Have A Closet? Make An Amp Room!

This past weekend I was hard at work recording guitars on an upcoming EP for a local band. It’s been fun, challenging and long in the hours department. But, when it all comes together in the end it is always worth it. This post is in response to an issue we ran into when we recorded guitars earlier for demo purposes.

The issue is simple: I have my “studio” in a spare bedroom in my house. Room is limited. So the standard procedure is to have the guitar player sit next to his mic’d amp in my 11′ X 11′ “studio” and start to find the perfect tone. The problem? Your ears begin to go numb from sitting so close to the amp, so you can no longer discern the differences in tones. The only way around this is to put the amp in another room… preferably a closet or something similar without a ton of echo flutter… and use the studio monitors to listen for the perfect tone.

My problem with this scenario was that the only available closet that would work was approximately 50 feet away in my bedroom. Most will tell you that you don’t want to record with any cable over 25 ft, because you’ll tend to run into all sorts of sonic issues. But, I’m an experimenter in these types of things and was willing to give it a shot.

We tracked down a 50′ mic cable which gave me hope.  I would suspect a company wouldn’t spend the money on creating a 50′ mic cable unless it actually worked without the sonic issues. The main problem ended up being the instrument cable. They seem to only go up to 25′ because of the sonic issues. So… troubleshooting begins.

I quickly resolved that because the guitarist uses a pedal board, an option may very well be to split two 25′ cables with the pedal board. This way we get a total of 50′ and never exceed the 25′ rule in a single connection. The downside is: the pedal board will reside in the hallway and all settings will require the guitarist to get up and down to find the tone… same with the amp. To me, this was worth the trade off.

We initially used walkie-talkies and had another band member or myself sit by the amp or pedal board and make the necessary adjustments as the guitarist played, but it soon became apparent that the guitarist knew what he was wanting, so up and down he went to find the perfect tone.

All in all it worked like a charm, despite the warnings from all the pro studio staff at Guitar Center. So, I felt it worthy enough and informative enough to share here with this write up and a little video showing the nonsense of cables running through my house. We were able to use my studio monitors at moderate levels and find tones all day long without our ears going numb. That’s how the pros do it and we somehow emulated that experience. Yay for us. 🙂

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Till next time!

David (Cali Dingo)

 

 

 

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