Guitar Gear

For a long time, I’ve had this thing for getting a big guitar sound in my recordings. I’ve done a bunch of different things like doubling, overdubbing, signal splitting between two amps, and the like. But recently, I got a couple of pieces of gear that is allowing me to explore yet another way to get a big guitar sound: Re-amping. Re-amping is essentially taking an already amplified guitar signal, and running it through another amplifier. This is not like adding a gain stage because that usually involves multiple pre-amp sections. With re-amping, you’re building on a fully amplified signal that has passed through the power tubes. The result is VERY different in tonal character from just moving the signal through another gain stage.

There are lots of ways to re-amp, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. But I will share how I do it. Ever since I got my Aracom PRX15-Pro, I’ve been contemplating this very thing because of its line out which could be used in a variety of ways; such as running the signal into a PA (since it’s unbalanced, you need a DI box), or taking that line level, and running it into another amp to re-amplify the signal yet again. The cool thing about the PRX150-Pro is that I can simultaneously run an output to a speaker, then the amp that’s doing the re-amping can also have it’s own audio output.

Now here’s something even more cool! I have a Reason Bambino, which also has a line out. It’s a balanced line out, so it can go directly into a board, and doesn’t need to be hooked up to an external cab. The tone coming from the line out of the Bambino is very nice. I suppose that I could’ve miked the Bambino from another cabinet, but I did want to test the line out.

In any case, here’s a diagram of how I had everything hooked up:

In a nutshell, I plugged my guitar directly into my Aracom VRX22, which ran into the PRX150-Pro. I hooked up an external cab to the attenuator, placed a mic in front of the cabinet that ran into Channel 1 of my audio interface. Then, I ran the line out of the attenuator to the input of the Reason Bambino. From there, I went directly from the Bambino into Channel 2 of my audio interface.

I set up a clip from a song I wrote and added two tracks that took input from the two channels. I also panned Channel 1 full left and Channel 2 full right. Once I had the levels worked out, I recorded a solo over the existing music. Once the recording was finished, I took the Bambino’s signal slightly out of phase with Channel 1, to make it sound like two guitars are playing simultaneously. The effect is totally cool, and it creates a very in-your-face, big guitar sound! Here’s the clip:

Note that this is a kind of a different way to employ re-amping, which basically runs two amps in a series then out a single output. The way I employed it, the re-amped signal is a component of the overall package.