I see what you did there LOL! I mean could be a typo but it's a good pun anyway.

I highly agree ! getting to the core of sound is something truly beautiful!

@@kelainefes oh, ha..totally unintentional!

Thanks!

@@creativesoundlab I just tried this on a vocal track using asymmetrical saturation plugins (ie tube emulator), it works just the same. This is absolutely amazing, pure genius, thanks for sharing, obviously subbed!

i thought so too! makes sense, doublers are in-box and will probably always come in second to effects you can cause and capture in the air itself.

@@liquidstar9 oh was it a doubler? i thought it was literally a 2nd recording (traditional 'doubled'), not a software 'double'. if it was software, then i totally understand and agree with ya, Jon. just putting stuff back in the air makes such a diff. i loved learning that depeche mode put a lot of their synths thru guitar amps and reamped them to give them that girth and power.

@@schance1666 i might have misunderstood then, i'll have to recheck. i never knew that about depeche mode though! good stuff

@@schance1666 You're both right: he was using a single out of the reAmp, but you could apply this in one pass with this particular reAmp to two separate cabinets and phase invert the second for example (or just use two separate cabinets and leave it at that!), or phase invert a single channel of a dual preamp, etc...

Yes yes and yes! Well said.

Isn’t this different? Out of phase (meaning small time delay) isn’t the same as flipping the polarity, applying non-linear distortion, and flipping the polarity back again

@@Benji_6969 oh cool, maybe this is different.

@@Benji_6969 So the SMM does flip the phase. Each output has the dry and delay signals for a mono sound, but the phase is reversed to create a decent stereo effect when played live through two amps. But it is not applying the distortion or flipping back, as far as I know.

I know this is an old comment of yours, so you may not be able to help. But how did you flip the polarity a second time after the amp emulator? My only thought is to maybe flip the polarity on the guitar track itself, then create a send track with the amp emulator on it and flip the polarity on that track. Would that do it? I would test this myself, but I'm not able to at the moment so I just thought I'd ask how you did it.

I don’t remember how I did it, hmmm… But with Reaper you can flip the polarity on a channel (which would be “after” the amp emu). For “before” I may have done it on the audio track itself. I also have the free DMG plugin “Track Control” which I believe provides control of polarity, as well as other things.

@@dbhammond Thanks for the reply! That's a good idea, I think a lot of plugins have a polarity option so that should give plenty of flexibility in ways to do it.

Agreed, that’s why he said imagine you are stocked with just 1 take

@@victorlara99 Just play another one :P Sure it's great for solos. I can imagine this technique in a live setting though. Have 2 (of the same) amps and mic them the same way, reverse the input polarity of one, reverse it back on the preamp and pan them out.

Of course that is the ideal scenario. But this is great for someone that is sent a mono recording with no way of actually doubling it “for whatever reason”

@@mathiasmuggli1162 yes, particularly for performances which are not going to be repeated. For chords, maybe still worthwhile seeing as the lows can remain mono compatible while opening up up high...

@@JamesLevineAndSons Mono compatibility has become a real pain in the ass these days, and you also need the highs there. damn mobile phone speakers! I sometimes even record 3 tracks of the same guitar, then pan 2 of them hard L/R, send them to a stereo bus and kill the mid signal there (only keep the sides). Then I add the 3rd track in the middle.

They have

Was thinking exactly the same. Dont think that it stresses out the speaker. AC stays AC. The asymetric clipping might be the key and this could be tested with clean settings.

It doesn’t. As you mentioned, it’s asymmetrical clipping of the waveform. When you invert the phase, you’re reversing the positive and negative clipping threshold. The reason why the mono summing of the stereo image sounds different from if it was a single mono track is that you’re now essentially turning two asymmetrical clipping takes into a single symmetrically clipped waveform that will have some appreciably different characteristics from traditional symmetrical clipping methods.

Yeah the speakers (or amp) really don’t care. Speaker polarity often has to be monkeyed with in stereo or wet/dry/wet rigs, and especially in the P.A world where there’s massive speaker cable runs. The amps and speakers really couldn’t care less

I was just going to type this exact comment. A speaker doesn’t sound different when you flip its phase. A quick way to prove this is to perform this same demonstration but invert the wires on the speaker instead of using the phase switch on the box. Speakers do not care at all about phase. The only reason you should pay attention to polarity is when you are using multiple speakers in close proximity, ie; multi-speaker cabinet, to avoid phase cancelling issues.

I commented pretty much the same thing. And when playing through different Marshall amps at rehearsal studios, I can get good feedback out of some, but not others. So I suspect the speakers or amp are reverse polarity.

Thanks so much Bart!

Yes!

This is actually the correct interpretation of the effect that we hear, non?

Pretty sure Haas isn't much of a factor here as when he nulls it by not flipping the polarity there's only high frequency left. With Haas you'd get a comb filter with some bottom end - notoriously bad in mono. Pretty sure the whole thing is caused by asymmetrical clipping in the amp, which might only be a thing in certain amp designs. So depending on which amp your sims are based on and how accurately they're modeled, the lack of effect might actually be true to the original. It probably doesn't work very well with a clean amp either.

I wouldn't count in three of them doing it correctly. It may very well be the exact opposite: That a typical signal has an offset and only one out of four amp simulators remove it, which would happen in an amp. More tests would be needed to check for that. A real amp and speaker does NOT care what phase the signal is. However, the distortion might be asymmetric, and it could also very well be that three out of four simulators emulate the guitar preamp clipping correctly.

If he is using the amp to distort, it might be that his particular choice of amp has asymmetric distortion. In which case this won't work with most amps. Or there is something silly like, the mic position changed slightly between the two runs, etc.

If this is the case you could verify by just reamping twice without doing any flipping and expect a similar result correct?

Thanks!

For very high volumes I would assume that the speaker itself will also show asymmetric distortion (even harmonics) since it is not built perfectly symmetrical. I currently do not have the environment here to blast a "high power low distortion power amp / guitar speaker / SM57 / low distortion mic preamp" combination into speaker saturation and check the distortion spectrum, though. :D Would be an interesting thing to research...

@@bavarianmonkey8326 sure, speakers can and do hit their X Max, or maximum excursion on the loud low notes, it'll add some extra girth to the low end in small amounts, but turn into a farty mess if pushed too much - as a bass player, I've destroyed a few speakers this way! So yeah, you're right, the speaker will be adding some extra harmonic distortion. But since its following a Tweed Delux with a concertina phase splitter, I would guess that's where the bulk of the 2nd order harmonics are coming from.

@@Mikey__R I completely agree on the point that most even harmonics come from the amp. I have done quite a few tests with impulse responses (self generated ones) and yes, they are close to the "real thing" in an A/B test, but they lack the dynamic effects the real speaker shows. Resonances, cone Breakup and distortion. For me this is only a gut feeling because I did not perform any measurements yet, but the fact that the impulse responses always seemed a little lifeless make me think that there is something to that story. Especially with very old speaker designs, I would not expect those to have a very linear behaviour mechanically (magnetically), so even if the speaker stays within xmax, the question arises what xmax actually refers to: Mechanical xmax (damage) or linear xmax and what "linear" means. Which brings us back to square one. I did some tests with rather asymmetric push pull power amplifiers (asymmetry was adjustable) and it felt like inverting the speaker polarity changed the sound at high levels. Guess that is the area where UA did quite some research for their OX...

@@bavarianmonkey8326 cool! I've never really investigated that deeply. I'm definitely in the "real amps sound better" camp, simulations are entirely useful but they're not perfect. You might well be right, the very minute details could be more important than we realised.