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Recording "clean" with sustain

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3/26/1999 6:09 AM

Recording "clean" with sustain

Here's a tip from a Slash (GNR) interview.

If you've got a modern high gain amp like a Boogie, you can get infinite sustain at reasonable levels, but the tone may to harsh and muddy. A big vintage amp can give you a better tone but it's harder to get a lot of sustain.

What Slash suggests is using a high gain amp in the control room, just to give you the sustain. This amp won't be recorded. Instead, the output of the guitar is send also to a vintage amp, and you record this one. You can set this amp as clean as you want, because you've already got the guitar strings vibrating with feedback from the high gain amp.

3/26/1999 1:34 PM
Adrian	This is also a winning technique with bass guitar with a few variations. Warm up a D.I sound by standing in front of a LOUD bass amp and getting some play from the SPL. Lotsa times I like DI bass but it can lack sustain and life.

4/5/1999 5:49 PM
Trace	GFR; How are you feeding the modern amp's tone into the vintage amp? Trace

4/6/1999 6:12 AM

quote:
"How are you feeding the modern amp's tone into the vintage amp?"

I'm not. The vintage amp is fed with the clean guitar signal. The modern amp just feeds the strings of the guitar with enough acoustic feedback so that they will ring for a long time (forever if you want). The modern amp and the guitar must be in the same room, the vintage amp and the mic in another (isolated) room so the modern amp buzz is not recorded.

4/6/1999 10:20 AM

GFR;

So you're splitting the guitar's signal and sending one to the vintage amp and one to the modern amp..correct? Kinda like a splitter box that doesn't load down the guitar's signal?
Another trick is to use just the vintage amp and have one cabinet in the live room and the other in the control room.
Basically you are using the cabinet to cause the strings to vibrate, hence sustain. You can also get feedback in the control room like this and it will of course come through the cabinet in the live room.
It's great if you are engineering but most engineers will send you out into the live room. It gives them "ear-burn" pretty quickly with a cabinet in the control room pounding along.

:-)

:-)

4/7/1999 6:19 AM

quote:
"It's great if you are engineering but most engineers will send you out into the live room. It gives them "ear-burn" pretty quickly with a cabinet in the control room pounding along"

That's where the modern amp does its job. You can have the vintage amp at the live room at any volume you want, and use the modern amp to give you the sustain. You can set a MESA amp in the control room to give you infinite sustain at a low volume. It will sound like a mosquito but you're not recording it anyway. You're happy with the tone being recorded and the engineer is happy with the volume level at the control room.

4/8/1999 2:54 PM

As an engineer and a player I much to prefer to track with guitarist in the control room. Headphones (along with DAT tapes) are the spawn of Satan. But the guitar does react differently when its in front of a loud cabinet thats moving air than it does in the control room when yor listening at 85db. Putting another smaller amp in the conrol room works okay except that i really want to hear everything thats going on exactly how it s going to tape. So I had this thought...

You know how drummers have those 'seat shaker' speakers? The don't actually make noise, the just transfer the low freq information into mechanical movements (just like a speaker) that you feel in your ass rather than your ear. It works great for everyone: the drummer feels the heavy power of his kick and toms, and the engineer doesn't have to deal with massive amounts of low end from the monitors causing feedback and resonance problems.

I thought, what if you could build some kinda shaker device that would attach to the guitar and physicaly vibrate the guitar so it would resonate as if it were in front of a cabinet, but not make all the noise.

Anyone got any ideas on how to implement this? Its not all that different from a speaker, its just that the cone needs to be attached to the body of the guitar...

To the drawing boards!!!

Warren

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