May 28, 2021 : Overloud  -a renowned Italian plugin and guitar amp simulation maker, praised for its TH-U products— has released a new convolution plugin named SuperCabinet (released May 18). This software IR loader can be purchased standalone or can be obtained through TH-U Premium (the complete TH-U edition).

The basic SuperCabinet plugin (or the TH-U embedded version) comes with 3 cabinets libraries : a 4×12 Simms Watts, a Friedman BE412 and a DrZ 2×12 cab (18 microphones x 16 positions x 2 power amps, for a total of 576 IRs).

This new convolution plugin allows you to mix up to 4 Overloud cabinets or standard IRs. When using Overloud libraries you can select the microphone, the speaker and the microphone positions. You get access as well to close/nearby position switch and a off axis/on axis switch.

On the left side you get the 4 Cab or IR slots  (each having dedicated volume, pan, on/off, phase reverse and solo buttons). A welcome addition is the frequency response graph, the graph gets recalculated when using the HPF, the LPF or the 2 bands EQ. The EQ is very interesting : the default Q1/Q2 settings are shelve filters and this is very useful to adjust the low-end and the high-end of your tone.

When switching to cross-over mode (XOVER button), the number of Cabs/IRs is set to 3, and instead of mixing them on the full frequency spectrum, you can use this mode to mix them by using 3 bands (the three slots become « lo », « mid » and « hi » ) using a multi bands approach to mix the IRs in a new way. You can adjust the cross-over frequencies on the graph.

And finally, you can export the resulting IR (using the cross-over mode or the standard mix mode): this feature will be extremely interesting for people using other IR loaders, and more specifically guitar players using hardware loaders : you can fine tweak your tone in Supercabinet and reuse it in your multi-effects system for example. The exported IR is in WAV format (44 kHz, 32 bits floating, stereo, 93 ms in my first test).

Testing it for a couple of hours, I found the sound quality to be extremely good, and the new options (EQ, mixing capabilities) very useful and convincing. With this new module, Overloud is beefing-up its offering and is getting closer to Two-Notes in terms of capabilities. For TH-U users, this new module will provide even more options for tone tweaking. For users considering using standalone convolution plugin, this new player is extremely interesting and brings a whole new offering of cabs libraries from Overloud and Choptones (you can directly select unlicensed cab libraries from the plugin and start a trial).

From my first quick tests, free overdriven.fr IRs work well with this loader (nice tone in my test with the TH-U “Modern” amp, which is one of my favorites Rectifier sim). You may need to boost overdriven IRs by +1 dB to +2 or +3 dB to get a level similar to Overloud IRs.

A few screenshots :

Mic selection

Testing Choptones cab

Testing with custom IRs

Modifying bands in cross-over mode
Browsing the cab libraries

Note : TH-U 1.4.2 has been released on June 1, with 3 new features :

  • An autogain function, for adjusting level when mixing multiple IRs
  • The solo button works now as an exclusive selection
  • A Z-Curve control to add more tone tweaks capabilities

More info, documentation and pricing at : https://www.overloud.com/products/supercabinet  (launch price for standalone version : 49 Euros).