i have been through pages and pages and pages of transformers and inductors. and all these diy forums of people saying they made their own passive reamping box\interface.
this is all i really need to do...
i need to plug an xlr output from my interface and send a signal to my guitar amp. the impediance on the female mic input idk about. i know the boxes were using 600:600 ohm transformers...
i just need my amps to think they are seeing a guitar. and my interface to be getting the right impedance
can you help me please?
can i just use op amps to do this. and make it run off 9-18v?
this is where i got the idea
http://www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/314.html (http://www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/314.html)
How do you set the input and output impedances of a op amp gain stage
IMNSHO a reamp box is almost always unnecessary.
Your amp doesn't care what's plugged into it. The important part of the guitar>amp interface is that the guitar's pickups see an appropriately Hi-Z load. Presumably, you've already taken care of this. This output of your interface is such Lo-Z that it can very easily drive any guitar amp.
The output might be a little louder than what you'd get out of a passive guitar, but there are volume controls (either analog or digital) to compensate for this.
There might be an issue of a ground loop between the interface and the amp. The first thing I'd try to remedy this would be to plug both objects into the same power strip. If that doesn't work, you might try lifting the shield of the cable connecting the two devices.
A "proper" reamp box does usually include a transformer, but I've never heard of using a 600:600. The transformer should step up the impedance, like a passive DI in reverse. Like I said above, it's not necessary.
This will actually step up the voltage, so these things usually include a passive attenuator, but we've already got a volume control.
The transformer is also used to unbalance the connection. With most modern gear, you can accomplish this (and buy a little attenuation in the process) by simply lifting the - connection.
It also isolates the chassis grounds between the two devices to alleviate ground loops. Better ways to deal with that, remember?
I say get yourself a mic cable and a 1/4" TS plug. Cut off the end of the mic cable which doesn't fit into your interface output and wire the + to the tip of the TS, shield ground to the sleeve. Leave the other wire disconnected. Maybe tape it off so it doesn't make any accidental contacts. Plug it in. Should work fine.
Hmmm I guess I could do that. Some guys argue most of all that the time the impedance going to the amp needs to be correct. Is there a transfoer radioshack sells that I could make one with? Also does it matter that I will be using my pedalboard? I also already have a mic cable that goes from xlr female to ts.
I just think the closer I emulate the impedance of a hot electric guitar pickup the better
> output from my interface
WHAT "interface"?
> emulate the impedance of a hot electric guitar pickup the better
Unlikely.
If this "interface" clearly says MIKE output, buy a XLR-1/4" cord (Banjo Center has 'em) and plug-up.
If it is LINE output, this will probably overload or need drastic turn-down in the interface. You have to buy two resistors.
In very tough cases you will also have to break ground. Here's where the transformers come in. You could use R.G.'s active splitter (note that it does nothing special to "emulate the pickup").
Turns out after some research. The standard xlr to ts connecors have transformers in them to match the impedance and they are like 15-20 bucks. That's the plan I guess. And it should handle fine going into my boss tuner and the rest of my pedalboard. I have lots of buffered pedals :-/ lol
Did you ever worry about "impedance mismatch" when plugging from a pedal to your amp? How 'bout from one pedal to another?
The out-Z of most pedals is very low, possibly even lower than that of your interface.
The concerns you hear come from folks who don't understand the issue and believe the hype.
If you're looking for the filtering and saturation from a cheap transformer those "Line Matching Transformers" from RadioShaft will deliver, but if youi want a good clean transfer from your interface to a pedal or amp, just plug the thing in.
Ok works for me. :D
our studio is one step closer to our Full setup now lol.
This may be what you're looking for:
http://www.jensen-transformers.com/as/as092.pdf
I made one using this 10K:10K transformer from Edcor:
http://www.edcorusa.com/Products/ShowProduct.aspx?ID=306
Built it just as it is in the schemo, works like a charm. Can convert balanced or unbalanced line level into guitar amp or guitar pedal levels.
:icon_cool:
Can somebody please explain to me how a 1:1 transformer (600:600, 1K:1K, it all reduces the same) converts anydamnthing? Won't the primary reflect the same impedance that sits on the secondary side? And won't the secondary have the same voltage as the primary? Am I missing something?
Well the Example i saw used a 680 ohm resistor in series with one side of the transformer and a 1 Meg on the oter aide... Idk exactly... But it was using the transforme to convert the signal and to amplify it passively... However a transformer works idk... And it saw the impedance of 680 ohms on the mic side and 1 Meg on the guitar side with a variable impedance ( a audio taper pot) to change the simualtion of the guitars output impedance
Does edcor have a way to order online? Cause I can't figure out how lol
Here is the direct sales page:
http://www.edcorusa.com/Articles/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=23
Forgive my dumb question, but what it the point of "re-amping" anyway? I just read a little blurb about it in the latest issue of Guitar Player magazine, but the concept still doesn't make any sense to me. ???
point is that there is alot of time and effort tht goes into recording electic guitar. But with reamping you have endless options. If you record a guiar track and you hate the tone later. Yougotta bring the musician back in to retrack it. With reamping you record the dry signal going into the computer. So pretty much what you pickups sound like before an amp. And you can go back an experiment with mics, room mics, multiple mics, Mic positions, speakers, amps, pedals, effects. Everything. And rerecord it with the tone that best serves the song/music groups style... Anoter thing is, nobody but the producer will ever know how that tone was accomplished. It's cuts ou the need for the musician to always be there and cuts out the need for an engineer for guitar tracking.
Oh, so it has to do with a pre-recorded guitar track. OK, I get it. I was thinking it was something different. *slaps forehead*
yea its pretty awesome. like you can get a vibe from what the band wants by what kind of ton they like on a cheap virtual amp software. and make it sound better through some nice mics and amps. i have hated my tracked guitar tone a million times. and with reamping i actually have the chance to go back and rerecord it easy :-)
I could see the benefits of having such a device at your disposal. I usually record direct from my multi-FX unit with my own made from scratch presets that I have taken a longgggg time to perfect (as in years of tweaking). That way, I totally bypass guitar speakers with all of their quirks that really bother me. All of my MySpace tunes were recorded like that. Unfortunately, I can't recreate that sound in a live setting. :icon_frown:
just ordered a 10k:10k transformer from edcor like he just said he purchased above... and you said i can wire it exactly the same as the jensen transformer schematic?
i understand that guitar speakers can be difficult. but its practice and effort at working with the diff. SPLs and FREQ. responses in the different positions that makes somebody a good studio musician\producer. we have a little studio we work in and bring people into. thats how i plan to market myself around here with any builds i do. i can just le them try out my pedals and compare it to the stock version circuits that modify and upgrade the parts for. i dont really sell them. but that how i can sell my business and my repairs ll
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 18, 2010, 03:47:58 PM
just ordered a 10k:10k transformer from edcor like he just said he purchased above... and you said i can wire it exactly the same as the jensen transformer schematic?
Yes, same as the Jensen schematic, with a few notes. The Edcor xfrmr does not have external mu-shield or an internal Faraday shield, so the wires designated "WHI" and "BLK" on the schemo can be disregarded. However,
use a metal case to minimize hum. The schemo shows an XLR connector for the input, but I used a 1/4" TRS jack instead for easier connection to unbalanced equipment. If you use a TRS input jack, TIP is RED (hot), RING is BRN (cold), and SLEEVE is ground. Both input and output jacks should be isolated from the case, and all grounds should be tied to a single point inside the case. That's about it.
