LICENCE — CC BY 4.0
Free to use, including commercially.
You CAN:
- Use these IRs on commercial releases, streaming, YouTube, live shows and client work
- Modify, trim, EQ, blend or mix them with other IRs
- Redistribute them or include them in your own packs
You MUST:
- Credit "Dark Days" and link back to https://darkdays.net
- Say if you modified the IRs
You CANNOT:
- Remove the credit or claim the IRs as your own
- Redistribute under stricter terms
REQUIRED CREDIT LINE — copy this:
Mesa 2x12 V30 impulse responses by Dark Days — https://darkdays.net (CC BY 4.0)
Put it wherever you'd normally credit gear: album liner notes, video description, or your pack's readme.
This applies to the impulse responses only. Your music is entirely yours — no claim on anything you record with them.
Full licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description:
Impulse responses of a real Mesa/Boogie closed-back 2x12 loaded with broken-in Celestion Vintage 30s, cloth grille on, back panel closed and tight. This is the cab half of the classic death metal recipe — tight lows, that vocal V30 upper-mid bark, and none of the fizz a raw amp capture leaves behind.
Capture method: sine-sweep deconvolution at moderate level in a silent room. The sweep amp was a solid-state head's clean channel with EQ flat — a deliberately neutral driver, so what you're getting is the cabinet and mic, not a second amplifier's tone stack. Mic is a Sennheiser MD421 (large dynamic — the metal standard on this cab), stand taped in place for each position, one sweep per spot.
What's in the pack — 13 IRs across the full mic grid:
Cap positions — mic aimed dead-center at the dust cap. The brightest, most aggressive spot on the speaker: maximum attack and presence, the most top-end detail.
- cap_grille: capsule touching the grille cloth. Most proximity bass, most in-your-face.
- cap_1in: 1 inch back from the grille. Slightly relaxed lows, still very direct.
- cap_2in: 2 inches back. The cap character with a little air and less bass buildup.
Cap-edge positions — mic aimed at the seam where the dust cap meets the cone (the workhorse metal spot: bite and clarity without the ice-pick top of dead-center).
- edge_grille: at the grille cloth. Punchy and full.
- edge_1in: 1 inch back. The classic balanced close-mic sound — start here.
- edge_2in: 2 inches back. Same voice, a touch more open.
Cone positions — mic aimed at the cone, roughly halfway between dust cap and surround. The darkest, warmest spot: most body, least fizz.
- cone_grille: at the grille cloth. Thick and dark.
- cone_1in: 1 inch back. Smooth rhythm tone, tames harsh amps.
- cone_2in: 2 inches back. Darkest and roundest in the pack.
Off-axis bonus:
- edge_1in_offax30: cap-edge at 1 inch, mic body rotated 30 degrees off perpendicular. Softens the top end the way engineers angle a mic to smooth a bright cab — the polite take for tracks that don't need maximum aggression.
Plus three mix-ready blends built from the grid:
- Balanced — the do-everything starting point; sits in a dense mix without EQ
- Tight — leaner low end, faster attack; palm-mute rhythm under a busy bass
- Deep — more cone and distance in the blend; leads, doom, and sparse mixes
Format: 24-bit mono WAV, 500 ms, 48 kHz native with a complete 44.1 kHz set included (for hardware modelers that resample poorly). Levels matched across the pack, so auditioning positions is a fair A/B — switching spots changes tone, not loudness. Voicing verified against reference measurements of real close-mic'd guitar cabs (proper mechanical HF roll-off — loading one of these after an amp-only capture reduces fizz, as a real cab does).
Pairs naturally with amp-only/DI NAM captures — including the Ampeg VH-140C DI capture uploaded alongside this pack: that DI plus the edge_1
