Does reamping suck tone?

[Ermz]

Okay so I know it's common place in recording today, and given some of Marcus' prior tests one would be forced to conclude that reamping is virtually indistinguishable from running your guitar right into the amp (provided you use the right tracking chain).

BUT.

I've been going the reamping route for a year or two now as my main method of tracking guitars. We'll do the tracks here right into the Millennia/RME and reamp them wherever - at a studio, at some guy's house... wherever works.

I've yet to have a single one of these projects lead to a guitar tone that was as good as the ones I was getting straight into the amp years back.

None of them have sounded exciting, lively, full. I'm listening to my old raw tracks and they are dominating the reamps consistently. What's the issue? I use a world-class channel strip with reasonable quality conversion. Why does the 6505 not sound chunky and sweet anymore? Why do none of the tones breathe as well as the SLO100 did?

I can't figure it out. I'm hitting a point where I'm sick of the process and would like to go back to recording the old fashioned way. I just can't work out where the quality loss is happening.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Sly]

I think reamping sucks tone, for sure. I've done many tests and you clearly loose something (smoothness, clarity), you can hear it even more if you use high quality gear (like a good DA converter for monitoring).
I always had good results with reamping but better ones when tracking directly through the amp. But maybe you have an issue in your chain too...

 

[Lasse Lammert]

I'll try recording a small comparison later.....let's see how many people will be able to tell the reamped tone from the direct one

 

[Machinated]

I think some peoples playing responds differently depending on what they are playing through.

I think the guitar, how its set up, the pickups and the player all have a bigger impact on the tone than taking DI's and then reamping IME. recently i was tracking a much better guitarist than i had for the last couple of bands and all of a sudden the guitar tone just seemed to be THAT much better.

 

[Lasse Lammert]

I think some peoples playing responds differently depending on what they are playing through.

I think the guitar, how its set up, the pickups and the player all have a bigger impact on the tone than taking DI's and then reamping IME. recently i was tracking a much better guitarist than i had for the last couple of bands and all of a sudden the guitar tone just seemed to be THAT much better.

very true

 

[exoslime]

just a stupid idea, and you probably now already,
but do you do any latency compensation?

i´m just did some reamp test becaue i got my first reamp box only few weeks ago.
i noticed a little bit the same like you mention, but then i thought about the process and that from the actual processing that there is a slightly latency in everything, so moving the reamped tracks a few ms forward helped to get them "on the spot" again!

also i noticed that with reamping you need to treat the amp settings a bit different then going in directly from guitar to amp..
i dont know why, but its not the levels only that effecting the tone.

ciao
chris

 

[GeertSamuel]

Don't know..have been wondering myself this for awhile now. When ever I did an a/b test, it wasn't something really noticable...but it for sure "felt" different. Maybe it was just the feeling that I knew which track was what!

 

[Ermz]

I'll try recording a small comparison later.....let's see how many people will be able to tell the reamped tone from the direct one

Well I certainly hope not many! If you can include a wide range of gear in the test, that would be fantastic, to show how much of an impact it can have.

I never considered myself much of a purist. I mean what's the difference between the amp input interacting with a pickup and with the output of a reamp unit? Sure the impedances are mismatched but who cares, potential for good tones either way right?

I don't know. I'm starting to find those unquantifiable things like 'thickness', 'dimension' and whatnot missing. I'm not sure whether that's because the reamps themselves have not been done in a studio of the caliber I was working in before, or perhaps becasue I'm not doing most of them myself... at a loss, truly! I really hope it's not the reamp process itself.

 

[John_C]

I think some peoples playing responds differently depending on what they are playing through.

+1

i feel this........although when i did some tests myself i found no huge difference. I'll have to do some more

 

[exoslime]

I think some peoples playing responds differently depending on what they are playing through.

I think the guitar, how its set up, the pickups and the player all have a bigger impact on the tone than taking DI's and then reamping IME. recently i was tracking a much better guitarist than i had for the last couple of bands and all of a sudden the guitar tone just seemed to be THAT much better.

very good point

 

[Nebulous]

I'll try recording a small comparison later.....let's see how many people will be able to tell the reamped tone from the direct one

Could I make a request here (instead of asking at another time): Mahogany guitar> JSX> Engl cab?
Would be much appreciated!

 

[Lasse Lammert]

Could I make a request here (instead of asking at another time): Mahogany guitar> JSX> Engl cab?
Would be much appreciated!

would but the Engl Cab is in my rehearsal room atm, so I won't get to record that.

plus I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to use gear more people are familiar with..like marshall or mesa cab, 5150 or recto or so....

 

[Nebulous]

Fair enough.

 

[Ermz]

6505 has been the most prone to losing tone this way for me, so it would be fantastic to use as a 'control' in the experiment.

 

[deanbailey]

...also i noticed that with reamping you need to treat the amp settings a bit different then going in directly from guitar to amp..
i dont know why, but its not the levels only that effecting the tone.

Yeah, I've been experiencing this since the second day I started re-amping.
The only answer I could come up with is similar to what everyone said here where you react differently to a particular tone.

I always seem to use cars as an analogy for amps. (bear with me ) In this case it's like having a really awesome fast car to ride your race with, and you win. But the next race is the same track but a different car which is just as fast but the specs and handling are different.
You could still come first but you have to drive the car differently.

Even though the difference between recorded and reamped is so small, you have to approach setting up the amp a lot differently, even if what you're doing might seem weird. As long as it sounds good.

 

[::XeS::]

I think the problem is the way we track guitars.
If you record DI's using an amp simulator, the guitarist's touch is based on that sound.
The best way to do a comparison is to track the DI's monitoring the miced amp and after the recording, send the DI's through the same amp with the same settings.
My touch is very different if I record hearing an amp simulator sound

 

[exoslime]

Even though the difference between recorded and reamped is so small, you have to approach setting up the amp a lot differently, even if what you're doing might seem weird. As long as it sounds good.

yeah, i think the same, as long as it sounds good its fine..

 

[Ermz]

yeah, i think the same, as long as it sounds good its fine..

That's been my thought, but the problem is that it doesn't sound 'good'. At least not compared to going directly into the amp. Once again I don't know where the issue is at, but the best way I can describe it is that the reamping process takes some 'life' out of the tracks.

It seems likely that in a blind shoot-out we won't be able to tell which is which easily, but the fact remains that for some reason my tones were always better in the straight-into-amp days.

 

[462studio]

I think re-amping can definitely cause some tone loss. But honestly, the tone loss is usually made up for 10x by someone re-amping the DIs that knows what the hell they are doing with amp tweaking and microphone placement, on top of what fits in a mix properly.

 

[GarethSE]

XeS, Mark Morton had a lot to say about that in some Lamb of God interview I read from while they were recording Wrath.
He claimed he didn't want to re-amp mainly because the way he approaches playing the guitar is very dependent on the guitar tone he's using at that very moment. So he's looked back on their prior records and thought "i'd have played that differently if i had used that tone while recording..." So whether its conscious or subconscious, whether we realise it or not, id say all guitarists do adjust the way they approach playing per guitar tone. it may well be a minute difference in approach, but we all know how much the tone comes from the fingers, if something changes with the way the guitarist plays and frets, you'll hear it a mile away.
That could be a big part of it.