BTW, depending on how inventive you are with the recording process, reamping can be applied to anything--bass, drums and drum machines, keyboards, vocals--you name it.
Have fun! :icon_biggrin:
Hey I am using a metal casing.
. But what do you mean by isolating the jacks? I usually use open mono nuetrik jacks not the enclosed ones. And I already have a female xlr from radioshack. I was gonna use a on off type swith for breaking The ground
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 18, 2010, 05:18:05 PM
But what do you mean by isolating the jacks?
A jack that's "isolated from the case" does not make the usual connection between the jack's ground sleeve and the case. To do this, you need either a jack with a plastic bushing, or some kind of plastic washer or other to insulate the bushing from the case. As you can see in the schemo, the output jack "floats" on the xfrmr secondary and isn't connected to the case ground at all. The input jack also floats, though with the Ground Lift switch in the "preferred" position (lifted), the RC network directly grounds radio frequencies only. For that to function properly, you must not ground the body of your XLR connector directly to the case. So, using the Edcor xfrmr, your only ground should come from PIN 3 of the XLR, through the RC network/LIFT switch, and should tie to a ground lug inside the case.
Ok so the ground from te xlr and the ground/sleeve of the 1/4" connect to the transformer an do not make contact to the case? Or do they connect at a central ground point to the case
I will use a plastic 1/4" jack. I am just curious if the grounds make contact with the case whatsoever
> how a 1:1 transformer ...converts anydamnthing?
It breaks the ground.
In a large studio the source (tape deck, DAW, etc) is in the control room on one power circuit and the amplifier is out in the studio on another circuit, or a different point on a long power circuit. Guitar amp inputs are unbalanced, the ground is a signal reference. That works fine for a short cable from a guitar hanging on a strap, but can make trouble when the source has its own ground. microVolts of stray voltage make large buzz.
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 19, 2010, 03:03:52 PM
I am just curious if the grounds make contact with the case whatsoever
The answer to your question is
no, the grounds of the jacks make no contact with the case whatsoever. If you connected the jack grounds, you would bypass, and therefore defeat the purpose of, the transformer. That is one of the main and most useful functions of transformers, to "transform" voltage/current from one part of a circuit to another
without making any physical contact whatsoever. Among other things, (as PRR said) this sort of isolation helps reduce noise (by breaking ground loops).
An one more question. Do you use a different ratio or different transformer to make a direct box out of a edcor transformer. Looking to make a direct box too with the edcor equivelant of the jensen di?
I've never made a xfrmr direct box, so you're on your own with that. The Jensen site has lots of good schematics with part numbers, so it's just a matter of figuring out which Edcor part is roughly the same.
Happy hunting! :icon_biggrin:
Quote from: Paul Marossy on June 18, 2010, 03:01:44 PM
Forgive my dumb question, but what it the point of "re-amping" anyway? I just read a little blurb about it in the latest issue of Guitar Player magazine, but the concept still doesn't make any sense to me. ???
It supposedly allows you to "re-amplify" a safety track so you can reuse the performance later. I did a session where the producer split my signal out with a direct box for a clean safety track (as well as micing my amp). Then on one track he reused that and ran it through his onboard plugin fx in his DAW s/w and consequently ruined the guitar sound for me, and used that instead of the mic'ed track, grrrrr... :icon_mad: But you
could run the safety track back into a guitar amp for re-recording of the performance. The re-amp box converts from the lo-Z of the mixing board output to a typical hi-Z guitar signal. I agree with Ashcat in that it is probably unnecessary for plugging directly into a guitar amp. With ~1M input impedance, who cares how low the impedance is of the input signal. If you wanted to run through a Rangemaster or Fuzz Face first, which requires a hi Z sig to sound right, it might be necessary. But I suspect a re-amp box doesn't really do all the "pickup simulation" stuff you would need in that case anyway. I believe it just serves as an impedance converter. So IMO it is probably kind of unnecessary. But when I home record I don't record safety tracks, etc. Part of the performance, for me,
is the sound. You either catch it and get what you want or you don't- without a net IMO...
I suspect producers like gizmos like this more than performers do. Esp if it allows the producer to go back and ruin the track after the fact.
I've been using a simple 10K volume pot in a box for reamping, and it has worked great. Just ran a guitar cable out of one of the outputs of my interface. It attenuates line level down to guitar level so it doesn't blast the effects with too hot of a signal. It just loses one of the balanced lines. I really see no need for a transformer, for a home recordist, unless you really want the balanced line because you're running it through a long snake and are getting noise. For ground loops, you could just put a ground lift switch in, and isolate one of the jacks. A cheap transformer would likely screw up the sound way more than wiring it straight through unbalanced. Actually, rather than a pot, an attenuator made with a rotary switch with a voltage divider made of a ladder of metal film resistors would be more hi-fi, and make settings more repeatable. Kind of like you see on nicer mic pre-amps.
Many engineers don't have the working knowledge of electronics we do, and falsely assume there is something gained by converting a low impedance source to a hi impedance one, to run it into a hi impedance input, and "match" them. A hi impedance input will happily accept a hi or low impedance source with no issues. The only issues with audio signal impedance is running a hi impedance source (probably guitar) into a low impedance input (say, a 10K line input on a mixer, or passive DI), where you get tone suck from the pickups being loaded.
This is ignoring the rare fuzz face type effects that load the pickups, and a low impedance source (like a line in, or buffered guitar) will squash them. For reamping with those, you'd want to add a series resistance, or go further and make a pickup simulator like the thing at AMZ.
Well a couple of things here. I could totally sell these reamping boxes to the local studios. And I don't thing the pot is horible. Just not as good as it can be. And from I here edcor transformers rock. Illegal be making more of these I'm the future I have a feeling
> For ground loops, you could just put a ground lift switch in, and isolate one of the jacks.
Since the destination is unbalanced, lifting the ground is equivalent to breaking the circuit. No sound.
The pot is usually necessary: most sources are stronger than any guitar, and you need the equivalent of the guitarist's arm-strength and axe-pot to set up the amplifier's tone and overload.
Metal-film switch attenuator seems like lily-gild to me, but if that's what the Buyer wants to see....
Given the low level and narrow bandwidth at guitar jack, if the transformer is well-suited to the pot (nominal impedance = or > than pot) the transformer is probably not hindering "the sound". Again, whatever the Buyer wants to see.....
Technically it's not full breaking the ground just keeping the ground from transfering from transformer tothe 1/4" Jack right?
Quote from: PRR on June 21, 2010, 12:13:50 AM
> For ground loops, you could just put a ground lift switch in, and isolate one of the jacks.
Since the destination is unbalanced, lifting the ground is equivalent to breaking the circuit. No sound.
If things are buzzing, it is because the ground circuit is still being made through the 3rd prong on the amp and the 3rd prong on the mixer going back to the breaker eventually. The ground loop is cut. One could put in the cap and series resistor between in and out ground as per Jenson's schematic in the ground lift position, if there where issues just opening the ground connection.
