Technical data

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Academy of Tone
™
Home & Recording
Home
At home, what you want is as vibrant and full a sound as possible at living
room levels. With AMP1
™
, a single 1x12 cab will do the job (Nano CAB or
FAT CAB). If you just love the punch and overtones of a howling tube amp,
you’ll need a PowerSoak to tame the volume levels. Using the REMOTE1
™
foot controller, you can operate AMP1TM’s integrated POWERSOAK within
the home from anywhere between 150 mW and 2 Watts.
If there’s no guitar speaker available, you can connect your headphones
or home stereo to AMP1
™
’s Recording Out port. Be careful with the
volume levels, though!
The Recording Out simulates the sound of a guitar speaker with a very
elaborate 7-stage analogue filter circuit. In contrast to digital solutions, the
signal is never converted, and therefore has a super quick response,
with no latency.
Recording
There are many options available to you if you want to record with AMP1
™
.
The simplest is to use the Recording Out and, at the mixing stage, use a
few effects to position the direct and dry guitar sound perfectly in the mix.
This works fine even without a connected loudspeaker. When you do use a
loudspeaker – even if it’s only at room volume levels – the sound from the
Recording Out will be that little bit more vibrant and punchy because of the
“current feedback”. This current has an effect on the sound, since it allows
the power amp and speaker to work together in tandem. With REMOTE1
™
and the help of the PowerSoak, you can bring the amp into saturation while
reducing the power. This lets you keep the volume level bearable and you will
also get more overtones and punch from the amp for your recording.
Of course, you can also position a microphone in front of the loudspeaker
for recording. In that case, I would record both the microphone signal and
the direct Recording Out signal. In your recording software, after you have
recorded you should make sure you compensate for the time lag differences
from all signals, to make certain they are all in phase with one another.
Later, when you get to the mixing stage, you can still make any necessary
adjustments to the mix ratios.
Miking up – an art in itself
Anyone who has ever tried to record a guitar amp with a microphone will
have had the following experience: through the microphone, the signal
sounds completely different to what you hear when you’re stood directly
in front of the amp. So, how do you mike up an amp correctly? Here are a
few tips from my experience. Put the microphone really close to the speaker
– this is also known as “close miking”. If you were to put the mic further
away, then power and presence would be lacking. Sure, if you have a large
recording space, you can record the amp with multiple mics. The different
amounts of time it takes the sound to reach the mics can result in so-called
Mixing
Regardless of whether you’re recording with a mic or through the direct
Recording Out signal, a little post-production – with echo (even just a bit,
so it’s almost inaudible), reverb, and minimal EQ and compression – will
make your sound vibrant and natural, and will deliver professional sounding
results.
There are three different types of reverb that help me with this: Plate, the
good old plate reverb, which can be heard on early Van Halen albums. Their
sound simulates larger rooms, like sports halls. During mixing, I use plate
reverb to define the depth of the room in which the guitar is being played.
The reverb time is between 1.5 and 3.5 seconds. Room – a small room can
get the guitars to sound particularly wide. You can also use this effect in
conjunction with short delays. Nowadays, I also like to use short convolution
reverb IR Responses for this. In the 80s, the ‘Eventide’ Chorus was particu-
larly fashionable.
The simulation of a real genuine space, in my opinion, is very well suited for
giving a sound real height, as well as depth. It’s also worth trying out mixing
the various miked and Recording Out signals.
Trying out a mix with all of these effects is worth it – mainly because you
need to check the different volumes against each other. Often I only use very
little of two of these effects, but the third one very prominently. If I were only
to use one of the effects, though, something would be missing.
It’s also worth lightly EQing and compressing the guitar and reverb signals
again. This is because every instrument needs its own space in the mix, and
everything you take away somewhere gives other instruments more room.
Here’s the motto: slim down everything as much as possible without losing
character or making the sound lifeless.
phase shifts. The time differences, though, can be compensated for with
modern recording software. Here, the craft of the sound engineer begins.
In the studio, but also live, close miking – without any ambient sound – is
almost always used. If a certain sound space is required, it is conveniently
supplied by the mixing desk. In live situations, the picked up guitar sound is
sent back through a PA system into sound spaces with sufficient reflections.
Therefore, in these cases, close miking is the right solution. The decisive
factor is always the quality of the direct – close miked – signal.
Naturally, a miked guitar speaker offers up the most authentic solution. But
the placement of the mic in front of the speaker is an art, because every
centimetre you move it alters the sound radically, making a balanced sound
very hard to find. I’ve spent hours in front of a speaker, moving the mic
around and finding the best position and angle, in order to find and then
mark my own “sweet spot”…
The sound of the recording is one thing, but the playing feel also has
to be right. The sound also has to be big and powerful, otherwise you
won’t ‘feel’ it. Fig. 1: Sound zones
Sharp highs
Cold frequencies
Middle frequencies
Warm, muffled frequencies
Fig. 2: Miking up a loudspeaker
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