April 3, 2009

• signal chain

  today jack and mark are recording guitars. i thought it would be nice, for the 5 people who read this and have interest in such things, to include a description of our guitar signal path. so, here goes:

  first, we plug a 1/4 inch instrument cable into something, like a guitar, like this one for instance.

  

  then we plug the other end of the cable into this amp switcher.

  

  it has a pretty blue light.

  the reason we do this is so that we can split the signal from the guitar. one cable goes directly into a patch bay that sends it to a preamp, that then sends it back to the patchbay, that then sends it into protools as a direct signal. this is so we can re-amp stuff later if we don’t like the tone and has the great benefit of ease of editing the waves of a direct guitar line are much easier to edit.

  out of the other side of the amp switcher we plug into a pedal board, like this one.

  

  or maybe we don’t plug into a pedal board and instead, plug into something more awesome like this.

  

  that was sort of a joke. unless you own that pedal and are into that sort of thing. in that case, it is just down right mean that i would make fun of it. i am sorry.

  then out of the pedal board, or awesomer pedal, we then plug into an amp head, like this one.

  

  that goes into a cabinet that we put two mics on like this.

  

  one, directly on the center of the cone up against the grill, and one about an inch back, just a bit out of phase.

  then we run those into a console, like this.

  

  we blend the second mic with the first to taste using the second mic to, in essence, adjust eq of the first by jacking with the phase.

  these tracks are bussed to one one track, like this.

  

  then we send that to a purple compressor, like this one.

  

  i like purple.

  we then go into protools through an aurora converter and then we smile very large smiles.

  • 1:40 am
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