We’re very pleased to announce the winner of our Celestion IR Mix video contest.
And the winner is… Johnny Kuehl!
You can see Johnny’s winning video here:
We were impressed by the attention to detail that Johnny brought to this mix, thinking about what he wanted on the lows, mids and highs and selecting not just the speakers, but also the cab type, the gain and the microphone mix over the whole frequency range.
But what made Johnny’s mix really stand out for us was the unique tone he found with a combination of two Celestion speaker IRs:
- Celestion Blue (2×12 Open Back, High Gain, mic All+Room, mono)
- Celestion Cream (1×12 Closed Back, Low Gain, mic All+Room, mono)
The Blue and the Cream are both Alnico speakers of course, so you’d expect them to work well together tonally. The end result is a tone with bags of very recognisable Celestion character, but which is noticeably distinctive to either a pure Blue or pure Cream by itself. The overall tone feels very retro with a nice dirty analogue quality that’s perfectly suited to the bluesy rock track that Johnny chose for this demo.
Congratulations to Johnny – Your prize of 2 Celestion Cream speakers and a voucher for a Celestion IR pack is on its way!
Our Runners Up
We also have four worthy runners up, who each receive a voucher for a free Celestion speaker IR collection of their choice.
In no special order, we say congratulations to….
Chandler Oliver
Chandler really goes to town in this 13 minute video exploring three different ways of mixing Vintage 30 and Creamback IRs to achieve a range of different effects.
In his first mix (Multimix), he uses no fewer than 3 different IR files together, giving a combined V30/Creamback tone, with a nice rounded feel from the room mic IR:
- Celestion Vintage 30 (2×12 Closed back, High Gain, All mics)
- Celestion G12M Creamback (2×12 Open back High Gain, All mics)
- Celestion G12M Creamback (2×12 Open back, Room mic, stereo)
Then, in a second mix (Frequency mix) Chandler is controlling different parts of the frequency range, and wanted to get the high end of the Creamback and the bottom end of the Vintage 30, with the crossover happening around the 1kHz mark.
- Celestion G12M Creamback (4×12 Closed back, Low Gain, All+Room mics, stereo)
- Celestion Vintage 30 (2×12 Closed back, Low Gain, All mics)
In his third mix (Level mix) he puts together the High and Low gain IRs of the Celestion Creamback 4×12, in order to focus on the Creamback tone but get a lot more control over how the highs and lows sound:
- Celestion G12M Creamback (4×12 Closed back, Low Gain, All mics)
- Celestion G12M Creamback (4×12 Closed back, High Gain, All mics)
All in all, we felt this was a masterclass in precision and control!
Edward J. Rodriguez
We simply had to include Edward’s video for the sheer originality of tone achieved. In fact, tone is too slight a word for what Edward has created here – texture would be better – or perhaps even sculpture?
Edward combined impulse responses of two very different speakers, aiming for a tone reminiscent of the industrial distorted sound on Neil Young’s Arc-Weld album of 1991:
- Celestion V30 (2×12 Open back, MD421 Fat)
- Celestion A-Type (2×12 Closed back, High Gain, 421+57 mics)
The result is a brilliant and highly distinctive effect!
Hiatus O
This video from Haitus O shows a mix that we think will be pretty popular with a lot of IR users. Many guitarists (especially the heavy / metal variety) are searching for a sound that’s good and meaty, while still keeping good clarity and definition – and this mix definitely delivers that.
Hiatus used these two Creamback IR variations:
- Celestion G12M Creamback (4×12 Closed back, SM57 Fat)
- Celestion G12M Creamback (4×12 Closed back, Room right)
Of course, simply adding a room mic is a fairly obvious way of adding some fullness to your tone (as Chandler did in his first mix, above) but what Hiatus has done is to blend in just 25% of the room mic IR via the Balance control in his software – a clever way of getting enough room mic to round out the tone, but not too much to lose definition.
Well done again to all our prize winners!
We hope this has inspired you to explore some of the possibilities that are open to you when using Celestion speaker impulse responses within your chosen software or plugin. If it has, why not put your own video together? We’d love to feature it on our Facebook page.
All our speaker IRs are available to browse and buy here.