Though the "ground lift" (it's more like chassis ground lift, as opposed to cutting ground between input and output) on Jenson's Reamp schematic is honestly kind of strange and superstitious, because all it does is disconnect a DC connection from the metal box and the shield on the XLR cable. The box can be seen as merely a continuation of the XLR cable's shield. The switch isn't useful, unless the bare metal box is touching something else metal, like an amp chassis or pedal. Some rubber feet would do the same thing, or a sticker. Or moving it.
It's a good point that guitars aren't very wide bandwidth. The transformer thing makes it more universally useful in a real recording studio with XLR snakes going into another room. I thought it was important to let home recordists know that they need nothing except an inline pot or attenator to get good (ie, identical sounding to an expensive reamp box) results plugging their soundcard into their amp. They could even make a special cable with a two resistor voltage divider soldered right into the amp side plug. No ground loop worries if the amp is plugged into the same outlet as the PC.
Quote
Metal-film switch attenuator seems like lily-gild to me, but if that's what the Buyer wants to see....
The real value of the stepped attenuator over a pot is merely that the settings are limited, and repeatable. The metal film part is the lily gilding! I have some things to do this evening, but I'll try to put together a schematic for an alternative, xfmr-less reamp box sometime soon.
Quote from: Processaurus on June 21, 2010, 01:47:29 AM
Quote from: PRR on June 21, 2010, 12:13:50 AM
> For ground loops, you could just put a ground lift switch in, and isolate one of the jacks.
Since the destination is unbalanced, lifting the ground is equivalent to breaking the circuit. No sound.
If things are buzzing, it is because the ground circuit is still being made through the 3rd prong on the amp and the 3rd prong on the mixer going back to the breaker eventually. The ground loop is cut. One could put in the cap and series resistor between in and out ground as per Jenson's schematic in the ground lift position, if there where issues just opening the ground connection.
Ah, I thought of a problem, even though you would definitely get sound, by cutting the shield at one end and relying on the building's wiring to make the ground connection, it might be noisy, because the building's grounds being used to connect the PC and the amp will probably have all kinds of appliances leaking power onto it and causing a changing voltage potential between the two pieces of equipment's ground reference. The 1:1 isolation transformer is a good idea if the amp can't conveniently be plugged into the same outlet as the pc. But if things can share an outlet the xfmr isn't necessary.
From AMZ's article (http://www.muzique.com/lab/patent1.htm) about the Jenson design, the Reamp patent is eerily similar:
(http://www.muzique.com/images/reamp.gif)
Yeah, the ground switch thing as drawn in Jenson's schematic is an error, the 1/4" output jack should not be isolated from the chassis ground. Like a DI, the chassis needs to be permanently connected to either the input or output ground, and not left floating, just like you wouldn't isolate a pedal's hammond chassis from the jacks. The ground lift should break the connection between in and out's ground, not in's and the chassis's ground with the out left permanently floating. So either don't use an isolated jack, or draw a wire from the white wire over to the sleeve connection on the 1/4" out.
(http://www.muzique.com/images/reamp2.gif)
Quote from: Joe Kramer on June 18, 2010, 04:53:43 PM
However, use a metal case to minimize hum.
Unfortunately the case won't effectively shield electromagnetic interference from power transformers, wall warts, etc. (a concern because it would often naturally be stacked on top of an amp) unless it is thick steel or other ferrous metal, aluminum doesn't block it at all. A forumite, Mike, turned me on to this stuff for magnetic shielding, it works well:
Quote from: .Mike on January 01, 2010, 10:34:58 PM
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=G16600A
Quote from: Processaurus on June 21, 2010, 08:17:30 AM
the ground switch thing as drawn in Jenson's schematic is an error
By "error" I think you mean to say the Jensen schematic is not drawn exactly as in the patent you posted? At any rate, the Jensen schematic can and does work perfectly exactly as drawn. After using this circuit, the only mod I might suggest is to raise the value of the Impedance control (to 100K or so?) because it has only slight effect using the value shown.
Quote from: Joe Kramer on June 21, 2010, 01:45:36 PM
Quote from: Processaurus on June 21, 2010, 08:17:30 AM
the ground switch thing as drawn in Jenson's schematic is an error
By "error" I think you mean to say the Jensen schematic is not drawn exactly as in the patent you posted? At any rate, the Jensen schematic can and does work perfectly exactly as drawn. After using this circuit, the only mod I might suggest is to raise the value of the Impedance control (to 100K or so?) because it has only slight effect using the value shown.
Nope! It's wrong as in they missed drawing a line. App notes can be wrong. If it doesn't seem fishy just from the electronics you know, reference any DI schematic (as these are just a backwards DI, with a volume knob), like this one from jenson (http://www.jensen-transformers.com/datashts/dbe.pdf). Note the 1/4" input is connected to the chassis. Yours isn't grossly noisy to the point of being obviously malfunctioning because the chassis is still AC connected to the XLR through a cap an resistor, but you may have wondered why the switch doesn't do anything useful. It is permanently lifted. In the case of when you might like to connect it, like when reamping to just a pedal with no 3rd prong power, you wouldn't be able to, and the pedal's ground would be floating in a DC way.
Quote from: Processaurus on June 21, 2010, 05:45:49 PM
Nope! It's wrong as in they missed drawing a line. App notes can be wrong. If it doesn't seem fishy just from the electronics you know, reference any DI schematic (as these are just a backwards DI, with a volume knob), like this one from jenson (http://www.jensen-transformers.com/datashts/dbe.pdf). Note the 1/4" input is connected to the chassis. Yours isn't grossly noisy to the point of being obviously malfunctioning because the chassis is still AC connected to the XLR through a cap an resistor, but you may have wondered why the switch doesn't do anything useful. It is permanently lifted. In the case of when you might like to connect it, like when reamping to just a pedal with no 3rd prong power, you wouldn't be able to, and the pedal's ground would be floating in a DC way.
Okay, I see what you mean by the Jensen DI schemo. And come to think of it, after having built this, http://www.jensen-transformers.com/as/as002.pdf, I did find that the output jack sleeve needed grounding to the case. IOW, same error. And all this time, I believed their apps were as exemplary as their xfrmrs. :icon_frown:
As for the reamp, I've never had a problem, though I tend to use the same set-up in the same way every time I use it. I guess I should check it with some other sources/destinations before I send other builders off on futile missions. Sorry for the mis-guidance on my part. Thanks for the eye-opener.
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 18, 2010, 03:09:46 PM
With reamping you record the dry signal going into the computer. So pretty much what you pickups sound like before an amp.
Um, except this process completely loses any interaction the guitar pickups, volume and tone controls, and cords have with the input to the amp, or the effects.
A guitar pickup is a complex source impedance. Replaying it from a recording is not quite the same thing as replaying it from the guitar. The guitar source impedance is entirely missing.
Not that it can't sound good. But it's not the same.
While I'm thinking about it, Tim, is there anything else you need to market yourself that we can design for you?
Wow. I have sold like two pedals that I didn't like. And everything else I've built has been for my own personal use... You can't really learn something as complex as electronic circuitry with posting questions and getting opinions and answers on things... I think it's kinda lame that you are accusing me of using this forum and it's users for profit... I am no electrical engineer. I am a 21 year old guy interested in electronics... If people didn't wanna help me out with my projects than they would not offer up the information. Thanks for encouragement R.G.
