Recording - July 2012 - 46

By Paul Vnuk Jr.

Is reamping the best-kept studio secret? It’s not a new technique, but if you ask around you’ll find that not everybody has tried it, let alone mastered it. Could it do wonders for your working habits? You bet! “Re-” means “again” Reamping means miking and recording an amp that gets its input signal from the output of a recorder. It re-plays, and you re-record, what had already been recorded once before. That’s why this second pass is called reamping or reamplification. (The word comes from the original commercially available box intended for the purpose, John Cuniberti’s Reamp. The current version of the Reamp is being made and sold by Radial Engineering and is one of several Radial products I review on page 20 of this issue.) Why not have the player simply do another take? Ah—here’s the crux of it—the player doesn’t need to be there. Maybe you even don’t want him to be there. Maybe the player performed a great take that he couldn’t ever repeat, but he used an amp or some effects that you tracked with a sound that could be improved upon. Or, for one of many other possible reasons, you say “If only I could do this over again...”. Well, you can. Instead of having the player do it again, you play the recorded track back through either the same amp but this time with different tone settings, or through a different amp altogether, and possibly also through different stomp boxes and in a differentsounding room... You can see how this opens up a lot of possibilities, without having to keep a player in the studio all night, past the point of exhaustion. First take it dry On the first pass, make sure to record a track completely dry, so you can later start with a neutral sound if you want to use reamping. So, first you capture the raw tone of the guitar, preferably through a good DI box, an instrument input on a high-end microphone
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preamp, or through one of the many hi-impedance guitar inputs found on many mid-level recording interfaces. That’s: Guitar > a cable > DI Box/Pre-Amp > DAW. But your guitarist may not be happy hearing that signal—it’s not inspiring, and after all, to get just the right tone, you track guitars with carefully chosen effects and with the mic placed just so in front of the amp. So you need to have it both ways—find a point in your signal chain where you can split the signal before it goes through the amp. You track what the guitarist and you agree is the right tone, and you hedge your bet by also recording the dry signal, in case you need it later on for reamping.

But you need help You can’t just use a Y-cord to split the signal if that’s what you’re doing. Get one of the many boxes built for that purpose, to avoid load and impedance issues that can mess up your signal. Some splitter boxes can send the identical signal to more than two destinations, while preserving the signal’s integrity, so you could be tracking two separate miked amps and also record a dry track.

Reamp Resources
Recording has two instructional videos on reamping that you should watch, one with electric guitar, the other with electric bass. Go to www.recordingmag.com/videos/videoDetail/17.html and www.recordingmag.com/videos/videoDetail/14.html Elsewhere in this issue, on page 50, we review the Redeye 3D, a DI/reamp box by Little Labs (littlelabs.com) that lets you do both DI and reamplification at once. As I mentioned before, we have a review of several reamplification products from Radial Engineering on pae 20, including the current version of the original Reamp. Radial makes many other useful studio tools for guitar, including the JD7 that does both the signal splitting and the DI/reamping jobs from within the same box. The man behind the original Reamp product, John Cuniberti, still has his own website with lots of good information and an interesting history of the reamping technique; head over to reamp.com and check it out.—PV

http://www.recordingmag.com/videos/videoDetail/17.html http://www.recordingmag.com/videos/videoDetail/14.html http://www.littlelabs.com http://www.reamp.com

Recording - July 2012

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