Re-Amping

Hello all. Instead of recording in a sane and normal manner I've decided to try something else. I've recorded a brief guitar riff direct, nothing added. I can run the signal through any number of plugs but I want real amp tone. I figured I would take an output and run it direct into my 55 Deluxe while recording it with a microphone onto a second track. Track 1 play> out to amp>microphone>Track 2 record.
I have found a number of ways to cause feedback loops but haven't had much luck with recording the amp with an SM57. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks for looking.

It's not insane, it's actually done somewhat often from what I understand.  Always wanted to try it myself but haven't as of yet.  But from everything I read, it's all about using headphones at lower levels and/or isolating the amp.  What DJSur said :-)  

Some re-amp device is needed to get your level correct. Check out Little Labs Red Eye, ReAmp or The Radial Reamp device. It works somewhat like a backwards direct box. There are also lots of DIY re-amp projects out there. Check out Jensen's schematic page. Re-amping guitars and bass rocks! I usually record bass direct and re-amp at mix time. The price of admission is well worth it!!! Good Luck.

Might be showing my age here. In the old days, if you had a room to work in, it was an every day occurence to record our guitars thru a direct box that split the signal. One output went direct to the board, one went into whatever amp you were comfortable with, mic'ed and recorded as we played live. Then if for whatever reason the amp sound didn't quite work, we always had the dry take to route back out into the studio room and we could try any number of amps and settings until we found the right one, much less being able to move the mic around without having to re-cut the track.
This was somewhat of a common practice for many years. Now, of course, it's plugin heaven. I love being able to pull up a plug and get a ballpark kind of sound very quickly. But, you just can not replace the sound of the real amp with the real mic dialed in and set in just the right place. 

Sidroe wrote: "we always had the dry take to route back out into the studio room and we could try any number of amps and settings until we found the right one, much less being able to move the mic around without having to re-cut the track."

This is a description of re-amping.

I re-amp all the time. But with real amps, not plugs. As mentioned above the real trick is to match your impedence of the DI track that is being outputed from your system to the amp. I use the ReAMP box, the red one.

I have done some testing on everything involved with re-amping back to areal amp. I have more in depth info, but to quickly post my most important findings...

The test and setup...

I wanted to know if and how the guitar tone was affected or how it was changed (if at all) by re-amping.

Test 1: The guitar plugged directly to the amp with nothing in-between. The chain was...guitar to Peavey XXX, miced up with a pair of Shure SM57's (in Phase) on a Celestian Vintage 30 inside a 2X12 Genz Benz cab.

Test 2: Same as above but with a Radial J48 Active Direct Box in the chain. So the chain was Guitar to Radial J48 to Peavey XXX. Of course there was also a mic cable going from the Radial J48 into a pre-amp in my system so I could record the direct guitar signal. But the mics and cab were all the same and in the same spot etc...

Test 3: I took the direct clean guitar that was recorded from test 2, ran it out to my ReAmp Box, and back into the Peavey XXX.

I recorded the same guitar riff to a metronome in tests 1 and 2, of course text 3 was the exact same performance as test 2.

The results...

Test 1... Overall this had the best sound. It had bite, depth, and everything that I heard coming from the amp while listening in the room.

Test 2... I noticeable loss of high-end bite. There was definately less of an edge on this one. But most casual listeners would not notice, but I noticed, and anyone who is in audio recording would notice.

Test 3: Surprisingly, the tone was pretty much exact to the audio from test 1, except there is a type of "hiss" similar to white noise present in the track. The biting high-end edge was back that was lost in test 2, but the hiss was really bugging my. Again, a casual listener would have to be told what to listen for before they noticed it. I know because I used a couple of casual listeners to help me listen back to these tests. I think it is possible that the hiss on test 3 might be coming from the AC power that the amp was plugged into. But I will have to test further to confirm.