I am a guy with musical knowledge and experience and a drive and desire for diy electronics. I don't need anymore information From
you R.G. So please save your low blows for somebody worthy of the accusation and skip right past my threads ok?
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 21, 2010, 07:03:09 PMI think it's kinda lame that you are accusing me of using this forum and it's users for profit...
I'm confused. I read this post from you:
Quotethats how i plan to market myself around here with any builds i do. i can just le them try out my pedals and compare it to the stock version circuits that modify and upgrade the parts for. i dont really sell them. but that how i can sell my business and my repairs ll
And offered to help. Did I miss something?
In addition, the technical comment on a recording of a guitar not being the same as the guitar itself is accurate. Did you not need to know that?
R.G. Look at your last post. You asked if there was anything else I wanted to market that you could help design for me. Sarcasm at it's best. I see people in this forum get accuses for things like that alot. Just didn't think I would be one for asking questions
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 21, 2010, 07:47:15 PM
R.G. Look at your last post. You asked if there was anything else I wanted to market that you could help design for me. Sarcasm at it's best. I see people in this forum get accuses for things like that alot. Just didn't think I would be one for asking questions
I actually have a pretty good memory of that post. It said:
Quote from: R.G. on June 21, 2010, 06:54:45 PM
is there anything else you need to market yourself that we can design for you?
... which is what you asked, I believe.
Or do you not want help?
my Understanding of the word market generally means To advertise and sell. And i felt it was sarcasm implyig that your guys are designing me a product for my own profit... If that was not your intentions in that post I will offer upy apology now. I know you highly respected around that forums R.G...
Can I be honest? It may have been that fact that it's 98 degrees, and my dad is kicking me out and told me he won't be attending my wedding that's in a month, affecting my perception and immediately being defensive. I apologize if you intended to truly help me.
Quote from: R.G. on June 21, 2010, 06:53:58 PM
A guitar pickup is a complex source impedance. Replaying it from a recording is not quite the same thing as replaying it from the guitar. The guitar source impedance is entirely missing.
Question, would a 10K:10K isolation transformer's secondary, with the primary being fed from recorder, react much differently than a steel string wiggling over a 10K magnetic pickup, provided the recorder level is matched (padded down appropriately)? Is there something electronically different happening from the viewpoint of the output coil sensing an alternating magnetic field, regardless of how it was generated?
It seems the only thing that you can't create with reamping is controlled feedback. Everything seems audibly the same to me. Including pinch harmonics. Dynamics. Everything
Quote from: Processaurus on June 21, 2010, 09:28:42 PM
Question, would a 10K:10K isolation transformer's secondary, with the primary being fed from recorder, react much differently than a steel string wiggling over a 10K magnetic pickup, provided the recorder level is matched (padded down appropriately)? Is there something electronically different happening from the viewpoint of the output coil sensing an alternating magnetic field, regardless of how it was generated?
Let's take the big example first.
Remember all the hoo-hah about not using a buffer in front of a fuzz face? A guitar pickup looks, to a first order, like a 1H to 4H inductor with some series resistance and a parallel capacitor. The models get complicated from there on.
The output of a recorder looks like - yep, you guessed! - the output of a line amplifier. I guess the simple explanation is that guitar pickups are not 10K magnetic pickups. They may have 10K of resistance, but it doesn't stop there. Yes, there's something different.
Remember how some players use a long cord for "brown sound" or "tone sucking", which are the same, just different ways of describing it? That's the cable capacitance eating treble because the pickup impedance is high in the treble end.
This gadget is for people who are either overly obsessed with "tone" or want to endlessly twiddle with stuff after the fact, or both. I.e., for producers, not performers.
Record your track, get it the best you can, and move on, IMO.
Not to mention that this thing is pretty unnecessary, except possibly for converting from balanced to unbalanced line, if needed.
I've got something I wrote & recorded 20 years ago on a 4-track that I'm redoing for better fidelity and to include some other musicians on it. Listening back, it's not the greatest "tone" but the performance and feel more than make up for it. I don't even hear the "tone" when I listen to it any more. Performance trumps "tone"- every time... And I'm looking forward to redoing it and performing it even better.
Quote from: todd rundgrensound quality only matters to the audience if the song is bad
The reamping thing can be fiddley, time consuming, and lead to option fatigue, or just be a safety net or a "we'll get a good sound later" kind of procrastination, but it opens the door to things like adjusting the settings on an amp or pedal in the middle of a part, like Neil Young's Whizzer (the machine that sits on top of his Deluxe and turns the knobs to different preset positions), for more unique and animated sounds, or recording parts at night when people are sleeping and then blasting it through a stack the next day, or you could borrow someone's nice cherished amp for a day and run a record's worth of guitar through it. Or put an amp in a neat sounding space. The transduce anything thread got me planning on trying reamping guitar and synth through different materials to see if it gives it some good character. Like transducing electric guitar into an acoustic guitar gave us a great, Leadbelly kind of sound.
I had a whole EP with an instrumental band that we recorded direct, intending to reamp everything, and never did it because we ran out of time and had to send it off. Just used the direct sound :icon_eek:. It sounded strangely ok, but moral of the story was make sure to have the time and energy for the reamping thing.
Quote from: Joe Kramer on June 21, 2010, 06:30:36 PM
Okay, I see what you mean by the Jensen DI schemo. And come to think of it, after having built this, http://www.jensen-transformers.com/as/as002.pdf, I did find that the output jack sleeve needed grounding to the case. IOW, same error. And all this time, I believed their apps were as exemplary as their xfrmrs. :icon_frown:
As for the reamp, I've never had a problem, though I tend to use the same set-up in the same way every time I use it. I guess I should check it with some other sources/destinations before I send other builders off on futile missions. Sorry for the mis-guidance on my part. Thanks for the eye-opener.
Sure! It's a strange situation, because one generally ought be safe trusting the app note over the random internet person.
Quote from: ashcat_lt on June 17, 2010, 12:02:03 PM
Did you ever worry about "impedance mismatch" when plugging from a pedal to your amp? How 'bout from one pedal to another?
The out-Z of most pedals is very low, possibly even lower than that of your interface.
The concerns you hear come from folks who don't understand the issue and believe the hype.
If you're looking for the filtering and saturation from a cheap transformer those "Line Matching Transformers" from RadioShaft will deliver, but if youi want a good clean transfer from your interface to a pedal or amp, just plug the thing in.
This is exactly what I was going to suggest. I use a pair of these to run vocals 'in' and 'out' of a cheap old Zoom 2020 digital multi effects unit. They solve all the impedance issues quite simply.
Quote from: R.G. on June 22, 2010, 12:37:59 AM
The output of a recorder looks like - yep, you guessed! - the output of a line amplifier. I guess the simple explanation is that guitar pickups are not 10K magnetic pickups. They may have 10K of resistance, but it doesn't stop there. Yes, there's something different.
Remember how some players use a long cord for "brown sound" or "tone sucking", which are the same, just different ways of describing it? That's the cable capacitance eating treble because the pickup impedance is high in the treble end.
Presumably this part has already been taken care of by the time we've gotten to the re-amping portion of the program. That is, while recording the track, the guitar was connected to some (hopefully) appropriate input impedance via some cable. The pickup inductance and cable crapacitance have already done their dirty work all over the signal. I'd think that we'd want to avoid duplicating this in the act of re-amping. Best way I can think to do this is to make sure that the source impedance is very low.
