what the magnet is doing. So we're going to hear a very precise sound. It's going to be more accurately representing the signal that is coming into the speaker. It's to be going to have quite a lot of top end in it. We're not going to be hearing so much of the room or the other aspects of the speaker cabinet. We're hearing a pretty pure sound, pure being a relative thing in this case. If we were to instead put a microphone at the edge of the speaker, we're going to be listening to what's happening at this part of the speaker cone. So a lot of the high frequencies, which have had to propagate throughout the speaker, are going to be lost because high frequencies tend to get killed off before the low frequencies. So we'll hear an emphasis shift towards the low end, really speaking. We will also, if we imagine that we have a nice big speaker cabinet here, be hearing a lot more of the speaker cabinet proportionately. So more of the resonances of whatever the speaker cabinet is built from. So generally more sort of boominess to the sound, more thud and thunk. If you happen to be a guitarist and you're doing palm muting, this is where all the womp, womp, womp stuff is happening rather than in the middle here, where you're attempting more of the chuck, chuck, chuck part of the palm muting, for example. And that's what these controls are controlling essentially. We're able to move where our virtual microphones are situated, and that's going to have potentially quite a big change on a big effect on the sound that we're hearing. So at the most basic level, you can kind of think of the edge centre controls as being like a tone control. So we've got this sound on the microphone here, and if we just turn on, just go for the first preset here. And we'll just set these dead centre, both of them at the same place, reload the preset. Which is basically I think where the preset must begin with. Now if we turn these both to the edge and reload the preset by clicking the button. You can kind of hear there that things have got bigger at the bottom end, a little more restrained at the top end. Maybe the mid-range has become a little bit more subdued. If we throw this over both of them onto the centre, quite different in terms of how the low end is sculpted now. Mid-range is a bit more sort of spiky and present. Maybe those sort of mid-mids are a little scoopier. And of course we don't have to sit at the extremes. We probably find a happy medium where we get a little bit both of them. We also don't have to have them set the same way, of course. So I can set one side more towards the edge and one more towards the centre. You know, here now, if you're listening in headphones or on decent monitors, that the left-hand side is quite bassy, whereas the right-hand side is a little bit brighter. And this kind of gives you the impression almost like a keyboard spread is happening, where the lower notes are more emphasised on the left-hand side, and the higher notes seem to be appearing a little bit more on the left-hand side. That's without any of the delay stuff that's going on in here to make a stereo spread more evident. It's just by changing the tonal characteristics of the left and right side. If we do go to a preset with a bit of spread and we do a similar sort of thing, the effect should be even more noticeable. So lots of ways that we can create stereo interest that can be quite subtle or quite obvious by adjusting those edge and centre controls separately. So one really cool thing that we can use the edge and centre controls to do beyond just creating those tonal shifts is because the cab's use is working in stereo. So if we move things around on either side, it will naturally bring certain elements of a sound to one side rather than the other. And probably the easiest place to hear that is on a drum machine where you've got lots of different types of sounds happening at once. So if we just stay with this preset here, that's how I had it set up to begin with. But what happens if I drag one side into the centre? Can you hear how the hi-hats are now much more prevalent if you're listening on headphones on the right-hand side and the crack of the snare? And we can take to an overblown example there where now with the left-hand side on the edge, all of the boominess is on the left-hand side and all the snap is on the right-hand side. But there are probably sort of happy mediums where we can create a little bit of stereo interest without resorting to any sort of delay or reverb effects just purely by dealing in terms of which speaker is on which side. Let's try. Or in the middle. And that's with a little bit of spread thanks to the edge and centre control. So obviously we've been using the GFI cab's use throughout this video so I'm really happy with the way that it works. But of course it's not the only cab simulator on the market and there are more available than ever these days as more and more guitarists move towards hybrid and pedal board-based setups for recording and live performance. You can find hardware options at a range of price points though it's worth bearing in mind that many units out there only operate in mono, which is fine if you're just after that speaker tone but it won't give you that subtle stereo enhancement that I thought sounded especially effective on the min-log and micro-freak demos so you won't find reverb on every unit either. There are also broadly two different types of cab simulators. The cab's use is an example of an algorithmic cab sim using clever DSP to emulate the behaviour of the speaker cabinet. You will also find cab simulators where the marketing talks about convolution, impulse responses, or IR. If you've used convolution reverb before, you might be familiar with the idea. With these cab simulators by way of sending specially crafted test signals through a speaker, the tonal and dynamic response of the speaker or even the whole recording chain can be sampled and reapplied to other signals. You can find or even create your own impulse responses to recreate interesting and unique signal chains. Both technologies give fine results. Generally speaking, algorithmic simulators tend to allow you to fine-tune a particular sound whereas convolution allows you to be super specific as long as you can find an appropriate IR to load in. If you're more about working in the box, there are of course both paid and free cab simulator plugins available. And as a final word, we shouldn't forget about hardware and software which simulates a whole guitar amp as they will necessarily also be simulating the speakers and while you might not want the extra tonal changes and indeed distortion that they might bring in every case it is certainly another tonal colour that may be just the thing that a particular composition is looking for. In many cases these amp simulators also allow you to disable the amp part and just use the speaker simulation and vice versa. I hope you enjoyed this video and perhaps found some ideas that you'd like to explore in your own music. I tried a different style and approach in this video so let me know down in the comments what you thought of it. I'm not saying that I'll be moving to these more scripted style of videos in every case but if people dig it, I'll give it another go in some upcoming videos. As always, thank you so much for watching. Until next time, take care, bye bye.