Electric guitar in control room...

[gabler]

I would like to record my electric guitar in the control room but have my amp in a different room. How do I get my guitar signal
through my snake to another tracking room without losing tone?
Gabler

[drundall]

I run the head in the control room and use a long good speaker cable to get out to the cabinet.

[Crandall1]

Well, in a perfect world you'd have channels in your snake set aside for the purpose, heya?

But the obvious aside, there are a number of ways to go about it, and a fair percentage of those ways virtually guarantee you're going to pick up every cab driver in a ten-mile radius.

I'm sure many of the studio owners and operators that frequent this board will (a) have several good suggestions, and (b) absolutely go apeshit when they read what I'm about to tell you, but here's one method.

I was doing overdubs in the K2 room at Battery in NYC, and, due to a strange confluence of events, ended with the amps in the live room, and playing in the control room via a good quality wireless. Now, this might not be the best method, and certainly not in midtown Manhattan, but either K2 is well-shielded or the RF Gods were smiling on me that month (probably due to the sheer hubris of the act itself). Either way, it worked out fine, and was actually quite convenient, as there wasn't any cord to get wrapped around the wheels of the chair.

Your mileage may vary on this one, and I haven't done it since, but it worked, at least that time. One option to consider anyways.

-Chris Randall

[Jules]

THICK speaker cable between the rooms, head in control room.

Thats MY favorite anyway..

[Midlandmorgan]

I use a buffer after the guitar pedal board...pumps the signal up so you can run a good solid level 1/2 a mile...run that channel down one of the TRS return to the tracking room, then convert signal back to regular old 1/4 cable, into the amp(s)...

Hi gain things and single coil pickups (strat, tele, et al) will buzz like a big dog if the player gets too close to the video monitors, though...

Ken

[Dan-O]

The long speaker cable is the best way to IMO as well. I also run two passive DI's. One in the control room to a Low Z and one at the source from Low Z to Hi Z. You do lose a tad of hi end this way though depending on the DI. The IBP is designed to run long unbalanced cables but I've never used it for this purpose.

[blackcatdigi]

We use this:
hhttp://www.mercenary.com/smarressmard.htmlttp://www.mercenary.com/smarressmard.html

[Dave Martin]

I have been using the Smart DI for running into a combo amp, and have speaker lines built into the walls for things Head/cabinet amps.

[bjornson]

I built an "analog amp farm". 1x6 output splitter connected to various heads on a rolling shelf with 6 runs of 10 gauge spkr cable running to cabs in the tracking spaces. Heads all recieve simultanious input and drive individual cabs. all cabs are miced and pres output to P+G faders where you can combine, compress and eq them. Freaks people out.

[Steve Smith]

Originally posted by bjornson
I built an "analog amp farm". 1x6 output splitter connected to various heads on a rolling shelf with 6 runs of 10 gauge spkr cable running to cabs in the tracking spaces. Heads all recieve simultanious input and drive individual cabs. all cabs are miced and pres output to P+G faders where you can combine, compress and eq them. Freaks people out.

I have heard of folks doning this kind of thing, your your setup sounds really cool.. any chance at pictures?

[stakeoutstudios]

I've got a speaker cable running through to my amp room, heads in the control room. Try and keep the speaker cable as short as possible, mines not through a snake, but a single cable run through and over the wall.

Avoid running it next to mains cable if you can.

It's great, literally you can patch between different amp heads for different parts of songs!

Jason

[Jay Kahrs]

Originally posted by bjornson
I built an "analog amp farm". 1x6 output splitter connected to various heads on a rolling shelf with 6 runs of 10 gauge spkr cable running to cabs in the tracking spaces. Heads all recieve simultanious input and drive individual cabs. all cabs are miced and pres output to P+G faders where you can combine, compress and eq them. Freaks people out.

So it's just the guitar being split right? Not the output of the amps? I've gone down the multiple amp road a few times, I can never really get it to work unless there's a ton of space and pretty good isolation between the cabs. Overall, it's not something I would do unless I had a lot of time on my hands which could also be read as "budget".

I use a long speaker cable with the head in the control room. In the case of combos I'll either unplug the original speaker and use a cab instead or just **** it and use a long instrument cable. It's about a 40 foot run which isn't too bad. Albert Collins used a 150 foot cable all the time and if it worked for him...

[bjornson]

After reading my own post i'm not sure I got it quite right, so here goes again.....The guitar is split out to all heads, via a great cheap little splitter/combiner (rane sm26). Each output has its own gain control. I usually try to set it for unity throughput. cabs are gobo'ed from each other and each cab is miked.(sometimes w/multiple mics) You can use any amp with any cab, alone or together. All these mic signals are run to separate pres and come up as insert returns on big ol' P+G faders at the console. I've juggled as many as 15 inputs. Labeling is critical!!! sometimes I'll add a room mic and catch some roar too. I find that its a very cool way to get lots of tones FAST. There are literally thousands of combinations. I often combine several paths into one 1176 (or for stereo 1178) channel and compress/eq together. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but when you get the whole thing happening, the player can get a lot of great sounding parts down quickly. Just yesterday, after spending some time dialing in a mesa road king, I hooked up an old yamaha POS solid state combo and added just a whisper (5%)of "papery mids" (which sounded like complete ASS by itself) and bussed em' together. Jawwws wass a droppin. The next time I have a serious "guitar fest" I'll shoot some pix.