To put it another way, I honestly don't believe most amplifiers care what's connected to them. It's what the pickups "see" that has the biggest impact on tone. Again, I'll point to the case of running through a pedal on the way to the amplifier.
Quote from: DougH on June 22, 2010, 08:22:11 AM
This gadget is for people who are either overly obsessed with "tone" or want to endlessly twiddle with stuff after the fact, or both. I.e., for producers, not performers.
An ironic criticism to make on a forum devoted to people building gadgets with which to endlessly twiddle for the sake of tone! :icon_wink:
Quote from: DougH on June 22, 2010, 08:22:11 AM
Record your track, get it the best you can, and move on, IMO.
But "getting it the best you can" presumably excludes the use of a reamp box? Not trying to pick a fight here, just observing that no tool is "useless" if it helps you achieve the aim you have in mind. Unless your aim happens to include recording a track
and specifically not using a reamp box, there's no other reason to place limits on materials or tools in recording, or in any creative medium for that matter. Just saying. . . .
Quote from: ashcat_lt on June 22, 2010, 02:20:36 PM
Presumably this part has already been taken care of by the time we've gotten to the re-amping portion of the program.
Hmmm. I wonder then why some people don't like the sound of re-amping? Didn't someone post that a few posts back? :icon_wink:
QuoteThat is, while recording the track, the guitar was connected to some (hopefully) appropriate input impedance via some cable. The pickup inductance and cable crapacitance have already done their dirty work all over the signal. I'd think that we'd want to avoid duplicating this in the act of re-amping. Best way I can think to do this is to make sure that the source impedance is very low.
The problem with that is a re-amping track is the unvarnished guitar signal so it can be run through other effects after the fact, right? It's not that the original guitar signal wasn't appropriately loaded when it was recorded. It's that you can't undo that and load it differently when reamping. It's nice to think of re-amping as running the recorded guitar into a different amp or effect when reamping, but you're stuck with what the original setup did. You can't go back and un-do the original effects. Playing the recorded guitar sound, loaded as it was, into a different amp later is not the same as playing the actual guitar into the different amp directly. Low impedance may force the second amp to follow the original recording, but that's not the same as the guitar being plugged into the second amp, potentially. Maybe bad, maybe not bad, but different.
There are a couple of possibilities.
(1) The producer is going to do whatever they like to it, so the player's wishes and ears don't matter. Fine - do whatever feels good.
(2) The player gets a vote, and is picky about tone. If a player is picky about what cords, effects, amps, etc. are on the way to their tone, they're likely to be picky enough to at least think they hear the interaction of the guitar setup with an amp.
In case 2, unless you loaded the guitar with exactly the load it will see with whatever you connect to it in the reamping process, the reamping process will come out differently. The effect of the loading on the guitar will be different. The guitar recording freezes whatever the effect of the guitar being recorded dry into whatever it was recorded dry into has on the guitar signal. That may or may not be what you want when reamping, because presumably you're REamping to change things a bit.
QuoteTo put it another way, I honestly don't believe most amplifiers care what's connected to them. It's what the pickups "see" that has the biggest impact on tone. Again, I'll point to the case of running through a pedal on the way to the amplifier.
Well, Mother Nature doesn't care much what you or I believe. She's very stubborn that way. Under the situation where the driving impedance is much less than the amplifier's input impedance and the amplifier is not being overdriven, you're right. However, guitar outputs rapidly get up towards the amplifier input impedance, and it's frequency dependent. So the guitar signal, not the amplifier, is changed by the amplifier it's connected to. It is possible that this will all work out just swimmingly - also that there will be audible differences to some players who may not like the changes.
Remember EJ says he can hear the difference in where the screws are placed in the backs of his speaker enclosures. Can you prove he can't? :icon_biggrin:
And there is at least one situation where an amplifier input does care what impedance drives it. A triode grid driven from a low impedance distorts differently from the same grid driven by a high impedance. A low driving impedance input-clips less sharply than a high driving impedance as the grid goes from nearly-infinite impedance to a few K as it gets driven positive. That's pretty easy to demonstrate.
So is the difference in sound in a Fuzz Face or similar distortion pedal when driven from a raw guitar versus a buffer.
If you don't hear a difference, or haven't tried it and believe you won't hear a difference, that's OK. Go for it. I have not messed with reamping. But I get chewed on by picky players regularly. :icon_biggrin:
I re-amp all the time.
Most of the time it's because my bass player currently lives in another state and he is forced to record direct and I like to get his bass sound with a mic in a room, it's not as nice as when we can get him here and run a nice tube di WITH an amp, but it gets the job done.
I also re-amp drums, vocals, drum machines... often in conjunction with my cistern as an echo chamber.
Depending on what sounds better, I use an old passive dod DI in reverse or the behringer ultra DI (which is surprisingly good sounding) but usually it's just the passive box, sometimes running through the tube buffer of my Anthony Demaria DI.
I don't tend to re-amp guitar because I'm a guitar player with a bunch of amps and I don't mind just playing it again with the right amp/right mic, but I can see why you would want to do it. Much like the pickup simulator circuit, I do like the sound of a transformer in the path over just plugging my MOTU into an amp.
It's never gonna be the same is a guitar in a room, not just for the complex electrical interaction, but the interaction of a wood guitar in a room with high spl and the performance factor... you always rock harder with a cranked amp!
Edit.. Oh yeah, and what R.G said
I only re-amp out of necessity, the necessity to mangle things beyond recognition and make emailed bass parts sound better, not for endless guitar possibilities.
I think 90% of people who don't like reamping are the old school players who swear by their gear and their gear only. Anything that's not recorded on old 3m tape with their perception of their guitar idols "tone" is unacceptable before they hear it
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 22, 2010, 03:21:42 PM
I think 90% of people who don't like reamping are the old school players who swear by their gear and their gear only. Anything that's not recorded on old 3m tape with their perception of their guitar idols "tone" is unacceptable before they hear it
Hmm. Lessee, let's do some "how does that sound the other way round?". How does this statement sound to you?
QuoteI think that 90% of people who like reamping are new school players who swear that the gear doesn't matter. Anything that's not recorded direct to digital with their perception of their guitar idols' "tone" is unacceptable before they hear it.
A tad opinionated and argumentative?
Gosh, how did it sound when you said it the first way?
:icon_biggrin:
As a music producer I have noticed the classic rock kinda gang it's not really open to any suggetions from the producer. 3 different classic rock bands we recorded don't understand no matter how many times you tell them... That a mic will NOT pick up the exact tone they here with their ears coming out of their amp. Their tone is their tone and they just don't feel like listening to the guys they came to to record it. I wanna reamp so I can do their songs justice. Not pick up their tube screamer with all knobs at 10 in front of a Marshall with the patch cable jumpering their channels at such a loud volume you can't monitor it for them correcty. I like reamping. The songs sound great when they are done in the context of a mix
Quote from: TimWaldvogel on June 22, 2010, 04:29:01 PM
As a music producer I have noticed the classic rock kinda gang it's not really open to any suggetions from the producer. 3 different classic rock bands we recorded don't understand no matter how many times you tell them... That a mic will pick up the exact tone they here with their ears coming out of their amp. Their tone is their tone and they just don't feel like listening to the guys they came to to record it. I wanna reamp so I can do their songs justice. Not pick up their tube screamer with all knobs at 10 in front of a Marshall with the patch cable jumpering their channels at such a loud volume you can't monitor it for them correcty. I like reamping. Te songs soun great when they are done cause I actually was able to put it in the context of a mix. Best piece of eat ie used in a long time with my edcor transformer !! Will post pix asap
Alright, now I was defending you a bit because I do a bit of re-amping myself but this is one of the most ignorant statements I've ever read, of course I thought I was a producer that knew everything when I was 21 too.
