guitar reamping box

[R.G.]

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.

[R.G.]

While I'm thinking about it, Tim, is there anything else you need to market yourself that we can design for you?

[TimWaldvogel]

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.

[TimWaldvogel]

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?

[R.G.]

I 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:

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

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?

[TimWaldvogel]

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

[R.G.]

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:

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?

[TimWaldvogel]

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.     

[Processaurus]

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?

[TimWaldvogel]

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

[R.G.]

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.

[DougH]

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.

[Processaurus]

sound 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  .  It sounded strangely ok, but moral of the story was make sure to have the time and energy for the reamping thing.

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.   

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.

[Derringer]

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.

[ashcat_lt]

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.

[Joe Kramer]

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!  

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. . . .

[R.G.]

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? 

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. 

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.

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.

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? 

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. 

[wavley]

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.

[TimWaldvogel]

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

[R.G.]

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?

I 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?