miking guitar amps/speakers to warm sound

[YEK]

does anyone have experience doing this? i hear you can do this to warm up sounds. really interested

 

mic suggestions as well would help

 

 

 

other options for warming sound would be more expensive gear, discussion of those ideas welcome as well.

[Audioblysk]

I found that when I would record from my friends fender twin reverb with a cardioid condenser off to the side of the cab and one in the center sent to separate channels to adjust eq/phasing ect.... it would sound really lush. Recording sounds (especially drum samples) from sending a drum pattern thru a nice tube amp being recorded on the way out by a solitary close mic and a mic placed a few feet away can add a lot of depth to drums if done right.

 

Sometimes I will run the playback of samples or a loop thru my ART pro channel 2 for compression/slight EQ and added tube warmth, making it even more lovely, just have to have fresh ears or you can really fuck up the original recording and over-compress. When my ears get tired I tend to just make everything loud, which is not good for many reasons.

 

For microphones, I use a Rode NT1 and a Sennheiser MD421 II, I prefer the Sennheiser, it has a less 'clinical' sound than the Rode. Call me crazy, I just think the Sennheiser is a little warmer sounding, the Rode is much better at picking up minute details and works best as a room mic for me, but can be a little too clear and sensitive with acoustic guitar...

 

I'm still learning too, so I'm excited to see what comes out of this thread!

[spunktronics]

condenser -> nice pre amp -> tape = warm!!!

[psn]

the burglar should be able to chime in some good tips here.

 

I've experimented with a Fender Hod Rod DeVille amp and a Shure SM57 mic, which gave good results. I tracked a synth bass dry into the DAW, then ran it out to the amp. Ran four different versions, close mic'ed with and without spring reverb, plus distant mic'ed with and without spring reverb. That gave me plenty of tracks to cross fade between and sort of zoom in and out in the 3D space. The effect is obviously most apparent on headphones.

 

Here's a remix I did using the above procedure.

[YEK]

ok,what's the cheapest way to do this?

[mcbpete]

ok,what's the cheapest way to do this?

A free tape emulator VST ... http://www.acustica-audio.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=122

[YEK]

 

ok,what's the cheapest way to do this?

A free tape emulator VST ... http://www.acustica-audio.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=122

 

 

 

sorry i meant hardware

[Guest lambda]

I seem to recall reading in an interview with Alan Wilder that during the recording of Black Celebration they ran whole tracks through amps.

[YEK]

pre amps in general look expensive and i have know idea what all the knobs and buttons are

 

 

condenser -> nice pre amp -> tape = warm!!!

 

by tape you mean reel to reel?

[spunktronics]

pre amps in general look expensive and i have know idea what all the knobs and buttons are

 

 

condenser -> nice pre amp -> tape = warm!!!

 

by tape you mean reel to reel?

yup! i'm currently running a Rode M3 - > TL Audio 5051 - Fostex R8 -> Motu 8 pre

[Lucas]

A classic microphone for that is the Sennheiser e906. You can simply place it stuck to the amp's front by making it hang on its cable, then look for the position in front of the speaker which suits your needs. Straight in the middle of the speaker will provide the most high frequencies, and the sound will get softer (bassier) when you move to the side of the membrane. Of course that rule works for any microphone.

 

I think the e906 is pretty versatile for that (it's its main aim) but you could try any microphone really, a SM57 will do it as well as a more expensive mike, it all depends on the sound you're looking for. As it's been said, miking the amp with a second and more distanced microphone can also be a good idea if the acoustics of the room is interesting.

 

I want to use the technique since a long time but never moved my ass to do it for my own tracks. Maybe I'll do it when I realize my album project.

 

@ psn : nice track, very relevant to the subject !

[peace 7]

Sooo... this thread is about adding warmth to digital tracks by adding back analog?