Your job as a producer/engineer is to capture the artistic intention of the band period, you work for them, not the other way around, they tell YOU what to do. Maybe it's because these guys have been playing music for as long as you have been around so that they KNOW that a mic is not the same as your ears and they KNOW there is a difference between being in a room with a screaming Marshall and recording direct. Recently I recorded a band that used all amp modelers, not even good ones, everything except the drums were direct, it was a major pain for me to set up six different mixes for their cans. I suggested it might sound better if they used real amps, they like their modelers... I think the drums sound great because there is no bleed in the mics but the guitars sound like crap, they love the guitars. Now I can impose my will while mixing and re-amp the guitars through a 64 Super Reverb OR I can listen to the band and make the record that they want to hear. My job is to keep them on track and make suggestions that I think will help them, but in the end it is their decision because it is their art.
You can't possible be comparing a mic to ears! For one, I know what mics sound good on my amps and in what positions because I have spend years figuring it out, now if I'm going to a strange studio I am open to suggestions about placement and mic selection, but knowing my rig is a nice place to start and if I tell somebody that a certain mic sounds good in a certain place and he is a good engineer then it will save him time experimenting and give him a baseline for what I want to hear, because it is MY tone. An e609 is not a U87 and vice versa and I think the mic/ear analogy is bull, the mic could be in a null or a standing wave in the room, the guy could have three jensens and one greenback speaker and he wants you to mic the greenback, you could be standing in a flutter echo and the mic not, it's an over simplification of our job and you are over selling your contribution, imposing your will, and proving that you do not understand the nature of recording.
Recording my guitar is not about endless options at mixdown, it's about recording MY guitar. A good engineer can sculpt a mix and retain the integrity and sound of the artist.
No. Honestly. These guys didn't know a dang thing lol. I understand what your talking about as far as me working for them. But these guys just didn't have a clue about recording and understanding how a mic captures sound. They can't complain about it sounding like poo when I am not allowed to produce their stuff. It was distorting the mic and just plain horrible. I tried to tell them but thy wanted me to shut up and stop doing my job to save them some money in studio time... And I am their employee I get that, but if my boss gives me a turd and told me to polish it gold... Well I'd tell him it's not possible but ill do the best i can. Which is what I did. I have yet to get a classic rock band to come in and let me help them. Maybe I need to do something probono so I can make something worthy of a demo classic rock song
Mythbusters proved that you can, in fact, polish a turd...
Try a different mic, use the pad on your pre-amp, use a different pre-amp, move the mic, people record Marshalls on eleven every day.
Your job is to know how to do this, not convince the band of what will make your job the easiest.
To use myself as an example because I can't speak for anybody else. I haven't spent the last 25 years of my life learning guitar (I'm 35), acquiring gear, going to school, and making a career out of electronics so that I can build and modify my equipment to make it sound exactly how I want to let somebody run my guitar through whatever crappy amp he has on hand while I'm not there to have any input. If I don't Leo Fender, Jim Marshall, and Pete Traynor have the last word on how I sound, why would I let YOU have the last word?
I think that re-amping is a great tool for polishing a turd, I really do, I think it makes for some interesting sounds, but if I walked into a studio and the engineer said "I changed all your guitar sounds to my vision of how they should sound because you don't know what you're doing" At the very least, he wouldn't get paid.
I LOVE technology, but it steps out of reality sometimes, it's nice to have options, but really how "real" is it to have a dozen Fairchild 670 emulations running, how many studios on earth have a dozen $40K limiters on hand? It's a blessing, but often too many options lead to a mix that has no character.
Bad Brains "Pay to cum" was recorded in a warehouse with a pizza box taped to the kick head because it broke, that 7" is AWESOME, what if somebody had gone in with SPL drum exchanger and fixed that after the fact? Would it have captured the angst any better?
I truy don't change the sound. Just raise or lower the gain by snippets and alter eq to be less bright at times
And I love the mythbusters. Haha they couldn't polish any old turd
though.
I'm not the least bit interested in arguing the pros and cons of re-amping. I have and will do it on occasion. Different strokes for different folks and all that. The point I'm trying to make is that many people are doing it and many of them have a poor understanding of what it takes which can lead them to purchase a rather expensive box which may not be necessary or applicable to their particular situation.
Keep in mind that when we talk about "re-amping" it doesn't always involve a guitar, and also often doesn't even involve an amplifier. People use this same technique (and the boxes) to interface recorders and mixers with pedals and other Hi-Z inputs all the time.
I can definitely dig the fact that the input-Z used in the recording process may not be the same as it would if the guitar was plugged directly into the amp. Most active DI's - whether standalone units or those built into mic pres or recording interfaces - usually present 1M to the pickups. Many common (especially vintage) amplifiers will be lower than this. On the other hand, most passive DI's connected to typical mic pres will reflect an impedance lower than might be found at an amp's input - especially when running the "parallel output" to an actual amplifier for monitoring purposes. If we know for sure what we're going to be re-amping into, we can take steps to present the appropriate impedance at the time of recording. I have a cable with a 1M resistor soldered between the tip and sleeve on one end. In parallel with the 1M DI input, my guitar sees 500K. The difference is subtle, but real.
On the other hand, we're really just talking about a hi-pass filter. A fairly complex hi-pass filter to be sure, but not much more. I've got plenty of these in the box. I'm not going to step into the hornet's nest by saying that you can get the exact same response using EQ plugins. I know (from experience) that you can get perfectly acceptable results this way, however. When there's a doubt, I lean in the direction of capturing as much of the treble as possible and rolling it off if necessary on the way out of the box.
Keep in mind, too, that just because we're capturing a "safety copy" for later re-amping doesn't mean we can't actually have an amp in the room while recording the track. The guitar and guitarist can react to the moving air as per normal, but now we've got the option to mangle the sound if necessary.
Again, all I'm really trying to say is that the re-amp process itself can quite often be accomplished by way of a simple cable. I am always flabbergasted when people go out and buy a re-amp box or some expensive transformer to build one before even trying without it just becuase they don't understand the "impedance mismatch" issue. As mentioned above (like 4 pages ago) there are problems that these boxes can help to resolve, but they are situational, don't apply in every case, and can often be adressed in other ways.
Quote from: wavley on June 22, 2010, 03:14:21 PM
I re-amp all the time.
Most of the time it's because my bass player currently lives in another state and he is forced to record direct and I like to get his bass sound with a mic in a room, it's not as nice as when we can get him here and run a nice tube di WITH an amp, but it gets the job done.
I also re-amp drums, vocals, drum machines... often in conjunction with my cistern as an echo chamber.
Depending on what sounds better, I use an old passive dod DI in reverse or the behringer ultra DI (which is surprisingly good sounding) but usually it's just the passive box, sometimes running through the tube buffer of my Anthony Demaria DI.
