ORIGINAL: jacktheexcynic

you will never get the "exact" sound you hear, it's simply not possible...

ORIGINAL: jacktheexcynic
...so if he's 8 feet away, and puts the mic there, he should get the same sound, but no one mics a cab from 8 feet away and calls it a day, right?

Geokauf

The problem: getting that sound recorded and coming through the monitors as I hear it live.

Hello,

This is a joke right? I mean you have all this equipment Marshall 4x12, Avalon, Royer ribbon, Apogee converters, and the whole nine yards. And you're wondering, "Why can't I get a good sound?" The question for me is why can't you? You certainly can't blame your gear.

Way before I had a chance to work with top pros I was recording guitar amps with SM57s. Not because the 57 was my mic of choice but because that was all I had. I put a 57 on a boom stand about 1" away from the grill, 1/2 way between the center and the edge. Then I would cover the amp and boom stand with a couple of movers' furniture pads. My reason for the furniture pads was to keep out street noise (my studio was in a New York City loft). (Note: on a Marshall 4x12 you place the head on top of the covered amp. On combo amps one must keep track of how long it is under a blanket because a tube amp will get as hot as you know where very quickly. So during those sessions we would break frequently to let the amp cool down. I might note that in the summer my top floor non-air conditioned space was about 110 degrees F to begin with.

However, years later working with top pro engineers, I found that they predominantly used 57s on guitar amps and a few of them even covered the amp with furniture pads, but not to keep ambient sound out but to improve the sound by blocking out all ambience. If they didn't use 57s for guitars the next mic of choice was a 421. Sometimes there might be a U87 in the distance to get some room. But mostly I saw guitar amps placed in vocal booths, and then cranked up to 11 (if that was the sound you were looking for) and a single 57 or occasionally a 421. I once saw a rather exotic setup used on one of my band's recording date and it is interesting to note that the engineer was not a top pro but a middling pro. The amp was a twin reverb on stool about 7 or 8 feet away from the control room window, facing the control room window. There was a 57 in the usual position in front of and facing the amp and then there was a U87 facing the control room glass about 12 inches from the glass. This mic (it was explained to me) was to get the amp's reflected sound from the glass. Then there was another U87 behind the amp about 7 or 8 feet in the center of the studio to get the room ambiance. I remember thinking, cut the cr*p, just use the 57 and record some guitar."

A huge amount of guitar through the ages has been recorded with 57s in places where they had just about every exotic mic available. This has been my experience.

In today's modern digital DAW world I strongly recommend ditching the hardware for Amplitube or Guitar Rig, etc. and spend your time creating your own pre-sets. Then you develop a library of setups with sounds that are easily repeatable. Also you are playing through your monitors from the get-go and you can formulate your sound to sound best in the monitors rather than in the room. I know you're a hardware guy and you got this nice Marshall bottom. I'm not entirely unsympathetic. I have a 23 year old Music Man HD130 amp with 4x12 bottom, a Fender Blues Deluxe, 62 Twin Reverb re-issue (belonged to Robert Quine) and a 1970 Ampeg B-15 bass amp. I luvs my tubes. But I did a little test. I created a set-up in Amplitube 2. I dialed up a twin reverb amp clean sound and then put the "fuzz ace" (Amplitube Fuzz Face simulator) in the line. Then I took my real 1970 Arbiter Fuzz Face and plugged it into the 62 Twin re-issue with the same clean sound. I had to smile because with my 5ms round trip latency playing through the computer really didn't feel (or sound) any different from the real thing. I was surprised but I really shouldn't have been. After all we have no problem using software reverbs, delays, compressors, EQs and every kind of softsyth. Why draw the line at software guitar amps? An advantage of a software guitar amp is that "nothing is etched in stone." You can go back and make adjustments to the amp rather than having to add EQ on top of the sound. For example I was about to bus an Amplitube track to a reverb and I realized I could go back to Amplitube and add spring reverb to the amp which is what I really wanted (make sure you unfreeze first). Or, more likely, the opposite: You realize at mixdown that you wish you hadn't used so much reverb but now you can't "turn it down." Things like that.

In the end it doesn’t really matter what kind of sound you have tweaked if you can’t really play or have nothing (musical) to say. I prefer the playing over the sound. Listen to Albert King and you’ll hear what someone can do with just a guitar and amp.

GK

Danny Danzi


LOL Saxon, thanks for the kind words. I change up my tone for just about everything these days. Sometimes I like the poppy 80's type thing, other times I'm doing stuff that sounds a bit like Dream Theater. As a matter of fact, here's a little test clip of me actually doing a piece of a DT song called  A Right of Passage. Much heavier tone on this one. :) Still probably not to your liking, but it's a good representation of "high gain in control". LOL!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4909348/AROPtestMaster16.mp3 

mike_mccue


Simply beautiful Danny... it sounds emotionally and harmonically engaged.