3.9 Khz Cut

[holoholo]

2 kHz is the sensitive area for me. Strat, Fender tones, mic on a cab tones, modern FRFRs that seem to be built for vocal intelligibility is like a recipe for build up in that area..

 

[Achilles]

Be gone glassy ice picks.

 

[Cirrus]

Sorry if this has been asked before. But where do these whistles come from? I'd like to think it may be the IR. When I switch to different IRs, some have them and some don't or they are at different frequencies. Is it some combo of amp settings plus IR that just results in a resonance of frequencies like how mics need to be rung out in different rooms? I was going down the rabbit hole last night and I even saw a fractal thread where Cliff found his pickups to be a source of ringing. I guess I haven't ruled out my pups either.

There's a few places. In the real world, pickups often have a loaded resonant peak somewhere between 2 & 5k. Another one is physical resonance in the speakers & reflections from the metal frame legs, for example. 12" guitar speakers often have a ring around 2.5-3k, because they all have roughly the same dimensions. Then there's resonances in the microphone used.

There's also a reality of distortion - it adds overtones. On guitar the fundamentals are all in the hundreds or low thousands of hz, so the 5th and 2nd octave harmonics for a lot of the instrument get emphasised by distortion and end up falling in that same upper midrange area.

I do think IRs make them worse, purely based on my experience of using them. It feels like they make resonant peaks more prone to ringing than they are in real life.

 

[pipelineaudio]

An IR could only make it happen if the real speaker/ mic combo has it. We've been doing the whistler trick in audio recording since long long long before there was viable digital recording or signal processing