"Reamping" a guitar pedal

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paw1

New member
I want to send an already recorded guitar track from my interface to a delay guitar pedal, back to the return, and record the result in my DAW.

I suspect there will be some sort of impedance mismatch. Another problem may be signal strength. I suspect a hot signal may not be the best for a guitar-pedal. I could turn the volume all the way down and slowly bring it up and listen for anything unusual of course, but I wanted to ask you guys first.

Any advice regarding "reamping" with guitar pedals?

-paw
 
As long as you get the level right, you will be fine. EMG's put out a near line level signal, so the pedal can take a decent amount. Using the pedal run on battery will keep you from getting any potential ground loops.
 
If you want to spend the money, Radial makes a box that is supposed to be for that purpose. I just got one a few months ago and it will send a signal to a pedal or an amp equally fine. Makes me think that I could have gone with something a little cheaper to do the same thing had I done a bit more homework.
 
There's no impedance mismatch. Watch you levels a little and it'll work fine. If you had recorded the guitar at unity, there wouldn't even be a question on the level, but I'd imagine you have it some gain on the way in, so just be a little careful. Won't hurt anything, but it might distort.
 
Radial also make a cool little device called the Dragster - it's a part of the Tonebone line. It allows you to fine tune the impedance to preserve the natural tone of the pickups while also serving as a buffer. Worth the $50 for the consistency it affords you when reamping.

This is to place between your guitar and any pedals or FX when you record in the first place.

When re-amping, just get yourself a re-amp box. There are hundreds to choose from. There are really nifty tools like the Littlelabs Redeye 3D that allow you to monitor different signals in a reamping chain, then there are one trick pony ones from as little as $100. Or you could spend $2k on a tube based one ...

Cheers
 
...Or you could use the pair of instrument cables that you already own...

Edit - let me go a little further.

I understood the OP had already recorded the guitar, so he's got no need to "fine tune the impedance" for the pickups, but for future reference any guitar pedal is already going to present the load that a guitar pedal would present to the pickups ;), and most guitars have a device built in for fine-tuning that load. It's called a Tone knob.

There IS NO impedance mismatch on the other end! Or rather, we don't ever actually want to match impedance, we want to mismatch from low source to higher load, and a bigger mismatch is always better for both volume and frequency response. The input of a guitar pedal is way higher than a line out expects (that's a good thing) and the output of most guitar pedals look a whole lot like a line out and will drive a line input just fine.
 
Right on Ashcat!
The term "impedance" when it crops up makes my heart sink the same as the term "resolution" when digital systems are discussed. Both are misused. misunderstood by those using them as a rule and, in most cases, unnecessary BOLLOX!

We never "match" impedances in audio systems (digital audio transfer yes). Even speakers are not matched to valve amplifiers. For high fidelity valve amp the output impedance will be very low, less than one Ohm. For a valve guitar amp it will be much higher, a big 100watter maybe 10-20R and for a 20-30 "vox" style cathode biased amp could be over 50 Ohms.

Most, if not all the time, when peeps talk of "impedance" they mean signal level. Get THAT right and forget about ZZZZZZZ!

Dave.
 
Getting the signal level right is all that really matters with reamping guitar shit. Some of these guys wanna impress you with textbook regurgitation. Ignore all that. Just make the amp think there's a guitar plugged into it if you want that amp to act the way it's supposed to. A straight line out is usually too hot. In some instances it will drive and compress the front end of the amp into way more gain than you might want. If you want the amp to act like it should, get that line level down to instrument level. How you do that is up to you.
 
Thanks for the input guys!

Well, "matching" is probably the wrong word, as you'd (usually) want low output impedance and high input impedance of connecting units. What I really meant was if the connection between a guitar pedal and an interface would cause any impedance related problems of any kind. I haven't done this before so I wouldn't know.