I don't tend to re-amp guitar because I'm a guitar player with a bunch of amps and I don't mind just playing it again with the right amp/right mic, but I can see why you would want to do it. Much like the pickup simulator circuit, I do like the sound of a transformer in the path over just plugging my MOTU into an amp.
It's never gonna be the same is a guitar in a room, not just for the complex electrical interaction, but the interaction of a wood guitar in a room with high spl and the performance factor... you always rock harder with a cranked amp!
Edit.. Oh yeah, and what R.G said
I only re-amp out of necessity, the necessity to mangle things beyond recognition and make emailed bass parts sound better, not for endless guitar possibilities.
That makes a lot of sense. I don't have a problem with particular tools per se, just don't like how they are used at times. I was screwed on one song by a producer who thought he knew better what a good guitar sound was, and mangled my track completely with a lot of fakey "distortion" and reverb etc and it sounded like complete crap. It was a session I did to back up a friend so it's not a big issue AFAIC. And I honestly don't have a problem with others taking my work and adding their own spin to it- *if* they know what they are doing. BTW, this guy was an excellent producer/arranger otherwise and helped me a lot with some great ideas. Unfortunately, the great ideas were lost on that one song by the horrible sound because sonically he had a tin ear as far as guitar sound is concerned.
QuoteRecording my guitar is not about endless options at mixdown, it's about recording MY guitar. A good engineer can sculpt a mix and retain the integrity and sound of the artist.
I agree 100%. And part of where I'm coming from is as my own "producer" for home recording. I have no need for "safety tracks" or redoing things later.
My first need for a saftey track came along when I made a demo and was unable to track all the guitar in one day. I never USED to have the luxery of a quiet enviroment without people coming in and out all day. Tht and sometime the track is recorded perfectly, the timing is right and it just works with the song. And sometime you mus experiement to find out what sounds great. Before reamping everything was great. But now everything is grrrrrrrreeeat !!
I am basically gonna start runnin a DI into the interface and take the other output to the amp and record their amp. Then I can use the saftey track for layering.
Granted most my clients are not looking for their cd to sound like they do live with imperfections and a single guitar track kind of sound. They are looking for the overproduced compressed music they listen to in their cars around town. Something to get exited about. And for that I usually record one guitar track with their tone and layer it back with a little less treble and less gain so they can get a huge sounding track. So I will say reamping is not for everybody. But it IS for my studio.
I don't reamp often, but when I do, I reamp with Dos Equis software.
There are tons of cheap/free solutions out there that take care of all the issues an analog box could solve, plus some. I could see building one for personal use, but I wouldn't expect it to sell like hotcakes.
Still, it's best to use the real track you've got for all the benefits previously mentioned.
Sorry, I didn't mean to go on a big rant flaming you and all...
Sometimes I get things stuck in my craw. I've had it happen a few times where I recorded something I was proud of just to have somebody mangle it beyond recognition after the fact.
I understand the safety track thing a bit, for a while I was taking a di and a mic signal for my guitar (after the amp, another virtue of the behringer di) and the bass, but I never ended up using the di track of my guitar at all in the final mix and if I wanted something to sound thicker then I would just record another track or twenty with different amps and guitars to get the sound I wanted.
Also, I have discovered the joy of ribbon mics, so it has lessened the need for thickening up things after the fact.
To each his own, I don't deny the power and usefulness of re-amping. One of my favorite things is to run a drum machine track through my modded up Kalamazoo model one in a cistern with some space echo, crushed up tape saturation goodness.
QuoteKeep in mind that when we talk about "re-amping" it doesn't always involve a guitar, and also often doesn't even involve an amplifier. People use this same technique (and the boxes) to interface recorders and mixers with pedals and other Hi-Z inputs all the time.
this is true.
I mostly use my pedals for processing line level signals coming from my DAW's audio interface or for live use with a laptop, not a guitar or amp in sight.
I've been wondering lately if it might be worth building or buying a reamp box for matching impedances, but from what I've read in this thread, there wouldn't really be much point?
so if I got this right....
2 things we're concerned with: level and impedance.
the level I can just turn down from the DAW, usually about -30dB seems to present the pedal with a usable level.
with regards impedance, I was wondering if I wasn't getting the best out of my pedals when presenting them with a low Z signal.
then I read this:
Quote from: Processaurus on June 20, 2010, 08:34:23 PM
Many engineers don't have the working knowledge of electronics we do, and falsely assume there is something gained by converting a low impedance source to a hi impedance one, to run it into a hi impedance input, and "match" them. A hi impedance input will happily accept a hi or low impedance source with no issues. The only issues with audio signal impedance is running a hi impedance source (probably guitar) into a low impedance input (say, a 10K line input on a mixer, or passive DI), where you get tone suck from the pickups being loaded.
This is ignoring the rare fuzz face type effects that load the pickups, and a low impedance source (like a line in, or buffered guitar) will squash them. For reamping with those, you'd want to add a series resistance, or go further and make a pickup simulator like the thing at AMZ.
and this:
Quote from: ashcat_lt on June 17, 2010, 12:34:01 AM
IMNSHO a reamp box is almost always unnecessary.
Your amp doesn't care what's plugged into it. The important part of the guitar>amp interface is that the guitar's pickups see an appropriately Hi-Z load. Presumably, you've already taken care of this. This output of your interface is such Lo-Z that it can very easily drive any guitar amp.
The output might be a little louder than what you'd get out of a passive guitar, but there are volume controls (either analog or digital) to compensate for this.
all of which makes good sense to me.
so impedance matching only matters when we're talking about the Z load a guitar's pick-ups may see or when plugging a guitar straight into a line level mixer (not that you would).
but would fuzz face type circuits (like say, my tonebenders?) benefit from something like the AMZ pick-up simulator if I'm running low Z, line level signals through them?
Quotebut would fuzz face type circuits (like say, my tonebenders?) benefit from something like the AMZ pick-up simulator if I'm running low Z, line level signals through them?
I believe that was the original impetus for the pick-up simulator.
That is, a way for FF's and similar boxes to be run satisfactorily from active pickups or buffers.
From AMZ: http://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm (http://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm)
QuoteEffects circuit will respond differently to an input from a low impedance signal source such as an op-amp output than when driven directly from a guitar pickup. This can be especially evident with certain types of simple transistor circuits. The classic fuzz face is a good example of a circuit that has a low impedance input which produces a significantly different sound when connected to a guitar pickup than when it is preceded by a buffer or another effects box.
Note that doesn't mean the GPUS would magically revert your guitar tone to the way it was straight through, but at least it should prevent your fuzzbox from flipping out (like Fuzz Faces can do when presented with a low-Z signal).
Quote from: edvard on July 27, 2010, 09:59:55 PM
Quotebut would fuzz face type circuits (like say, my tonebenders?) benefit from something like the AMZ pick-up simulator if I'm running low Z, line level signals through them?
I believe that was the original impetus for the pick-up simulator.
That is, a way for FF's and similar boxes to be run satisfactorily from active pickups or buffers.
From AMZ: http://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm (http://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm)
QuoteEffects circuit will respond differently to an input from a low impedance signal source such as an op-amp output than when driven directly from a guitar pickup. This can be especially evident with certain types of simple transistor circuits. The classic fuzz face is a good example of a circuit that has a low impedance input which produces a significantly different sound when connected to a guitar pickup than when it is preceded by a buffer or another effects box.
