Greetings from the Great White North! Well, this is my first attempt at capturing and profiling a piece of gear. I think it went fairly well, thanks to the helpful info from posts on this forum.
The Dark Horse is a 15 Watt guitar amp, built by Traynor Amplification in Canada. It’s a fairly straightforward, lunchbox-style head. The couple standout features - one of which is the focus of these models today, more on that shortly - are:
Two output levels, a “Red” mode which puts out the full 15W through a 6V6, or the “Green” mode which puts out 2W through a 12AU7 for getting cranked tones at low volume
A 3-way switch which moves the treble/bass tone stack to one of three places:
“USA” (between the two preamp gain stages for a cleaner sound)
“Brit” (after the gain stages for more gain and some extra midrange)
"Pure (lifts the tone stack entirely, full power to the output tubes)
The models I’m sharing today are in the “Pure” mode at the full 15W, master volume at noon (again, tone stack is lifted, so treble/bass have no effect). One capture is with the Gain knob at about 2 o’ clock, the other at full.
Capture Details:
Capture rig on the MOD Dwarf using the file player and stereo recorder (shout out to @LievenDV for that setup, worked great)
Speaker out from the amp to a Torpedo Captor X, taking a dry output from the right XLR
Run into and out of my NI Komplete Audio 6 (I didn’t have a nice XLR-to-1/4" adaptor, so I just used the direct monitoring on the interface)
Audacity to split, normalize, and shift the recording (apparently even with the direct monitoring the Komplete Audio 6 added a little latency
Training Details:
Used the provided input file
Light model (might try out Standard at some point)
ESR came out at around 0.007 - not bad!
Speaking of which, @brummer is working on a plugin that does just that, making it even easier to play the input.wav and record the signal coming back (your target.wav)
Thanks! These were trained with the “Light” profile; I might try re-running them in both the “Lightest” and “Standard” profiles and post for those with interest. I think I’ll see about doing some more captures at a couple more gain settings, and maybe do a few in the Brit and USA modes as well, maybe some in the 2W mode. Then I’ll move on to my next target: my Traynor Iron Horse!
Already did! I got signed up for the beta, so the “Traynor Darkhorse” models you see up there posted a month ago are mine. I only wish I had done a few more captures, as I didn’t realize it wasn’t going to be possible to update the collection after the fact. Ah well…
