Better Tone Through Reamping

Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           
 

SEVEN PROS OFFER RECIPES FOR REVITALIZING YOUR TRACKS

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David Bottrill Interview

The clean DI track is essential as your reamping source, because you don't want to reamp an already amplified track. “It's hard to send a miked track out through an amp and have it sound like a guitar again,” says Hamilton. “It gets incredibly blown out.” Also, the DI track is like a blank slate, which lets you take the track in any tonal direction you want when you reamp it.

Some guitarists may be touchy about having their tone changed after tracking. “At times, I've had guitar players kind of give me a sour look if I want to take a clean signal,” says Nichols. “It's like, ‘What's wrong with my sound?’”

For the most part, though, Bottrill finds that guitarists are appreciative of the additional possibilities. “Guitar players are geekheads like everybody,” he says. “‘You have some more amps for me? Let's plug 'em all in.’” Engineers and producers certainly like the options that reamping provides. “If there's something going on in the song that requires a sound that's a little more driven or a little cleaner,” says Hamilton, “or we all determine that it should be a touch more aggressive, at least we have the option, without having to retrack live. We're going to retrack, but from a previous performance. What I like is that in a way, it [reamping] separates the performance from the timbre” (see Web Clip 1).

“A lot of times,” Antonell points out, “what's perceived as good for the basic tracks doesn't always work for the final mix.” According to Cuniberti, it's a simple matter of prudence: “What you do is that you essentially take out what I would call an insurance policy where, yeah, you go ahead and record the amp, and you can put a microphone on it, but you can also simultaneously record it direct.”

Another advantage to reamping a guitar (or bass) after the fact is that you can minimize leakage during a tracking session involving other musicians. If leakage is an issue, consider not recording the guitarist through an amp at all during tracking, and instead sending the DI guitar signal through an amp-modeling plug-in (meanwhile, you're printing the clean DI signal). That way, the guitarist can get an amplike sound during the session, but afterward, when leakage isn't an issue, you can reamp the DI track and get the precise tone you want.

With the proliferation of good-sounding amp-modeling plug-ins, you could dispense with the reamping processor entirely and generate the new guitar tone totally from software. If that gets you the sound you desire, it's a simpler option. However, many engineers and recording guitarists feel that the sound of a real amp is superior in plenty of situations.

“I can't pull the microphone back 6 feet from [Line 6] Amp Farm or [Native Instruments] Guitar Rig or have a unique acoustic space affect the overall timbre,” says Hamilton. “Again, to suit the track, sometimes we want the bridge to have a completely different sonic footprint than the solo does, and I run out of colors with Amp Farm.”

Cuniberti suggests that when recording a band live, splitting the guitarist's track through a DI and capturing a clean track in addition to the amped one is also a good idea. “If there's a mistake made, it's certainly a lot easier to bring the guitar player back in and just play over that mistake on the direct guitar track,” he explains. “Assuming that you have the same direct box that was used live, or something similar, you would be able to punch in and fix that little spot in the direct domain. Once you've matched up the direct signal for the punch-in and the cleanup section, then you can take that entire thing and run it out through an amp and rerecord the original performance.”

Walker will often reamp, albeit without an amp, to get the sound of tape on a digitally recorded guitar track. “A lot of the time, if it was recorded dry, I'll send that signal out [through a reamping box] and back into the tape echo and bring it back in,” he explains. “I'll set the tape echo to the shortest setting, and I'll get rid of the dry guitar and use only the effected signal. Then I'll time-align it so it fits in the track where it was supposed to be. That way it sounds like a warmer, lo-fi, crunchier guitar.”

Reamping also allows you to go for some completely out-there effects. Nichols describes a particularly unusual one, which involves reamping a guitar through an amp stack, with the speaker cabinet placed under a piano. “You set the 2 × 12 [speaker cabinet] underneath a piano, pointing at the soundboard. And then, depending on what notes are played, it gets all these freaky sympathetic chords and dissonant stuff — octaves and weird stuff coming through the strings. So you'd stick some mics in the piano as if you were recording piano, but instead you're playing a guitar through the bottom of it, and you get a total freak show. It's not something you would probably push up in the mix, but you can definitely make a real swimmy sound, which is pretty cool.”

Getting Down

Bass guitars were the first instruments to get reamped, back when the process was new. “For some reason,” says Hamilton, “bass players are more hip to the idea of Dis and they don't cringe like guitar players do. That's the less sort of exotic procedure, because everybody knows what it's about, to take a DI of the bass.”