I'll try recording it later. Hopefully it will work out nicely :)
 
Greg_L said:
Getting the signal level right is all that really matters with reamping guitar shit. Some of these guys wanna impress you with textbook regurgitation. Ignore all that. Just make the amp think there's a guitar plugged into it if you want that amp to act the way it's supposed to. A straight line out is usually too hot. In some instances it will drive and compress the front end of the amp into way more gain than you might want. If you want the amp to act like it should, get that line level down to instrument level. How you do that is up to you.
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+1 All you really need to re-amp is a feed, some way to knock the signal level down, i.e. a 10k pot in a tin and a way to eliminate a ground loop is desirable but THAT can be as simple as disconnecting a signal earth one end.

Paw 1, NOT having a pop at you mate!

Dave.
 
You asked and I answered. That's what we're here for. When I record my guitars, I plug the output of my pedalboard (basically the output of my Boss GigaDelay) into the line input on my D2424LV and record at unity. I do it all the time. Every time for a couple years now. I have done the "reamp" thing also. We lose a bit of signal (in my case, different gear can ba different) from "unbalancing" the signal by shorting half to ground (TS cable in a TRS output. Don't plug a TRS into a pedal, it won't turn on.), but that's easily tuned by ear.

Going to an actual amp can be a bit more complicated. I end up having more ground loop problems in those situations.
 
ecc83 said:
+1 All you really need to re-amp is a feed, some way to knock the signal level down, i.e. a 10k pot in a tin and a way to eliminate a ground loop is desirable but THAT can be as simple as disconnecting a signal earth one end.

Paw 1, NOT having a pop at you mate!

Dave.
Click to expand...

I appreciate you sharing your experience on the subject. Didn't get any hostility from your post, we're good:)

ashcat_lt said:
You asked and I answered. That's what we're here for. When I record my guitars, I plug the output of my pedalboard (basically the output of my Boss GigaDelay) into the line input on my D2424LV and record at unity. I do it all the time. Every time for a couple years now. I have done the "reamp" thing also. We lose a bit of signal (in my case, different gear can ba different) from "unbalancing" the signal by shorting half to ground (TS cable in a TRS output. Don't plug a TRS into a pedal, it won't turn on.), but that's easily tuned by ear.

Going to an actual amp can be a bit more complicated. I end up having more ground loop problems in those situations.
Click to expand...

Appreciate your input.

Didn't know TRS with pedals wouldn't work. Would probably never connect a pedal that way anyway, but good to know.
 
paw1 said:
Didn't know TRS with pedals wouldn't work. Would probably never connect a pedal that way anyway, but good to know.
Click to expand...
My bassist was having trouble plugging his acoustic/electric bass into his stereo system. He was using a 1/4" TRS adapter to an 1/8" TRS>dual RCA cable. Now, there's a lot wrong with that picture, but the reason he couldn't get any sound out of it is that the jack in the bass was a TRS, wired so that when you plug a TS cable into it, the sleeve of the plug connects R to S on the jack, which in turn connects the bottom of the battery to the preamp circuit. The TRS plug didn't do that shorting action, so the bass wouldn't even turn on. Same is true for the input of most any guitar pedal.

I have short patch cables for my pedalboard that are TS>TS, and others exactly the same but TRS>TRS for my patchbays. I have to be very careful not to confuse the two, at least when I'm patching the pedals together.
 
I'm a little bit psyched right now (in the most positive way) :D

Tried to make this thing work by patching up the pedal between an output and input, and after figuring out how to send the desired signal to the correct output, it did (never done anything like this before)! After turning the knobs on the delay pedal in every kind of position, I was quite disappointed that the echoes always sounded overwhelming, and not like it did with an amplifier at all. I was quite pleased when I noticed that I'd forgotten to turn off the send, which caused the track I wanted a delay-track of to be played twice (not counting the echo-track), but with a slight delay. After turning off the send, the result was a very nice sounding delay-track, just what I was hoping to achieve.

BTW, the pedal is Maxon AD999Pro if anyone wondered. It's an all analogue pedal with up to 900 ms of delay, and the possibility to output wet/dry, or wet and dry on two separate outputs. I'm VERY pleased with the sounds it produces. It's a bit pricey though.
 