Note that doesn't mean the GPUS would magically revert your guitar tone to the way it was straight through, but at least it should prevent your fuzzbox from flipping out (like Fuzz Faces can do when presented with a low-Z signal).
That pickup simulator is awesome. I run buffers before mine and it totally sounds better now, I have the option to turn it off and plug my guitar straight into it if I feel that it's really critical to preserve my actual pickup tone when recording, but to be completely honest I'm too lazy to do it because it's so close enough for rock and roll that even a tone snob perfectionist like me thinks it sounds good the way it is.
As a matter of fact, I re-amped an old Roland R-5 through my fuzz face, space echo, boomerang+ last night and really felt that it sounded great, not even thinking about the impedance matching aspect, but the center tap came in handy for tone shaping.
Quote from: DougH on June 22, 2010, 08:22:11 AM
This gadget is for people who are either overly obsessed with "tone" or want to endlessly twiddle with stuff after the fact, or both. I.e., for producers, not performers.
Record your track, get it the best you can, and move on, IMO.
Not to mention that this thing is pretty unnecessary, except possibly for converting from balanced to unbalanced line, if needed.
I've got something I wrote & recorded 20 years ago on a 4-track that I'm redoing for better fidelity and to include some other musicians on it. Listening back, it's not the greatest "tone" but the performance and feel more than make up for it. I don't even hear the "tone" when I listen to it any more. Performance trumps "tone"- every time... And I'm looking forward to redoing it and performing it even better.
I kind of agree because it seems like a twiddle box for guys with too much time on their hands, but I feel like I'm somewhat of an exception. I freelance out of a local commercial studio, but I don't want to spend hours away from my family recording guitar parts. I like being able to bounce back and forth between hanging out with the fam and playing guitar. If I split my guitar signal and record my guitar parts at home I can reamp at the studio later and I only have to worry about dialing in guitar sounds and not performances as well. Reamping is a necessity for me because I live in a townhouse and have a baby...can't crank the stacks here.
Oh...and my Firefly kicks insane amounts of ass and stands favorably next to the rest of the amps at the studio. That was a great way to spend less than $200!
I'm still not quite sure what the benefit is though.
If your just sending a line signal (your recorded guitar track) into the amp, and impedance matching isn't really an issue in such a case, why bother?
I mean, as RG said, impedance matching only really counts when the pick-ups are in the equation, but once the guitar part has been recorded, that interaction is then out of the equation.
If it's just a case of matching levels, just send the amp an attenuated line signal.
I'd really like to A/B a line signal going into an amp with and without the reamp box and hear if there is any real benefit.
Quote from: skrunk on July 28, 2010, 11:31:47 AM
I'm still not quite sure what the benefit is though.
If your just sending a line signal (your recorded guitar track) into the amp, and impedance matching isn't really an issue in such a case, why bother?
I mean, as RG said, impedance matching only really counts when the pick-ups are in the equation, but once the guitar part has been recorded, that interaction is then out of the equation.
If it's just a case of matching levels, just send the amp an attenuated line signal.
I'd really like to A/B a line signal going into an amp with and without the reamp box and hear if there is any real benefit.
I do it for two reasons for the most part.
1. Isolation- My recording equipment is all in a rack and properly grounded within that rack, my guitar stuff is in a different circuit and all properly grounded... but when you mix the two=buzz, not always, but often enough to use isolation all of the time. If I had more time and money then it would never be an issue, but I'm a working man with a basement studio that does the best he can to never record anyone but himself, needless to say... it doesn't make me any money, quite the opposite.
2. Sound- While you could argue that the amp seeing the transformer is more like a pickup and reacts better than seeing an op amp, that's not my reality... my amps see op amps, caps, and transistors on the input because of buffers, space echoes, boomerang+'s and stuff. On occasion I plug a guitar straight into an amp, dime everything, and rock out, and I would never dream of reamping a track like this, I would just play it again, and why not, it's fun! Last night I reamped a drum machine track, I intentionally saturated the transformer in my passive DI running in reverse, ran it through my pedal rig, and then intentionally saturated the transformers and tube buffer of my ADL DI, and again in my Neumann V476b's. The resulting sound was HUGE, dirty, compressed and up front in the mix. Now this is an extreme example and I'm not prone to extremes all the time, but I think it makes my point as a tone shaping weapon.
I think someone pointed out that a lot of people that make these "rules" about what you should use to record don't actually know anything about electronics. We do know about electronics so we should use reason when we do things. I'm a fan of re-amping and using transformers to do so, but if you read my earlier posts, I kind of tore into some poor guy for what I felt was abuse of the client/engineer trust and artistic integrity.
There are reasons to do it and reasons that say it wouldn't matter, much like anything else in the studio, it all depends on the situation.
cheers wavley, that's interesting.
I can understand how you might want to use it creatively with an amp, as you do.
I suppose I'm just wondering if using one between my audio interface and my pedals is going to allow me to get any more from them.
I might just try put one together and see if it offers any creative possibilities, which is all I'm after really.
Great big 'ol amp in a little room...rediculous.
Try making that work, it will.
Doesn't matter unless it matters, IME these guys want what they want and even if they knew what that was they wouldn't know what to try to figure out to get it.
Magic of amplifer...lol...yea if you figure there are hundreds of ways to make it sound bad, room / hall [if you got a really big amp...outside pelease.
Depends on the surfaces in the room and some room sound is nice, if dude's cranking his monster in order to make it growl, there's no way you're going to find a good place to put the mic because there isn't one.
Usually hasty rushes take precedence over understanding or figureing...just use compresion etc. forget the time consuming process of actually citing examples...much less demonstrating.
I see threads about re-amping pop up every now and then around the various forums I frequent. The OP is always one of two things:
A) "I've never tried re-amping (either through an amp or a pedal) but I heard something about an impedance mismatch and somebody on the internet said something about this box..."
B) "I've been re-amping for years and have always been satisfied, but somebody on the internet said something about this box, and now I wonder if I'm missing something."
The first I can almost understand. My advice is to try it first without, because it's cheaper.
The second I don't really understand at all.
In both cases the correct answer is that the re-amp boxes out there are designed to help alleviate a few possible problems that you might run into in the re-amping process. None of these problems are completely guaranteed to crop up in all - or even most - re-amping scenarios, and they all have other solutions. If it ain't a problem, it ain't a problem, and if it sounds good it is good.
Get his guitar signal into a splitter-buffer box, first thing.
Then grab your sample from right there at all times.
Do a sample recording if they wanna pay for junk, of the big amp cranked in smallish room [and all the associated wallbouncings / reverbia]..
Otherwise work with the clean pickup signal output, show what a sample of that can do [should be pretty dern good, I tried some CD quality samples into a tube amp...sounds like a dude playin' my guitar through my amp to me.
Not to say working with dude extensively [outdoors ? smaller amp ?] testing micing conditions can't make fine old style recordings...presenting a microphone into a room with amazing bounce levels [near surface reflections] or even totally dampened down [sound soaker room, can't hear anything except the initial wave]...pretty much limits the ability to experiment with what it'd take to expose up "the tape" to preferred sources.