Re-amping – a beginner’s guide, part one
| Posted in Guitar, Music Technology
Re-amping is a relatively new term in the vocabulary of the pro-audio and studio engineer. For guitarists, this may be the first time you’ve come across it. If you don’t have a recording set up at home or are not involved in the audio recording process in any way, this article will probably be of no interest to you. But if you do record your own songs, or produce others, and you do loads of guitar tracks and are always frustrated at having to ‘print’ guitar sounds and being stuck with them at mix down, this is a process is well worth investigating.
The definition of re-amping is this – it’s when a recorded signal is routed back out of its environment and run through an external processor then re-recorded back onto the multitrack. It’s not really that different to inserting a reverb or compressor plug-in to a vocal track. You can still hear the track dry if needed and it’s only at mixdown that the effect is printed. The original dry track is always there untouched if the effects turn out to be unsuitable in the final mix.
For guitarists, it can get a tad more complicated and the same time, more interesting. You can use an internal plug in or effect in the normal way for a guitar track but re-amping lets you utilise external devices, and not just effects. Imagine this; you’ve recorded all your parts, the only thing left is that solo you’ve been saving ’til last, the fairy dust on your track that’s going to lift it out of the mundane and catapult you to stardom. You select your best amp, you dial in a great sound, play the part, amaze yourself, and mix it. Oh, dear, that guitar tone just does not work with the track – it’s too distorted, it’s not distorted enough, I can’t get rid of the nasty mids! What happens now? I’ve got to try and recapture that magic. Time! Money! Despair!
Now, if you’d recorded that guitar solo ‘dry’ – you can do this while still monitoring through a processor for the feel – you’d be able to re-amp it, send it out dry to an amp and have time to experiment with microphone placement and room acoustics to best capture the perfect sound that’s going to work with the track. Simple, or is it? The device required to re-amp your track is really a reverse DI box, in that it takes the recorded, balanced, low-impedence signal and converts it to a high-impedence signal to match the input of the guitar amp. This is not without potential problems, the main one being ground loop or earth hum. You might also lose top end or introduce unwanted distortion of the wrong kind.
As always, choosing the right equipment that’s going to work with your studio set up is vital and in part two, I’ll be looking at the various devices available.
Tags: re-amping