Well mott, does this answer your original question, or should we expound a little on the topic?

LOL. He hasn't said anything since he first posted his question. I hope he's been reading at least.

What camp am i in. I use both in my recording, and you dare say i play for both teams. People will start to get the wrong idea..

CJ

ORIGINAL: CJaysMusic

What camp am i in. I use both in my recording, and you dare say i play for both teams. People will start to get the wrong idea..

CJ

I go both ways myself.

I did a quick search and didn't find anything relating to the reason why studios went to SS.

I know, so did I, but could find anything related either. That's why I was hoping you could hook me up with some. I appreciate your comments though since they have sparkled a quest to find out exactly what Mr. Dye meant when he said those words. Thank you.

Taken from http://mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_studio_nickelback/ Describing how the CD The Long Road was recorded.

“... we use a program called Amp Farm from Line 6. We just take a split off of their guitar amps so we can have everything modeled as though they're playing live, but we just sneak an extra cable in there that comes up to the computer. We have the amp-simulator program and record a direct, clean guitar tone — the same with the bass — with no leakage, DI'd into the mixing board and then into the computer, which then processes it. You create the amp sound in the computer and it records it. You can simulate any amp you want [with Amp Farm]. It sounds good.”

Here's a piece from Throw Yourself Away off that CD that has amazing guitar tone

http://www.kencampbell.it/nickelback.mp3

Is that professional tone? I guess its a dumb question, since it was a popular CD. But anyway, I think no one ever realized it was AmpFarm.

I still don't believe I have to have a tube amp mic'ed up to get decent recordings, or maybe I'm just not that picky about guitar tone. But I am very picky about musical content.

stratton, Jose7822,

I did a quick search and didn't find anything relating to the reason why studios went to SS. My opinion is the industry changed to SS gear mostly because of cost and ease of maintenance.

My edumacated guess is that they went to solid state (if I'm right about the question) because they were tired of getting 350-volt shocks when monkeying around inside a chassis to fix something, tired of burning their fingers on a boiling hot glass tube when the things needed to be replaced in the middle of a session, tired of pulling their hair out over a 100-millivolt ripple signal in a 350-volt preamp plate circuit that showed up uninvited one morning and hummed louder than an e-bow through a Marshall, ecstatic about having a 48-track console with mic pres on every track that didn't generate so much heat that it was always an August noon in an air-conditioned room in New York in January, elated about the development of circuitry that chained gain stages together with direct DC connections without the filtering effect of capacitors and transformers needed to keep that 350-volt plate circuit DC-isolated from anything that stuck out the front panel or plugged into the back, euphoric about the 100-fold reduction in weight that resulted from throwing away all those transfomers in the power supplies and signal chain, and etc., etc., such that they thought for X-number of unsufficiently-considered moments that they had discovered the word "quiet" finally and at long last, and were so in love with the 20-yard long wish-list of positive changes that they didn't really critically A/B the gear in listening tests of the kind needed to hear the difference between tubes and those noisy, square-cut, unforgiving things called transistors. Back then it was hum. Now, the hum is gone and it's the thermal noise floor in a solid that just won't go any lower at room temperature. And performing in a room cooled to near absolute zero is not an option for most. Not one for me, anyway.

In fact, it really wasn't until the CD came along and people began to toss out their high-end turntables and record collections that those who didn't began to notice that an analog signal cut into wax direct-to-disk, reproduced mechanically in vinyl, back to analog in a featherlight tonearm and going through laboratory-grade differential vaccuum tube circuitry had such a clear, obviously superior pristine clarity over a CD played in any way whatsoever, that engineers began to critically listen to clean guitar sounds played through an amp, and noticed that tubes made a huge difference there, too. Most guitarists were so distorting the signal deliberately by the time this realization began to surface, that a Beach Boys kind of clean hadn't been heard by any but die hard Beach Boys fans with expensive gear for many years. And such people (I presume) weren't particularly eager to announce their perceptions to the world, as many of you may be aware, because of such things as that moronic visual joke in the movie "Rush Hour" that heaped ridicule on the very idea of actually enjoying any of the music that the Beach Boys pioneered (I never will understand why popular culture always feels compelled to pull the foundation stones out from under the wall in order to start adding another floor. It was sadly the same in my generation. Bing Crosby was way before my time, and predictably inspired my contemporaries to roll their eyes in "sophisticated" exasperation, but I have always known that he 'invented' the popular vocal, after Caruso brought melodrama from the opera to the street after the invention of the phonograph, and that Sinatra took the ball another ten yards, to the point where Presley could take it and then hand it off to the Beatles and a whole generation of 1960s artists, some of the best of which sang so well that they burned out quickly and lived only a short time, and then ...), not that I've ever understood why anyone would trade full-bore, good, clean, all-out screaming Beach Boys exhuberance for an unintentionally laughable brief series of slow-motion chicken-necked spasms, but since it may also have something to do with why the first generation of post-modern people didn't notice that transistors didn't sound very good, it probably bears looking into with Rorsharch tests or something. I wouldn't know which end was the top of those 'dirty' pictures, myself, but I knew immediately when I bought an Ovation electric solid-body with a built-in preamp back in the mid-70s that my guitar tone was instantly flat and lifeless and DOA no matter what I did with the knobs, or the amps, or the signal chain. But by then it was too late, though, since the guitar was already mine and the money just wasn't there for another one. Nice to know, after so many, many years, that I was absolutely right about that. Tubes, dude. Or stay home and listen to elevator music on your walkman. A-one! Two! Three! "If evrybody had an Ocean, ka-ching-ga-ching, across the U.S.A. ka-ching-ga ching-ga ching-ga ching ..."

