Question Reguarding DI's and long cable runs

[DeathByDrums]

As posted in the gearslutz forum, I know some of you are pretty knowledgeable in the guitar department so here goes...

I have a few simple questions. I'm going to be tracking drums with the guitar and bass player in the live room playing with the drummer. However I want to track the bass and guitar direct, except say I want to take the thru out of the guitars DI and run it into a different room into an amp. Do I use a passive or active DI for this? ( I know it sort of depends on if the guitars pickups are passive or active right?) It would be going guitar > DI > Mic Panel > Patchbay into Different ISO booth > DI? > Amp?

And more importantly in the past when I've done a guitar or bass tracking session (guitar or bassist in the control room) I've had serious issues getting the right gain out of the guitar and into the amp in the live room. I had the guitar plugged into a Radial Passive DI and out of that into my TT bay, patched into the live room, back into another passive DI (XLR back to 1/4inch) and into the amp. (This cannot be right) What is the correct way to run a guitar or bass into a Patchbay in control room and then into an amp in the live room? Should I just run a super long instrument cable through the wall into the amp, or do I need to purchase some active DI's or expensive reamp box?? All I currently have are 2 Passive Radial DI's. I would like to have this problem solved sometime in the near future.

Thanks

 

[Trevoire520]

I'm going to be tracking drums with the guitar and bass player in the live room playing with the drummer. However I want to track the bass and guitar direct, except say I want to take the thru out of the guitars DI and run it into a different room into an amp.

You seem to be getting yourself a bit muddled up here, first you're saying you want to use the thru out, and then yiou're giving a flow showing that its coming through a patchbay?

I'm assuming you just want an amped up sound for the guitarists to use while tracking with the drummer? so if you're not bothered about recording that track then you could just run a really long jack-jack from the thru output to the amp. Chances are there'll be some signal loss though.

Other options would be to use a wireless system fed from the thru out, or (easiest) use a POD or some other amp modeller (I find Digitech's pedals with the cab sims are cheap and good for this )

Do I use a passive or active DI for this?

As a general rule of thumb if you're using passive pickups you want the DI with a 1Mohm impedance. Good examples are the BSS AR133 Active DI and MTR Active DI.

Active pickups have a hotter output than passives, so need a DI box that can handle that, generally active designs fare better here. Something with a switchable pad would be good.


As far as reamping goes. The most common cause of not having enough gain is that the DI is a mono signal, and therefore needs to be sent from a mono output, not a single side of a stereo (this'll cause your signal to be lower
(-3dB?) So that'd be the first thing I check. I'm assuming you got a decent level while recording and you've not got the fader turned down.

A reamp box might help you out here, as it'll mean the amp is seeing a guitarish impedance, rather than a line.

 

[Metaltastic]

As for whether to use an Active DI or not, it's really a matter of signal loss over long cable runs; I assume a passive DI potentially doesn't degrade the signal whereas an active DI does, but I'm sure that on good active DI's the difference is nigh imperceptible, and has (obviously) more signal strength for longer balanced cable runs. So in general I think an active DI is pretty much always better. As for your particular situation, my head got a little spinny, but are you saying you want Guitar, Bass, and drummer in live room A, DI signal in Control Room, and amps in live room B? :zombie: Oy...what're you gonna have the guitarists use to hear themselves, headphones?

Basically, I would give a few general suggestions that can hopefully help. First, provided you're using a stack (separate head and cab), you can run RETARDEDLY long speaker cable lengths without signal degredation, whereas a guitar signal degrades when the cable is longer than 20 ft. MAX, so in general it's better to have the guitarist as close to the amp as possible. And second, the "thru" output on a DI is still HiZ like the guitar signal, so it's range too is limited to 20 ft. MAX (probably way less on a passive DI). Good luck, sounds like it'd be much easier if you recorded either only the DI's or only the amp signals.

Oh yeah, and third, if you're recording a combo amp, then the best way to have a super-long guitar cable run is to go guitar --> active DI --> XLR cable --> Reamp box (Radial ProRMP is the best bang for the buck at $100) --> amp.

 

[Metaltastic]

And whether you use active or passive pickups has little to nothing to do with whether you wanna use an active or passive DI; it's simply a matter of a passive DI providing maximum tone, whereas an active DI inherently will have a little tone loss, but as mentioned barely noticeable with a good one. The most important thing with any DI is that it have a super high impedance, though with active pickups that's less important because the signal is buffered and thus slightly lower impedance.

 

[DeathByDrums]

Sorry for the confusion dudes. I was talking about 2 seperate instances. The tracking guitar in the control room through the patchbay feeding into amp in the live room was my main concern. (instance 1) and Tracking guitar using a DI in the live room, feeding an amp in a seperate room to RECORD not just as a reference track for the drummer. (instance 2)

I was just reading on reamp.com and think I found the solution for instance 1. I need to come of the mic panel and into a reamp box then into the amp rather than a DI box in reverse (which was what I was doing WRONG) I still think that doing this into a combo amp is not going to work very well becuase the cable run is still too long but if I had a head I could run a long speaker cable to the live room and still use the reamp box and I'd be good to go.

However, for instance 2 I will most likely be using our house fender combo amp and am still not sure how to make a long cable run and keep the integrity of the signal from the guitar.

 

[Metaltastic]

Guitar --> Active DI --> Reamp box --> amp should work with minimal signal loss, because the majority of the cable length is balanced LoZ XLR. Just make the unbalanced cables from the guitar to the DI and the Reamp box to the amp as short as possible, I'm talking like 3 feet at most. Check this place out, best place to buy cable parts or have them build 'em for you!

 

[DeathByDrums]

heh, I've been ordering from redco for years. Good idea about the short instrument cables. Thanks

 

[s34nsm411]

i believe this is what you need
http://www.littlelabs.com/std.html

 

[DeathByDrums]

Thanks I'm currently looking at radials X-Amp, Reamp V 2, and this little labs box.