There's probably a slight latency delay on your return track, too, but with this kind of effect it's maybe not a problem. If you really needed tight timing, you'd use a host-synced plugin and be done with it, right?

If you ever get into a spot where it might make a difference, how you deal with it is kind of up to what DAW you're using. In all cases, it's probably easiest to just record it with the latency and then nudge the new track back to line up where it needs to be. Some DAWs have ways of figuring out the latency (they usually send a ping through the loop) and compensating. In Reaper I think it's a plugin that does that.
 
In Cubase and Protools, delay compensation is built into the Hardware FX plugin. You're right - it pings the loopback, times the delay, and offsets the signal accordingly.

You could pretty much achieve the same outcome on an audio track by applying a time offset to the whole track. Most DAWs have a basic time plugin you can use as an insert on the track. It's easy enough to calibrate; just record a sample while reamping and compare the zero-pass points of the waveform with the original to determine how many MS the sample is offset. Then just apply that time offset with the time plugin for the re-amped track, remove the sample and off you go.

There are other approaches, but I find this way prevents other phase based issues from arising if you start making edits on that track.
 
Yeah, I have Cubase 7, so I should be good, right? Strange that I got that send-delay on playback though :wtf:
 
paw1 said:
Yeah, I have Cubase 7, so I should be good, right? Strange that I got that send-delay on playback though :wtf:
Click to expand...

Yeah, man ... I use 7.5 (waiting for all the bugs to be ironed out with 8) and just look in the "Delay" plugin folder for the plain Jane stock mixdelay plugin and just use that to create the offset for the track.

Delay on playback is a byproduct of the device driver buffer being set too high (latency is most likely over 10ms?).

I notice more than 3ms when using MIDI pianos, so I'm on 32 or 64 sample buffers for production and I find 8ms to be the higher end of my comfort zone for playback latency, but you can obviously get away with more and a notable delay when mixing, as there is no "real-time" synch issues usually.
 
paw1 said:
Yeah, I have Cubase 7, so I should be good, right?
Click to expand...
Assuming you actually set it up as a hardware send (whatever that means in your DAW), and did the calibration step...
Strange that I got that send-delay on playback though :wtf:
Click to expand...
In order to make what's coming back from your loop line up where it's supposed to, the DAW has to play back whatever track it's sending out a little earlier than it otherwise would have. If you somehow had the original un-compensated track playing parallel to that, you'd hear it as a delay, and it would probably be small enough that you wouldn't be able to tell that it was actually a sort of negative delay.
 
PlatinumAudio said:
Yeah, man ... I use 7.5 (waiting for all the bugs to be ironed out with 8) and just look in the "Delay" plugin folder for the plain Jane stock mixdelay plugin and just use that to create the offset for the track.

Delay on playback is a byproduct of the device driver buffer being set too high (latency is most likely over 10ms?).

I notice more than 3ms when using MIDI pianos, so I'm on 32 or 64 sample buffers for production and I find 8ms to be the higher end of my comfort zone for playback latency, but you can obviously get away with more and a notable delay when mixing, as there is no "real-time" synch issues usually.
Click to expand...

I haven't updated Cubase yet. Is 7.5 a free or do you have to pay for it, like 6.5?

Actually, the playback delay is less than 2 ms (1.8 ms according to Cubase). I think Ashcat pointed out something that could be the reason why the delay I experienced was so noticeable.

ashcat_lt said:
Assuming you actually set it up as a hardware send (whatever that means in your DAW), and did the calibration step...

In order to make what's coming back from your loop line up where it's supposed to, the DAW has to play back whatever track it's sending out a little earlier than it otherwise would have. If you somehow had the original un-compensated track playing parallel to that, you'd hear it as a delay, and it would probably be small enough that you wouldn't be able to tell that it was actually a sort of negative delay.
Click to expand...

I think the magic words here are "hardware send". I routed the signals in Cubase. To get a non-dealyed signal, I probably need to route it in TotalMix FX.
 
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