--thndrsn

hey thndrsn-
Nice to see when someone has some real knowledge has something to say!
I just wanted to say a couple things on topic for a change for me- not that that'll ever stop me from a ramble...

A couple things that can help a modeller sound more 3-D, and give you some better quickness and definition when at the shred-fest...

One thing we do is put a mic right on the electric guitar- focus on pick and finger noise... yep, you heard me right- just barely blend some highs from that mic back into the mix of amp, and/or amp sim... that will help add definition to fast playing. You may have to adjust to fit the latency.

Also, another thing that re-introduces the 3-D quality of an amp in a room is to pipe your amp sim, especially the verbs and delays- into your studio monitors (solo'ed, of course) and put a couple of mics in the room and record the room. (IF you have a decent room!) Helps to undo that sterile, 2-D, in a box sound- of course, it introduces a bit of noise... but is distorted guitar even SUPPOSED to be quiet?

And now... shall I pontificate about the difference between analog and digital...??? nahhh... not ME!

hope that's useful-
Ev

www.evanandnature.com

hey evansmalley,

Wow! Since it is only rarely possible for me to use the mic'd Fender Twin Reverb option (as in when everyone in the neighborhood is out of town! ), those suggestons are fantastic!

I like them both! Gonna try dat, botha doze, wunna these days fer sure!

I really like the idea of getting the note distinction from micing the pick!

But I also really like the idea of getting the modeler after it goes through the inductance of the monitor speakers and collects some ambience, too!

I've got the mics and the inputs. Now all I've gotta do is figure out where to put the mic stands. I'm running outta floor!

Very happy to hear that my dissertation was well received by someone at least. One never knows about these things ...

--thndrsn

I liked the dissertation, but I've always liked dissert. I think all the years of lugging around those transformers in my cab is responsible for alot of my back and shoulder pains now.

Evansmalley, I'm going to try your technique of recording, that sounds like a great idea.

ORIGINAL: mwall

Here's what I'm planning to do when I get around to recording my electric guitar parts:
Run a splitter cable out of my guitar with one line going into my miked up Fender Deluxe amp and the other line going directly through my Mackie mixer to the computer. That way I can play around with the clean recording using plug-ins to beef up or replace the miked amp track.

Another option I thought about for direct recorded track was running a loop from the computer through my external Pod and back into the computer, so I can play around with different tones there -- or would that be a bad idea?

I started a new thread to ask about signal paths, etc, for direct recording. It kind of goes with this thread....

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=975816

Thndrsn, thank you for taking the time to post this. Most apperciated.

Maybe the Late 50s and early to mid 60s was the Golden Age of tubes in recording?

FWIW my Neve and API pres are SS, tube and SS mics, amps are all tube, and then there's the representative from the collective conciousness, the Borg-like POD.

Times are great, never better for us recordists.

ORIGINAL: stratton

About five years ago, while I was still in the I HATE POD camp, I was aksed by my engineer buddy what the guitar sound was in a tune he sent to me. I guessed blackface Deluxe. It was a POD. I know I don't have the best ears, but dang, was that a wakeup call.

It took me another couple of years (and 5 PODS!) for me to make peace with the little box, but I did and my workflow and sound is better for it.

Since I have a lot of the actual amps it models, sometimes I'll use the POD to audition amps sounds for a song, like Recto or cranked Marshall? Vox or Fender? So useful in so many ways. I even get keeper tracks out of it.

So....you've woken up and smelled the coffee.

ORIGINAL: CJaysMusic

Yes, Guitars. Damnit...

ORIGINAL: GuitarPlayerSoCal

After 35 years of playing, I know most of the sound comes from the player. Eddie VH has also stated similar in interviews. Some guys think buying a new gadget will get better tone thus wasting a lot of time and $$$.

Why is it that Eric Johnson stresses over his battery brands and equipment, but he sounds the same every album and "live"?

I've also seen it stated that all electric guitars sound pretty much the same in a live setting so changing them between (or during) songs is not necessary for the audience. Still, we players know that we hear more than the audience does and it affects how we play (a feedback loop, so to speak). Of course different guitars feel different so we'll play them a bit differently but the same can be applied to all the rest of the equipment in the signal chain. There are many, many nuances the player will hear and feel that the audience will never be aware of. I personally can't "hear" a zinc battery vs an alkaline but I can accept that EJ can it can affect how he plays.

One problem with modelling is that the current s/w just doesn't respond the same as tube amps. A player can feel the difference even if an audience can't hear it.

ORIGINAL: thndrsn

Are you sure you're not talking about marcos69? Look at his avatar.

I sure hope you're wrong. I'm looking into a new guitar--maybe two of them--as we speak.

But can I really get authentic tone from a guitar made in China?

--thndrsn

I cant tell the difference between a guitar made in China and a guitar made in the usa. there's too many variables to measure.

CJ