Marshall 2203 REEEEEEEEEEE-work

[PLX]

When I can finally get all of that shit figured out I will post all kinds of clips. Until then I just get frustrated and want to throw everything at the wall.

I'm kind of there myself.

I never wanted to be a damned recording engineer.

It is frustrating when the rig you're playing through sounds so fucking good, but you place a mic on the speaker and the magic just disappears.

[RockyStar]

When I can finally get all of that shit figured out I will post all kinds of clips. Until then I just get frustrated and want to throw everything at the wall.

I'm kind of there myself.

I never wanted to be a damned recording engineer.

It is frustrating when the rig you're playing through sounds so fucking good, but you place a mic on the speaker and the magic just disappears.

It is a two sided coin...lol. On one side you practice a lot of years of your life, buy all kinds of cool shit and play and are happy. You plug in and say damn, this is fun, money well spent and you go on with your happy existence.

The other side of the coin is you are excited to share things with friends and then go to do so and hear the room sound vs the recorded sound and then ask yourself...why all the years of practice, buying all this shit and spending all this time to sound so good in a room and so bad on a recording. How is this possible? I don't know but it is.

[lll]

Sound engineering is, of course, a career all unto itself. If you want to sound good on "tape", you gotta learn some of it.

I can help. I'm not pro, but I have a lot of the gear and know enough and I'm... dangerous enough.

Ask away.

[lll]

Bass, Middle, Treble on 10
PREAMP: 6
Presence: 4
16Ω reactive load into 8Ω speaker tap.
Line out into audio interface
Reverb and low pass/high pass added in DAW

Sounds like a good stock (not all gussied up with studio fixin's) recording to my ears upon quick listen.

That's the first step - get a good recorded tone you can work with. It's not gonna blow you away (remember Eddie's stock ISO "Runnin With The Devil" snippets?)

The blowing away happens after you add the studio mustard.

[PLX]

Sound engineering is, of course, a career all unto itself. If you want to sound good on "tape", you gotta learn some of it.

I can help. I'm not pro, but I have a lot of the gear and know enough and I'm... dangerous enough.

Ask away.

I watched some Reaper DAW tutorials and realized I was looking at the wrong input meter. There's a way to change your "theme" in Reaper, and then switch to a large, easy-to-read input meter and then target -18 dB for your peak input level.

I was going waaay over this. That explains why I'm hearing all this clipping that was *not* in the original signal.

I'm gonna try to re-record tonight and correct this mistake, then see what that sounds like.

One of the differences I hear with your clips is, for lack of a better word, saturation. There seems to be a full, saturated signal that I think I was mistaking for "volume". But I realized now, it's not about the overall volume of the rendered clip.. there's some trick I'm missing in the final mixdown process that is producing that full, saturated sound in both left and right channels.

[lll]

I watched some Reaper DAW tutorials and realized I was looking at the wrong input meter. There's a way to change your "theme" in Reaper, and then switch to a large, easy-to-read input meter and then target -18 dB for your peak input level.

I was going waaay over this. That explains why I'm hearing all this clipping that was *not* in the original signal.

I'm gonna try to re-record tonight and correct this mistake, then see what that sounds like.

One of the differences I hear with your clips is, for lack of a better word, saturation. There seems to be a full, saturated signal that I think I was mistaking for "volume". But I realized now, it's not about the overall volume of the rendered clip.. there's some trick I'm missing in the final mixdown process that is producing that full, saturated sound in both left and right channels.

Generally speaking, the tone usually needs a little EQ massaging plus other goodies.

For guitar tracks (might need to make a "guitar buss" channel and pipe to here if doing multiple tracks):

-sometimes compression (1176 works great but also SSL is good here)
-EQ
-Tape saturation

For Master channel/bus (also known as the "2"):

-limiting (gentle/mastering style) to bring levels up
-(more) tape saturation.

For hosting sites like Soundcloud, YouTube, need your clip to hit around -14LUFS because they add their own compression (fags).

The FabFilter L2 provides this particular feature (meter read in LUFS)

If I were to guess what you're hearing as "saturation", it would be the tape plugins.

[lll]

and then switch to a large, easy-to-read input meter and then target -18 dB for your peak input level.

I typically go (input levels) for -14dB

But anywhere from -18dB to -12dB is good.

[lll]

Again (and most of this will be) general rule of thumb:

For guitars

-hi pass 100Hz @ 12dB per octave
-lo pass 8KHz @ 12dB per octave

Other freqs of note:

-500 Hz drop dBs to taste if too honky
-250 Hz drop dBs to taste if too woofy
-3,4,5,6KHz add dBs if you need more bite
-8KHz add to add "air"

There are lots of other frequencies that have effect of course, but you gotta train your ears by testing and fiddling to see what they do.

Be aware that getting all "surgical" with EQ, you're gonna want to give your ears a break after awhile, then come back to it. Ear fatique is a real thing; even when listening at reasonable levels.

odfr-guitar-eq-frequencies.png

[PLX]

If I were to guess what you're hearing as "saturation", it would be the tape plugins.

I think you're right. I realize now that by recording too hot of a signal to start with, I was leaving no headroom for the plug-ins I'm using.

This explains why I'm trying to use the tape emulation, and EQ plug-ins on my tracks and it just starts to sound like mush.

Another mistake you hit upon here is that I never bother to use "sends" or any of that. Never learned how to do that in Reaper.. I just record a track and load my plug-ins into the FX queue of that track.

[lll]

If I were to guess what you're hearing as "saturation", it would be the tape plugins.

I think you're right. I realize now that by recording too hot of a signal to start with, I was leaving no headroom for the plug-ins I'm using.

This explains why I'm trying to use the tape emulation, and EQ plug-ins on my tracks and it just starts to sound like mush.

Another mistake you hit upon here is that I never bother to use "sends" or any of that. Never learned how to do that in Reaper.. I just record a track and load my plug-ins into the FX queue of that track.

I only use busses ("sends") if:

- I've got multiple guitar tracks that need the same effect ("tweak once - affect many tracks" concept... and cuts down on processor load too)
for example, I have two tracks, doubled rhythm part. I want to put Eventide on them both, or maybe an 1176

- I want to blend an effect (Eventide, delay, reverb etc) with the dry tone using the channel fader

- I want to not only blend an effect, but pan it too (Van Halen 1st album)

- I want to keep the dry guitar tone separate from an effect (Van Halen 1st album reverb) so the dry tone doesn't get lost in reverb wash

- In a big project with countless tracks, I want to "conglomeratize" (haha fake word) many tracks (usually similar instruments) to one channel so I can quickly grab the channel fader