 

Some of my old tricks:

 

- Yah, you can mic an amp, and different angles (well, directly in front and off-center, etc.) will give different effects. The association of listening to music with speakers gives a very specific vibe, so actually recording speaker output and mixing it back into a track can give that *depth*, with real room characteristic sonic magic. Like if you place mic off-center or even totally at a speaker's side, the natural rolloff of highs is something very specific to that setup, which when mixed back in, gives warmth/depth by giving jo brainz signals of that specific analog setup.

 

- I was pretty inspired by some ghetto ass dude on the old mu phorum, who would post his tracks that he recorded playing off his stereo or whatever. You can get some IDM spacial magic on the cheap, by playing back your own music, sitting at the sweet spot of your monitors, and wearing your headphones with the earpieces facing outwards, and use your headphones as binaural mics. Then mix that shit back low into your track, and all of a sudden, it's some cosmic IDM Ultra shiz, mang. Your track doesn't even have to have reverb, and it will sound *REAL*.

 

- Shitty cassette tape is awesome warmth magic. I realized in late 90's when I used to send cassette tape demos, that my demos actually sounded better than straight from the hardware. So basically just output your track to cassette tape, and adjust output until saturation point- or even push harder for distortion. Then mix that back into original track at a low volume, which adds ultra tape harmonics (adding a very specific type of intelligibility), and is also a cheap compressor.

 

- For "warmth"... "distortion", yo. From a visual analogous tangent, perception of clarity can be upped by limiting data (like dithering a gif makes it appear sharper (especially the "pattern" setting in PS), same with dithering audio), and "points" can be made more apparent by accentuating things referencing that point (like if you have a blurry white point, you can make it appear sharper by darkening the immediate background, or the point can be made by taking the paint that made the point and spreading it around the point, erasing original point, but not really erasing point concept cuz the paint is now surrounding point). Anyway, distortion does all these kinds of things. If you experiment with like 5 different distortion types, and then mix every single type of distorted track back into the original at low volume, you can up perceived clarity and give warmth/umph/depth by harmonic distortion. This works especially well if your mixing is solid. If your mixing is shit, your sounds will generally always sound like mud, no matter how many velvet vacuum tube magic summing tmnt ooze boxes you put it through.

 

- Little bit of convolution reverb on final output, like of a car interior or washing machine.

[spunktronics]

i wouldn't get so hungup on "warmth" if it sounds good it sounds good.....

 

i recorded and album all to tape mixed all analog then it got sent for mastering and came back sound smashed to fuck with no dynamics....not my music and they were happy with it. soooooo.....

[peace 7]

... it can be tricky lining it all back up in ableton though. my rule of thumb is to find where it starts getting wonky, half that time, make an edit and shift+crossfade. maybe my deck is just shitty...which is good I guess

Put a click in the beginning of the track, and align the click.

 

 

Another depth (kiiind of "warmth") technique:

Take everything above like 200Hz and split left and right. Slightly pitch shift one side. Instant pointless 3-D! Make bass mostly mono. But if you do this technique with just selected highs and have others straight and non pitch shifted, you can get more intentional and controlled sense of depth. Like if you keep vocals straight on L and R with no stereo pitch shift, it can really pop out of the mix.

 

A debatable warmth technique:

Set your audio box on fire.

[MisterE]

the cassette tape trick is a good one. if you invest a bit more and get a good deck with 3 heads, you can hear what's being recorded to tape while it's actually happening. you could even go ahead and record it back to digital in the same pass as you are recording it to tape. so basically you're just going onto tape and right back off of it at the same time. this way, you don't have to worry about if your deck is too fast/slow, because it will always line up perfectly with your original digital version, whereas if you record to tape and rewind, play, record back off of tape to digital in 2 passes like normal, if your deck is too fast or slow your new version may be stretched or shorter, time-wise. with 3 heads that doesn't happen. plus you can hear how it sounds while it's going, so you could adjust the input level going in while its hitting tape, to fine tune and find exactly the right amount of input drive.

