Free Guitar Cabinet IR Editor + 21 Free IRs

Nothing to download to get started: the editor ships with two cabinet IR packs by Jester Dyne Productions — free, including for commercial use, with no attribution required.

The IRs are grouped by cabinet — page through the combo, hit Play, compare. Like a whole pack? The full zip (44.1 and 48 kHz) downloads next to the export button. And any of these IRs can be trimmed, folded to mono and matched to your hardware right here.

Twenty-one built-ins not enough? Here’s what we recommend.

Free — recommended. Origin Effects IR Cab Library: 142 IRs from seven cabinets (Magnatone 213, Fender Brown Deluxe, Marshall 1960B with a G12H55, Bogner with a V30, Fender Twin with a JBL D120F, Vox AC30 Silver Alnico, Fender 5E3 Tweed), captured by Origin Effects; 24-bit, 200 ms, at 44.1 / 48 / 96 kHz. Free to download. The license is stricter than our CC0: you can’t resell or redistribute the files, and commercial-release use isn’t spelled out — if that matters to you, check their terms.

Paid — our favorites. York Audio — paid, but worth it: reference-grade quality, about $15–20 a pack. Three we love:

Any of these can be matched to your hardware right here — trimmed, folded to mono, set to the right rate and bit depth.

A cabinet impulse response (IR) is a short recording (usually 20–500 ms) of how the chain of speaker + cabinet + microphone + its position + room reacts to a single impulse. An IR loader convolves your dry signal with that IR — and a bare preamp turns into the sound of a guitar playing through a real 4×12, miked in a studio. An IR is, in effect, a snapshot of a cabinet and a microphone.

Modern modelers (Quad Cortex, Helix, Iridium and so on) already have an IR block built in. But someone else’s IRs rarely fit a project perfectly: one has too much low end and buries the bass, another fizzes under distortion, a third is stereo when your hardware wants mono, a fourth is at 96 kHz instead of 48, a fifth is five seconds long with room reverb and eats a slot in your hardware. This editor fixes all of that in a couple of clicks.

A favourite distortion or preamp pedal (Tube Screamer, V4 The Sheriff, Friedman BE-OD) straight into the interface sounds harsh and saw-like: under gain the guitar becomes a mosquito whine with a hissing tail. The reason: without a cabinet you’re hearing a bare pickup after the preamp. The speaker physically rolls off everything above 5–6 kHz (where the harshness lives), trims the rumble below 80–100 Hz and adds the cabinet and mic resonances; without that the signal won’t sit in a mix even with EQ. An IR loader after the pedal puts that missing layer back: the harshness goes, body and character appear.

Got a hardware loader? Pick it from the device presets and the editor sets the rate, bit depth, mono/stereo and IR length for you. A link to the device’s official docs appears under the preset, so you can double-check.

Trim silence. An IR can carry anything from a fraction to tens of milliseconds of silence before the impulse — a recording artifact. Trim finds the first sample above −60 dB from the peak, keeps a 0.2 ms margin (so the attack isn’t cut) and shifts everything to the start. Leave it on almost always.

Length (truncate). The shorter the IR, the tighter the sound and the lighter the CPU load:

A 2 ms fade-out is applied at the cut so it doesn’t click. You can drag the length right on the waveform.

HPF / LPF. Not cleanup but tone shaping; off by default:

IR gain. A continuous IR-level fader. The indicator turns red when the peak reaches 0 dBFS.

Channels. A real cabinet miked with one mic is mono, and most loaders expect mono. If the file is stereo: mix L+R/2 (honest for two mics), left / right only, or keep as is (for Iridium, IR-200 and others that handle stereo).

Numbers on screen are an abstraction; the real test is hearing the IR on a guitar. The player has three channels: dry DI, through the original IR and through the processed IR, each with its own volume (convolution makes the sound noticeably louder than the dry DI — that’s normal, not a bug).

No DI of your own? Take a built-in one: dry takes from Cat’s Hard Day, Deep Space is My Home, Fifth Dimension and Eleven Light Years, recorded through different preamps — you can hear how the same IR sits on different gain. The take loops, and the processed preview updates as you change settings.

The filename is built from your settings automatically, for example:

You can read off the source, the cabinet and mic, the preset, the length, the rate and the bit depth. The file is saved with a normal browser download — nothing goes anywhere. 24-bit is the safe default; 16-bit only if your hardware demands it; 32-float for further DAW work (16/24-bit and 32-float don’t sound different in preview — the browser always computes in float).

Darwin’s Cat is an art project, and this editor is part of our exchange with the scene: prepare an IR in half a minute, with no paid software, signups or ads. Want to support it? Listen to our music or pass the page to a guitarist who’ll find it useful.