The Watering Hole

This is absolutely my new favourite way of recording gutiars (and bass).  Just allows for so many options for the mix.

Here's a little sample.  Maybe not to your taste, but that doesn't matter as it has a million possibilities.  

and another version of the same thing through two amps this time

way too much bass and too much master buss compression, didn't notice it until I had rendered it to disk so can't be bothered to go again, but none the less this is excellent fun.

They sound pretty good, but can you make them sound like you're playing in a small club and not a large, empty high-school gym?  ;D

The tone on the second one sound especially tasty to me.  :)

CraigBert — Mar 12, 2012 can you make them sound like you're playing in a small club and not a large, empty high-school gym?

Indeed.

Nice clip, but like the others, I'd dig it mowa if you backed off the reflective verb thing...I know that is your thing, but some of your tones would shine better I think if they were a little more 'in our face.'  ;)

So yeah, ashamed to ask, but what in the world exactly IS "re-amping" anyway?  :-[

Reamping is when you take a line-level recording you made (usually a second track made while you're playing through a real amp) then you feed it back through another amp.  :)

he he.....  I like guitars (and all instruments actually) to sound in big spaces....I really dislike dry guitars or any instrument recorded dry  as all instruments exist in spaces.  It is the space that makes it come alive.

Reamping is when you record the dry unprocessed signal from the guitar via a splitter box (so that you actually play through the amp to get the feel etc) and then you send the dry signal from you DAW back to the amp via an impedance matcher to "re-amp" the original unprocessed guitar and then re-record it onto another track. The beauty of this is that you can make as many passes as you like and all with different mic positions etc to build up some very big sounds.

edit: I see you beat me to it Craig :-)

Ahh, ok, thanks for the explanation. I see all these dudes with big amp collections offering to "re-amp" for others and I'm like WTF, why would I lone you my amp, lol.

I think I like the idea of re-amping a lot more than "profiling"...probably not as practical, but surely the results are superior (sonically).

Kabala — Mar 12, 2012Ahh, ok, thanks for the explanation. I see all these dudes with big amp collections offering to "re-amp" for others and I'm like WTF, why would I lone you my amp, lol.

I think I like the idea of re-amping a lot more than "profiling"...probably not as practical, but surely the results are superior (sonically).

Absolutely. My profiling honeymoon is over.....you just can't beat the real thing !

Well, I can't afford a Dumble, but I think recording a line-level track while playing through a real amp I can afford and then reamping that live-level track through a Dumble profile for recording is an awesome idea.  (Feel free to replace "Dumble" with whatever amp puts lead in your pencil but you can't afford it.)  :)

I believe we've beaten the concept to death and that profiling rocks if you're recording so I'm still interested down the road when I can afford it.

P.S., Hey Jon, having a little space is one thing, but making something sound like you're the only person playing inside an empty Madison Square Gardens is another!  ;) :D

Craig, reamping into the Kemper is a good way of doing it, but there are some things that are not immediately apparent with using a "profiled" amp.   The first thing is that if you are using a profile created by someone else, you are relying on their micing technique and amp settings which may of course not be how you would like the amp setup or mic'd (particularly as there is no amp tonestack to play with, the tone controls are all just like placing an EQ after the complete signal chain).    I have found that many of the user profiles (and indeed the stock profiles that ship with the unit), sound ok on their own, but they don't seem to fit a mix.   The concept of the Kemper is great, but if I had played with this unit for a while before buying it then I probably would not have bought it.  The biggest problem with it is that the firmware is still beta and there are tons of bugs in it.  The unit periodically freezes for no apparent reason, or freezes when you change certain parameters (not just mine, this is happening to everyone on the Kemper board), which really is not good enough for a unit with this price tag....or any price tag come to that, it just isn't "finished" and was brought to market before the software was 60% there.  Everytime they issue an update to the firmware that fixes problems they introduce a further set of problems that cause the unit to crash.  Very poor QA.

here's another experiment.  The same thing reamped x4 times through 4 different kemper profiles and then panned hard left, hard right, 45% left and 45% right.  A mixture of "cleanish" tones and driven tones