 

even cooler is if you have a 'pitch' knob on the deck. if you do it in 2 passes, you could use that to make your recording a bit faster or slower on purpose, or have it wobble up and down on purpose, of course throwing it out of sync but maybe you don't need sync for the sound youre doing it with. but the weirdest is if you use it in 1 pass, you can adjust that all over the place, and get pitching up and down, but as soon as you stop moving it, the pitch goes back to normal and everything is synced, no matter where the control is at. if you have a cool mixer you might be able to set up a feedback loop so some of what comes out of the tape goes back in, and maybe mix in a little of the original without the tape, and get some cool flanging this way.

 

another thing people seem to overlook is reel to reel recorders. you can actually get an ok consumer end one fairly cheap. these will give you a higher quality sound (if you get one that's working fine) since they record at much faster speeds than cass. it's still tape tho, so a lot of the same things you can do with cassette you can do here, but it will probably sound more hi-fi. good to have options... also with a decent reel you should get a significantly lower noise floor than you get with cassette, which is one of the obstacles of using cassette to dirty up sounds. sometimes that noise floor can become an issue. with reel that's probably a lot less likely.

 

@peace 7 - headphones as microphone trick sounds neat, never really thought of that

[MisterE]

ive also been thinking about recording to vcrs for a few years but never tried it. i don't know if the results would be 'warm' but it would be an effect that'd make it sound different. i think it'd depend heavily on the vcr and maybe even the tape itself. plus i think there are different ways to record audio to vhs.. the format gets a bit confusing if you look into it

 

one cool trick that might come in handy if you ever have some kind of analog setup you like the sound of but it has a bit too much noise- record it maybe like 10 or more times. i mean go through it and back to digital, multiple times, record each pass to a new file. then line all those files up in a multitrack daw, zoom in and make sure the individual samples are synced up in every one of these files. it might be a good idea to put some kind of click or even a short 1khz tone at the start of the original file before recording, which you can then use as a guide to sync these up.

 

if you have them synced they should basically blend together seamlessly and just make a louder result when you mix them together, so if you have a lot of them, you'll have to lower the volume level for them all before mixing. make sure to do it by the same exact amount for all of them. so anyway now mix them down to one new file.

 

NOW the whole point of this, is that it can significantly lower the noise floor. theoretically with 2 recordings mixed together you could lower the noise by 6dB but it doesn't usually work out as quite that much (hum/buzz will not get reduced well at all, just actual noise. if you have lots of hum (usually its around 50 or 60hz) you should consider filtering that out from each recording separately, before mixing them together). to get another 6db you'd need 4 total recordings. another 6 you'd need 8 total, then 16 etc, so you quickly get into where you have diminishing returns. if you want to compare, you could analyze the average volume level of a segment of audio in this new file, and compare that to the same for the same segment of just ONE of the recordings. then adjust the level of the new mix down file to match. now you can zoom in vertically (volume-wise) on both files, and compare how much noise is in each.

 

doesn't always work great, but sometimes it works really great. will not work with tape or anything with a motor like that, because the imperfections of the motor will throw off the waveforms so they don't synch perfectly between each recording. that's another thing, you want to make sure the audio in the mix-down looks just like the audio in the original recordings. so doing the comparison between the mix down and one of the originals, and quickly switching back and forth a few times, looking at it close, is a good idea.

 

sounds like a lot of work, it's really not once you do it a few times and know whats going on. the whole point that's cool about it is that it can allow you to use things that maybe otherwise you just couldn't because of high noise levels. i've done this with over 100 recordings at least once, and got a useable recording out of something that was almost totally covered in noise.

 

obviously it's always best to try to minimize the noise up front, if it can be done. if not, then you could try this and maybe still get something useable. i would imagine this should work with almost any soundcard but i suppose a real shitty one might throw off some of the samples so you can't sync them. it'd be easy to test by just recording a few sine tones at various frequencies, multiple times, and comparing them to see if they are always in sync.

 

the visual equivalent: http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2006/03/high_iso_noise.html

 

you could always just use a noise reducer vst, but doing this is like getting 100% free, natural noise reduction, with no NR artifacts, if it works. then if you had to you could still use a vst AFTER this technique to get even more NR.

