Teft’s Blog

So you’ve got some guitar amps laying around that don’t get use anymore because your head is always in the computer building beats … use them for the beat creation process! Just like you’d use Amplitube or Trash, REAL guitar amps are the pinnacle of crunchified dirty sounds. And what takes dirty processing in a fabulous fashion? Beats.

First off, we need to make sure some fundamentals are understood when sending signals out to guitar amps. What do you plug into a guitar amp? A guitar signal. What kind of signal is a guitar? Hi-z. Your audio interface is likely sending out a “line level” signal, which means that we need to convert that signal to Hi-z. (Drum roll) Radial X-Amp does the trick!

The X-Amp takes a line level signal (via XLR female input) and outputs two Hi-z signals. Ba-boom! You could drive two guitar amps at one time, mic ‘em both and have some serious creative sound processing!

The next piece of required information is micing a guitar amp. Generally speaking you need two mics: 1 mic really close to the speaker cone and 1 mic about 3 - 5 feet away catching the room sound. Your first mic catches the signal directly, kind of like a vocalist, and the second mic captures the reverb tale giving the sound air and life. There is no rule book to audio engineering, but you’ll generally get reliable results with this setup (and then build from there).

One more detail … guitar amps like volume! Amps true tone and character don’t really come out until you start pushing the tubes in the circuitry. A good rule of thumb is if I can be in the room with the amp(s) without ear plugs, then it’s not loud enough. You need to push the air molecules!

What next? Load up your favorite beat machine and send the signal to the amp! I made two beats .. 1 with MicroTonic and the other with UltraBeat from Logic. When mixing the signals, I usually lower the room mic down and blend the original signal with the recorded signals. It creates a larger than life sound. Have a listen:

Slow beat (83 bpm) Dry:

Slow beat (83 bpm) With Guitar Amp:

Mid beat (100 bpm) Dry:

Mid beat (100 bpm) With Guitar Amp:

Mid beat modified Dry:

Mid beat modified With Guitar Amp:

Here’s all the samples in 16-bit AIFF format (17.5 megs):
Download All Samples/Loops Here.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Make Beats,
Teft

 
More Production Posts:

• Producing Reusable Loops With Logic Pro and Various Plugins
• Building Electro/Dance loops from scratch using Logic Pro