Guitar Re-Amping

Friday 28.11., Sunday 30.11. and Monday 1.12.2008

Re-amping guitars is fun when you have loads of great guitar gear at hand. This time we wanted the guitar tone to have some attitude, but it had to be really tight at the same time. I started our tone hunting with very basic combination: Tubescreamer + Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier + Mesa/Boogie Rectifier 4x12". Ok, the sound was nice, but not quite there yet. I removed the Tubescreamer and took ProCo Rat distortion and boosted the amp with it. OMG! I knew this would be the sound. Lots of attitude but not loose at all. It had some "Swedish death metal" flavour, but not as extreme as Boss HM2 would have been. I sent a sample to Sami and he was blown away!

Then the problems started. To make a long story short, after two broken fuses and one faulty power tube, we could not use the Mesa. We had to start from the beginning and find the same sound from Peavey 5150II. To our suprise we managed to match it 98 %. I'm not kidding at all. The sound was not worse at all, just 2 % different. We were very happy and re-amped all the rhythm guitars through this combination:

• Little Labs Redeye
  
• ProCo Rat Distortion
• Peavey 5150II
• Mesa/Boogie Rectifier 4x12"
• Shure SM57
• MS Audiotron MultiMix
• RME Fireface 800

I wanted to keep it simple, so I recorded the cab with only one microphone. I didn't even move that microphone after placing it the first time. I used the basic on-axis "dustcap edge" placement. I think Mesa cabs are the easiest to record, because they sound good with almost any mic placement.


After the rhythm guitars were done, I changed the boost pedal to Tubescreamer to make it slightly smoother for lead guitars. It didn't took long and I was done.

Now I can finally start mixing this album!