The Watering Hole

I've been playing around with different re-amping techniques and have stumbled across one that works really well.

Instead of recording a clean feed from the guitar I record from the line-out of the THD hotplate, so this enables me to do silent recording using ir's at night etc but capturing the full roar of the amp.  Then, when I have "loud" time, I feed the recorded amp-line-out tone into a full-range amp and then into the real guitar cab and then record the sound coming from the cab with a mic or multiple mics.

This works really well as you now have plenty of time to find the sweet spots for the mic's and of course you can adjust the eq of the signal that you are sending to the guitar cab.

edit: Plus of course, if you want to record multiple mic positions but you only have one mic, just run the track several times and record the cab with the new mic position on another track.

Here's an example of this that I did this morning.

There's no reverb or effects on this or EQ at all, this is all done with 3 mics...actually x1 audix i5 mic but re-run the track x3 times and record it from different places.

In this test:

Mic 1 = 6 inches off the grill x1 inch from the left of the cone edge

mic 2 = the back of the cab (flipped phase)

mic 3 = 12 feet back across the room pointing up to the ceiling


mix= mic 1 50% right, mic 2 100% right mic 3 100% left

There is a hum on this as I used the power amp section of the Peavey C30 to reamp the JCA20H recorded hotplate line out, and my C30 has always had a severe hum on it for some reason that I just can't get rid of.

This has great possibilities.

ps: you can hear my son on the room mic  ;D

that's pretty cool - do you run into impedance mismatch issues? I don't think I have an instrument level out on my audio interface... I suppose I could send it to my ancient POS solid state stereo and run the cab that way. might give this a try sometime since I'll probably be recording the line out from the hotplate almost exclusively from now on.

other things too... might be nice to have actual echoplex delay instead of the plugin, for instance. hmm, I should get some sort of impedance converter I guess. I've not had a lot of luck with a line level out feeding guitar level devices in the past (and vice versa). would be handy... GAS, damnit.

ironsheep — Feb 26, 2012that's pretty cool - do you run into impedance mismatch issues? I don't think I have an instrument level out on my audio interface... I suppose I could send it to my ancient POS solid state stereo and run the cab that way. might give this a try sometime since I'll probably be recording the line out from the hotplate almost exclusively from now on.

other things too... might be nice to have actual echoplex delay instead of the plugin, for instance. hmm, I should get some sort of impedance converter I guess. I've not had a lot of luck with a line level out feeding guitar level devices in the past (and vice versa). would be handy... GAS, damnit.

I don't think I'm suffering an impedance mismatch as I'm running the line out from the DAW straight into the power amp section of the C30 bypassing the preamp, so that should need a line level signal anyway.  I will get a mono full frequency amp to run into a guitar cab I think and that will give much better results (I think).  This is a very satisfying way of recording that's for sure as this technique gives you an unlimited number of microphones !  The best of both worlds, recording direct and mic'ing for real !

I agree about real effects too.  A real echoplex would be cool.  Not sure what it is about vst delay effects etc other than they all seem "too clean".    

I'm wondering why you choose to do it this way instead of just taking a DI? You can run theDI through your amp at a later time?  We do this all the time... you get the added bonus of using the amp's power section and cab when you re-record the amped track.  You can do the same thing you are doing now, too... use an a/b/y box to "listen" to the recording through your amp, thd, and cab impulse (off output A) and take the DI from output B...

charger — Feb 27, 2012I'm wondering why you choose to do it this way instead of just taking a DI? You can run theDI through your amp at a later time?  We do this all the time... you get the added bonus of using the amp's power section and cab when you re-record the amped track.  You can do the same thing you are doing now, too... use an a/b/y box to "listen" to the recording through your amp, thd, and cab impulse (off output A) and take the DI from output B...

I did it this way so that I would have fixed amp settings, also I've noticed that it can get noisy if you reamp in the normal way with a bit of gain. All good fun either way though.