[mcbpete]

ive also been thinking about recording to vcrs for a few years but never tried it. i don't know if the results would be 'warm' but it would be an effect that'd make it sound different. i think it'd depend heavily on the vcr and maybe even the tape itself. plus i think there are different ways to record audio to vhs.. the format gets a bit confusing if you look into it

This album was mastered onto VHS - http://www.ilovecubus.co.uk/v2/downloads/small-mercies

Not sure if it adds warmth or anything, but there's certainly quite a unique EQ curve on it - plus it seems to handle clipping in quite an analogue-esque way

[MisterE]

wow thats actually pretty nice

 

i'd love to have maybe 3 vcr decks of varying quality, to mess around with. higher end ones seem to fetch higher prices still.. which is kinda weird but i guess there are collectors for just about anything. but i bet between a few decks you could get a decent variety of sound shaping ability. prob even ways to get variety just within one deck. different input levels. and i think you can record/play at different speeds? what would happen if you messed with tracking while playing it back?

 

ok i think i just decided to get a vcr. heh. great more junk

[mcbpete]

There's [surprisingly] very little gubbins inside a VHS player - you may be lucky and find they have visible modifiable potentiometers inside (looking like any of these)

 

 

Each of them would control a different thing on the recorder so you could try tweaking them for various results. Just don't blow yourself up !

[MisterE]

heh i was trying to figure out who did that album and finally realized it was you! wow

 

really nice textures you got on there! very cool

downloading!

 

also thats a cool idea about looking for pots in there to tweak! now im wondering if there might be any resources/blogs out there talking about the audiomangling potential side of vhs, and possible mods etc for vcrs

[mcbpete]

Cheers man - the problem with the structure of that album is that it's pretty relentless, normally we like to break stuff up with less claustrophobic tracks - but this is an hour of gloomy, muggy, feverish dark-ambience. I mean sometimes that works, just you really need to be in the right mindset for it !

[MisterE]

reminds me of some of the more creepier ambient parts in quake 1 soundtrack (which i think matched that game perfectly), just a bit more aggressive where that stuff was more subdued

[Guest couch]

Now I can only approach this as a guitar and bass player. So I don't know how applicable it is to EKT. But a lot of it is in how you EQ the amp. As well as how you have the instrument configured. What pickups you are using. Your pick attack (or playing w/ fingers). etc.

 

Warmth to me as a bass player makes me think of a tone that is very subdued but also very present in the mix It doesn't grate you or come off as obnoxious. Youtube "james jamerson what's going on isolated bass" to hear what I mean.

 

A tube amp also makes your tone noticeably warmer. It's hard to describe, but easy to hear when you listen back to back between a solid state amp and tube. Solid state amps tend to sound very processed and mechanical on their own.

 

Now I can't afford a super nice tube amp, let alone travel w/ it to shows, so I run a cheap beater solid state amp and a sansamp bass driver. Which helps recreate that tube warmth. And it gets pretty damn close. However, I don't know how that would work for guitar.

 

I don't know about micing the cabs. I just let studio techs or soundmen handle that shit. They just put the mic directly in front of one of the speakers. Probably some expensive-ass mic too. But the warmth comes more from the tone the rig gives me rather than his mic. Though lately I just go directly to their board with my sansamp.

[MisterE]

 

the problem for me is more long term drift, so two clicks spaced apart would work nicely in theory but if it starts to drift during a pad sound or something I'm in trouble. it's easy enough to sync rhythmic parts by eye but other sounds aren't always as intuitive.

 

misterE - maybe I have one of these decks? when I hit record, the recorded sound comes out of the playback aux of the deck in real time but I haven't tested to see if this is the just the aux in signal being passed through to the output or if it was going through onto the tape first. which would be more likely?

 

well, there would probably be a button or switch on it that says something like 'monitor' which would allow you to switch between monitoring the input or whats hitting the tape, and when you switched that you'd hear a big difference in the sound. i would imagine that most any 3 head deck that has monitoring from tape would have that switch, but maybe some don't.