Speaker Excursion, how to determine?

Mike 24

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Jul 23, 2007
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I wanted to ask about speaker and cabinet excursion to really get that great metal tone everyone is talking about when this happens. I can't seem to find the procedure where someone described how to determine speaker and cabinet excursion points.
Thanks
 
If you want to know when serious speaker excursion is happening, just watch the speaker. How else would you do it? :)


And what do you mean exactly by "cabinet excursion"? I don't think wooden cabinets excurse. They resonate and influence the response of the speakers, and the only way to get in tune with that is to experiment with a particular cabinet at length.
I imagine gary666 is right, you've probably heard the trickle down info from Slipperman about "Cabinet Involvement"
That there is an interesting and entertaining read.
 
Palm mute and hit the low string a few times while shining a flashlight through the grill cloth to see if the speaker cone is moving.
 
Find the resonant frequency. With most rigs it's normally a palm muted 8th fret, 6th string (G#) in Drop C or C standard.
Put in ear plugs, have a bright lamp facing the grill if you cannot see the speaker that well, and use your eyes :)

EDIT: It should look like 00:29min in

Just not that slow because they're probably pumping something below 20hz to have speakers that size excurse and not blow peoples eardrums.
 
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A wooden cabinet can shake like a Parkinson's patient in an earthquake if you turn it loud enough. Anything can shake with enough force going back and forth. Even the moon.

The fucking moon. Over.

Your best bet is to just look at the speaker with a nice, bright flashlight (bright helps if you're looking through a grille, nice because shitty flashlights aren't worth the money saved) and look for movement. If you can't find any, kill all volume and look for some little detail that you'll be able to find - a certain shadow from the speaker onto itself, any kind of mark/tear/speck of dust, even the seam between the cone and cap - and look for it again while it's moving. More movement means more abnormality in the sound due to the speaker, and since we choose our speakers based on what they do to the sound this is a good thing for a good range of volumes. For the cabinet... Jesus Fucking Christ, it weighs more than the chair you're sitting in, if you can't tell when it's moving (hell, just put a bunch of screws on top of the thing in a pile and listen for rattle) then you have a problem.

Metal tone comes from a lot of things, and while this is one of them it won't make or break a sound as much as proper dialing and finding a place in the mix. Unless you've been recording at whisper volumes, you could very easily be only helping yourself by using less preamp gain - and with a poor cab, you don't want much tonal contribution anyway. I just saw the phrase 'great metal tone' and felt that a disclaimer was necessary, don't mean to insult your intelligence but I wouldn't expect worlds of difference.

Jeff
 
One thing I am starting to do all the time but never hear other people doing (maybe there's a reason for that!) is I'll put my hand out and feel the air pressure as I send a reamped guitar track through the speakers. This just gives me a sense of what the mic is 'feeling.' You need some of that but you don't want too much else your signal will sound like diarreah, literally.
 
Yeah, is there any reason you'd wanna get it right to the point of excursion and not any higher? Cuz I just always fucking crank it
 
I think it's more helpful to just be realistic and throw all of this analytical bullshit out the window. Seriously.

Turn it up until it starts to sounds good. Turn it up some more and see if it sounds better. Repeat as necessary. When it starts to sound worse, turn it back down.

You have just successfully determined the optimum volume level / speaker excursion, cabinet involvement etc. :p

Of course "sounding good" is also dependant upon the influence of the room, the quality of the signal chain, etc., so obviously, your interpretation of what is really sounding good has got to be influenced by some experience with how well certain types of guitar tone work when recorded, but that's all just part of it.
 
What sounds good to you may not sound good to the mic...

Jeff

Of course, that's part of what I was aluding to with the last sentence. You have to know what's going to sound good after it's recorded. When you've been at it for a while, I think your ear will start to judge things with that in mind.

I still judge the guitar tone and all of my experimenting with it by listening to what's coming out of my monitors. Usually it equates pretty well to what I like in the room, but not always.
 
Yeah, is there any reason you'd wanna get it right to the point of excursion and not any higher? Cuz I just always fucking crank it

Same question for me.:erk:
Indeed, I record my cab at home, so my neighbours would appreciate if the amp volume was lower, but how much can I turn it down without losing the good metal tone?
 
I think it's more helpful to just be realistic and throw all of this analytical bullshit out the window. Seriously.

Turn it up until it starts to sounds good. Turn it up some more and see if it sounds better. Repeat as necessary. When it starts to sound worse, turn it back down.

exact-a-mundo

i've seen a lot of people having some really in-depth conversations about some ridiculously minute, and almost inconsequential details of the recording/mixing process

al schmidt said it best when someone asked him how he manages to get such a great sound out of everything he does, and he said "it's easy - i just push buttons and turn knobs until it sounds right."

while that's the single most simplified approach you can take, and i'm sure he was being sarcastic, it's still not a bad approach to take...