#re-amping

When I was 18 and first getting into recording, I had no idea what I was doing. Sometimes, I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have made enough mistakes along to way to learn what NOT to do, and that has helped me more than any blog/book/seminar ever has. During the process of recording my band Forester's full length album, I did many things incorrectly, things that one often only sees in hindsight. Some of these may seem like rookie mistakes to seasoned recording vets, but with so many elements that make up a great recording, everyone makes mistakes somewhere along the way.

1) UNDERESTIMATING THE AMOUNT OF WORK

This mostly applies to DIY engineers and producers, but almost every project I did starting out took longer than I originally thought. It can be really easy to lose sight of mix and chase a “perfect” snare drum sound or guitar tone, a lot of times just going in circles. New engineers can fall into the habit of indecision, something I still battle to this day. It can be hard to commit to a sound when you aren’t sure it’s going to work in the overall mix. In the end this process just adds time to the project, whereas professional engineers trust their ears and commit to a sound and move on. It’s a great habit to start building.

2) EXPENSIVE INSTRUMENTS CAN STILL SOUND BAD

I rented an $1800 bass to track a bass DI assuming an expensive instrument would sound...expensive.  I not only tracked all 11 songs, but re-amped the bass DI TWICE, once clean and once  distorted. That’s 22 rounds of re-amping bass alone. During the mix phase I wanted to add some more high end clarity to the bass and reached for an EQ...only to realize there was nothing there to EQ. After doing an A/B comparison with a cheap Squire bass with new strings, I realized the expensive bass I rented had old/dead strings on it. I ended up re-tracking ALL of the bass on our album and re-amping it again.

3) GREAT CONVERTERS MATTER

I recorded guitar in the same manner as I did bass, tracking the DI from home and re-amping at the studio later. This time I made sure to use new strings on every song and spent a couple weeks tracking multiple guitars on 11 songs, considerably more work than the bass. During re-amping I used a very high end signal chain and even blended multiple amps to get the final sound. Months later, when comparing our guitar tone to other recordings, I noticed there was a slightly muddy quality to ours. Even though I had used a superb signal chain during re-amping the fact was that I had captured the DI through a DIGI 003, an entry level preamp with entry level converters. I went back and listened to the raw DI could actually hear the same dullness that I had heard in the re-amped tone, and learned that a great sounding amp with a mediocre DI signal will only ever sound “good” at best. 

At the studio, we're currently using the following converters:

Universal Audio Apollo 16

Lavry DA10

Lynx Aurora 8 ADAT

4) FINISH THE SONGS FIRST

My own band has been guilty of this. The recording process is so much easier when every member of the band knows exactly what they are playing, and more importantly actually PRACTICED the parts they are recording. I’ve had bands try and finish lyrics in the studio and it rarely works the first time, which again adds unnecessary time to a project. Write in the jam space, record at the studio...unless you’re prepared to pay for the time.

5) PLUG IN PRESETS ARE NOT GOSPEL

Most EQ and compression plug ins come with presets to help give you a starting point when applying them to your mix, but it’s important to treat them as just that: a starting point. I recently opened up an old session from one of my first projects and realized that the compressor preset I chose for my drum overheads was slamming it about 10x harder than necessary. Settings like threshold are totally dependent on the level of the sound going into the compressor, so it would be impossible for a preset to account for that. Presets can work great at getting you started, but I would also take them with a grain of salt and at the end of the day trust your ears.

6) THE REAL WORK BEGINS AFTER THE RECORDING IS DONE

Promotion is important.You can have the best recording in the country but if people don’t hear it, or know how it’s by, or know where to get it then you’re putting yourself at a major disadvantage. Look into blogs, social media, anything you can use to get your songs into people’s ears. There’s a ton of great bands out there that fly under the radar because they don’t put in the work in terms of promotion, try not to be one of them.

Well thats a wrap! I hope that helps you guys avoid some of the key mistakes and thought processes that I had when I was first starting. Thanks for reading, and please share this post, follow us on social, join the Facebook group, and sign up for our email list to get more free tips and updates!

Cheers,

James Banks Velveteen Audio

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Banks is a recording engineer, musician, and plays drums in the band Forester. Check out more of his work, check out his website: Audiobanks

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Re-amping for dummies – by sebas honing

To answer the many questions on the whole re-amping case I’ve decided to write this note on several ways to re-amp your guitar signal.

Basically there are two ways to get a dry signal recorded:

1) Split the signal coming from your guitar and send one of the splitted signals into your setup and the other into your interface/recording unit/mixing desk, etc….

2) Run your dry singal straight into…

Re-amping is a process in which a previously recorded performance is played back and re-recorded at a later time for the purpose of adding effects, ambience, or modified tonality. Originally, the technique was used mostly for guitars as it separated the playing and amplification aspects of the recording. In this tutorial Paul and Brian from the band Crash The Satellites explain how the re-amping process works and share how they used this technique to record and mix the guitars for their latest album.

Pick up a couple things to add to the collection.... Gotta control these gear junky habits, but i need them, i really do!

Radial X-Amp - Awesome re-amping tool, just means I'll be spending more of my time in search of the "perfect" tone... hahaha

Apex 210 Ribbon Mic - I've rented a few of these but this one has that special sparkle. Who knew a cheap knockoff could be a gem. 

Hei folkens!

    I de siste par dager har jeg eksperimentert en del med å bruke data-baserte effekter på gitaren min og har skjønt hvor bra de egentlig låter. Som nevnt i forrige post har jeg installert Guitar Rig 4 og har kjørt signalet fra gitaren inn i dataen og ut av mine høytalere på stereo-anlegget. Det gav ok lyd, men ikke den rør-lyden som min Vox AC15-amp ellers gir. Tenke, tenke... hvordan får jeg lyden ut av ampen? 

Hele problematikken oppstår i det man plugger gitaren i lydkortet (MBox2 for min del) og kjører lyden inn på dataen. Signalet blir konvertert fra instrument level til line level i lydkortet og dette er alt for "hot" for inngangen på gitarforsterkeren (les mer om ulike levels her). Hmmm... what to do?

Nå er det slikt at min gode kammerat Yngve "The Wizz" Høyland er utdannet lydteknikker og har svar på lager til alle mine newbie-spørsmål. Jeg spurte ham hvordan jeg skulle få det til og svaret var simpelt: "Du trenger en ReAmp-boks", en boks som konverterer det alt for hotte signalet fra line level tilbake til det opprindelige instrument level. Tilfeldigvis hadde The Wizz en ReAmp-boks liggende på lager som jeg kunne låne. Nice... 

Hele konseptet med re-amping er langt fra nytt, det er bare meg som er litt bakpå mht. teknologien som vanlig. Stockhausen, Varése og Beatles er bare noen få eksempler på de som har lagt brukt teknikken. Egentlig er mitt setup bare en metode til å få lyden fra dataen ut gjennom ampen på, den egentlige bruken er re-amping litt annerledes og du kan lese mye mer her (wiki) eller her (sound-on-sound). 

Det som er bra og gøy med data-baserte effekter og forsterker-simuleringer er antallet av kombinasjoner og justérbare parametre. Du får lissom alt fra dødsmetall-vreng til myk saturation, harmonizer-effekter, delays, chorus, auto-wah, etc etc. Listen er nesten endeløs. Dette er selvsagt også farlig, når der er såpass mye å velge imellom. Husk "The Power of Limits"...! 

Nedenfor har jeg laget en liten grafisk representasjon av oppsettet mitt: