|
Practical ways to get authentic, authoritative cranked-amp tone with minimal noise leakage
The ideal approach is to create a permanent setup of a double-layered guitar speaker isolation cabinet in another room, or a super-insulated closet in another room. The most ideal would be a small massive concrete or brick room with inner insulation on the surfaces. Purchase one or two guitar speakers dedicated to this isolation booth and one or two guitar-cab mics dedicated to this isolation booth. The ideal is a booth large enough to roll in a 4x12 cab and mic setups, with breathing room for the speakers.
Run permanent cables between your control room/performance space and the remote isolation booth: one speaker cable and two mic cables.
When using a remote multimiked speaker isolation cab, which is the only way to get authoritative cranked-amp Rock guitar tone quietly, you end up with three cables running off into the distance, from the control room/performance area. These form an abstract transducer processing module, converting a high-power signal as the input signal, to a complexly smoothed and complexly distorted multimiked output signal which you can then blend and equalize at the mixer.
Be sure to put an equalizer on either side of this speaker-mic transducer processing module: one equalizer (such as a guitar amp's bass, mid, and treble controls) before the power amplifier that's driving the guitar speaker, and one equalizer (such as the mixer's bass, mid, and treble controls) after the mics -- just as you should bracket *any* major distortion stage with equalizers, one before and one after.
The worst-case, minimal approach is buying a big box and dropping it over a combo amp in the same room -- that's barely good enough to bother with.
It is a practical idea to keep a good power attenuator such as the THD Hot
Plate in between whatever amplifier you use to drive the guitar speaker, and the guitar speaker. This can be used to incrementally reduce the volume late at night (alas, reducing the amount of highly desirable, even though subtle, speaker distortion). A power attenuator also enables using a
100-watt amp to drive a 25-watt guitar speaker without blowing up the speaker too soon.
You should purchase extra guitar speakers, because speakers are like tubes and guitar strings: they regularly break when pushed into their interesting, nonlinear range.
You can also use a muffled guitar speaker without a cab or mics, or in a face-down cab, just to load the amp -- but the Weber MASS may be a less expensive and more ergonomic solution; it's a power attenuator using an actual guitar speaker, without surface, as the dummy load component. It has tone controls on the line-level Out jack.
For a further tonal compromise, using no actual guitar speakers, but still obtaining power-tube saturation, use a dummy load then a guitar speaker cab simulator. Power attenuators always have a dummy load component, and typically *don't* have a built-in guitar speaker cab simulator.
|
more posts...
