9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fairly good first-gen. book, needs basic amp tone tips, January 26, 2003
This review is from: Recording the Guitar (Paperback)
This is a fine book for capturing an existing amp sound. This book would benefit by being more emphatically aimed at the guitarist, particularly the guitarist who wants good amp tone in a home recording studio. There are currently two other books about recording the electric guitar. The book The Recording Guitarist by Jon Chappell has a more relevant perspective and is the longest, with the greatest number of helpful tips. Recording the Electric Guitar: It's All About Tone by Jon Bare is the same length as the present book, but comes with a CD that carries great authority by using real examples from the author's projects.
Page 2 shows isolation booths/rooms.
Page 7 mentions the loudness problem, and presents -- like all the books -- speaker simulators as the main solution to the loudness problem, without considering various forms of power attenuation or speaker isolation enclosures.
Page 43 has a paragraph on "speaker overdrive".
Page 44 covers re-amping a recorded dry guitar. (This is also an efficient way to dial-in amp sounds, surpassed only by having one person play guitar and the other person operate the processors such as EQ and level settings throughout the processing chain.)
Pages 45 and 50 cover multimiking, which is important when a single person in a home studio wants to remote-mike a guitar speaker and efficiently dial-in a good sound at the mixer.
Page 57-58 has fair coverage of DI (direct inject of a line-level guitar signal into the mixer), together with the muddled coverage of dummy loads, and speaker simulators that is typical in the first wave of "getting guitar sounds" books. "A speaker simulator provides a dummy load in the form of a power soak." That's incorrect and nonsensical. A better statement would be "A typical speaker simulator product provides an artificial speaker load in the form of a resistive or reactive load, in addition to a cabinet-simulation filter." What's happening here, in this sloppy and overgeneral use of the term "speaker simulator" and "power soak", is that the authors of the books have in mind a particular product they aren't explicitly discussing: the Palmer PDI-03 Speaker Simulator, which happens to comprise a dummy load and a cab-sim filter.
The term "power soak" is incorrect as a type of device, especially as a type of dummy load. The product, the Scholtz Power Soak, is a power attenuator, which can be used as a dummy load and contains a dummy load together with a wattage splitter. Odd, the author capitalizes "speaker simulation... the Simulator" -- supporting my contention that he ought to explicitly tell us he's talking about the Palmer PDI-03 Speaker Simulator. We need to be rigorous in distinguishing between particular products and general types of circuits or gear. Much of the confusion comes from using product names in place of technology types, and vice versa, as if saying "A Dummy Load is a type of hot plate." These authors totally jumble the product and technology terms: Hot Plate (THD), Power Soak (Scholtz), PowerBrake (Marshall), Speaker Simulator (Palmer), Red Box, dummy load, power attenuator, speaker simulator, DI box, and cabinet-simulation filter.
Pages 62-63 almost cover pre-distortion EQ: "the Sans Amp PSA 1... uses EQ pre and post overdrive to allow a very wide range of sounds. ... Alesis Quadraverb GT... EQ section offers almost too many options! ... You also have the option of running the EQ section pre or post pre-amp." The latter choice, "pre or post pre-amp", reflects the industry-entrenched single-EQ fallacy, on the part of the author or Alesis; the right "choice" is both pre and post distortion; a Rock amp rig largely comprises a series of alternating eq and distortion stages. The book mentions Session Award JD10 (also known as the Morley JD10). Page 67 says "a better eq could be patched in ... pre or post overdrive" -- but there is no explanation, systematic or otherwise, of the difference between EQ before the preamp distortion (pickup EQ) and after the preamp distortion (amp EQ). Neither does the book compare EQ before the tube power amp (this is "amp EQ", controlling the power-tube distortion voicing) versus after the output transformer (speaker and mic EQ).
Page 137 half-insightfully says to play the guitar in the control room, with remote miked guitar speaker in the live room, but doesn't specify whether the guitar amp head is in the control room or in the sound room with the miked guitar speaker -- other books point out the tremendous advantages of using a head in the control room and a guitar speaker cab in the live room (or, to speak more meaningfully in a home studio context: using a tube power amp in the mixer room and a remote-miked guitar speaker in another room or enclosure).
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