Better Tone Through Reamping

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

           
 

SEVEN PROS OFFER RECIPES FOR REVITALIZING YOUR TRACKS

BONUS MATERIAL
David Bottrill Interview

“If you don't like the sound [of the bass amp] or you're not sure about it or it's leaking all over the drums, forget about it,” advises Cuniberti. “Just record a DI. It's perfectly usable for the tracking session, and for most of the overdubs, you don't have to worry about it. Later on, run it out through an amp — it can even be a small guitar amp, it doesn't have to be a bass rig — and there you can re-create your amp sound” (see Web Clip 2).

Key Factors

Keyboard players have so many sounds and so many audio-processing options at their disposal, through the world of soft synths and samplers, that you might think they'd never have need to reamp their tracks. But even with all those options, there are times when reamping can really help.

Skinner, a keyboard player, frequently reamps his plug-ins. “If it's a sample like a Wurlitzer or Rhodes, it [reamping] really gives it a lot more edge,” he points out (see Web Clip 3), “and it gives you distortion when you hit it hard.”

It makes sense when you think about it, considering that vintage keyboards like Wurlitzers, Rhodeses, and Hammond organs are all instruments that listeners are accustomed to hearing played through amplifiers.

According to Skinner, some soft-synth sounds benefit greatly from being run through an amp. “The waveforms on most digital emulations of analog synthesizers just don't have the complexity,” he says. “I usually find there's something missing. When you run something through an amp, it's really generating more overtones. So I'll do that to spice up the sound a little bit. You don't hear actual clipping, but it becomes a more complex sound” (see Web Clip 4).

Walker finds that reamping keyboards often helps them sit better in the mix. “I would normally heavily and drastically EQ them,” he says, “to take out all these crazy, massive sounds that sound great when you're sitting in your bedroom playing on a keyboard, but [not] when you try to fit it into a mix with a bunch of other instruments.” Reamping them through an amp with a 12- or 15-inch speaker, he says, “kind of EQ's those sounds to sit in the mix.”

Pushing the Pedal

Beyond guitar, bass, and keyboards, virtually any recorded track can potentially benefit from being reamped. Antonell recommends a few more possibilities, including “getting a little more presence out of a vocal, making a blues harp sound a little more bluesy, or putting a little more grit on a vocal effect or a solo instrument.”

Walker uses the same technique with the tape echo mentioned previously for guitar on vocals as well, or sometimes he'll use an analog tape machine instead of the Echoplex. “I'll amp the vocal out to that, or the guitar out to that, when I want, and set it on the repro head, and run that back in to get a different kind of character,” he says. “And just like the Echoplex vibe, you can mess around with it in [Digidesign] Pro Tools to either time-align it so it replaces the original or use it as a slapback, and you can move it so you can set your own variable delay.”

Nichols sometimes reamps through stompboxes without using an amp. The setup is similar to Walker's tape echo example. Send the track out of the DAW, into a reamping box, and into one or more stompboxes. Bring it back into the DAW through a DI and a mic pre (see Fig. 2). Nichols gives an example: “If you have a really clean Wurlie that you took direct and wanted to put some sort of phaser on it, you wouldn't need an amp.” Such an approach, says Bottrill, allows you to “use the pedal at the level it's intended. You have the proper impedance and the proper level going to the pedal. If you just throw it back to a line input, then it just ends up being sort of a distorted mess sometimes.”

Yet another option for using a reamping device with stompboxes or other instrument-level processors is through an aux send. In that case, you'd go out of your aux (either from a console or from an audio interface, depending on your setup), into the reamping device, into the stompbox, into a direct box, through a mic pre to get it back to line level, and then back to the aux return (see Fig. 3).

Supersize Your Loop

The reamping process is also very effective for adding life to dull or two-dimensional-sounding loops or programmed MIDI tracks. There are a couple of different approaches for reamping such tracks. One is simply to play them through your studio monitors, and capture them back into your DAW with a couple of microphones. (No reamping device is needed for that.) Obviously, the size and quality of the speakers and the sound of the room will come into play here. You could mic each speaker individually or use a coincident stereo configuration such as XY.

Antonell, who has the advantage of using the live room at the Clubhouse, likes to liven up tracks by running them through his Genelec 1031 studio monitors. “I'd use a stereo pair like [AKG] 451s about 10 feet away,” he says.

He likes to liven up not only drum loops this way, but MIDI strings, too. “If somebody has a cheesy string sound and wants to make it better, I'll play it into the room and mic the room, and turn the direct sound lower,” Antonell says. In other words, he's layering the sound of the reamped strings with the original track (see the section “Mirror Images”).