Overview
Following our intro series on how to load third party impulse responses. We take a look at loading IR's directly into modern amps. Amplifier manufacturers are starting to include reactive load boxes with IR loaders built directly into their tube amplifiers. We're going to use the Mesa Badlander 100 with its onboard cab clone IR to demonstrate how this is done.
Getting Started
First we will turn on the amplifier and put it into standby mode. The next step is to plug a USB cable into the back of the amp, and plug that into your computer. The back panel of the Mesa Badlander has a dedicated IR loader section called the cab clone. Here we will plug in our USB from here directly to our laptop and an XLR into our audio interface. This section on the Badlander amp has a rotary dial that allows you to select two channels of IR's preloaded into the amp.
Loading Third-Party IRs via Cab Clone USB
When the amp is connected to our computer via USB, you will see the cab clone drive appear much like a flash drive. You will now see three different folders appear. We have the cab library, channel one and channel two folder. The cab library houses all of your impulse responses that are stored in the amplifier. The channel one and two correspond folders to the channels of the amplifier itself.
Next we will open the channel one folder, and you will see eight folders within that correspond to the rotary dial on the back of the amplifier. We will open file number one which corresponds to rotary dial position number one. From there we can copy and paste our third-party IR right into that folder. We can do the same into the other folders, loading up to eight custom impulse responses per channel.
Once we have our impulses loaded, we can now disconnect our USB cable / computer and we have our custom IRs loaded into our amp.
Playing Back our Loaded IRs
We can now use the XLR out (i.e. Direct Out) on our amp and run that into an audio interface, PA system or a full range, flat response speaker, using the rotary dial on the back to recall our preloaded IRs for playback. This function is essential for recording directly into you DAW or sending a signal (with the chosen IR) from your amp directly to front of house during a live performance.
