Where to Put the Guitar Amps

A

AlexW

New member
I've got a project coming up where the band wants to do all the raw tracking live (2 guitars, bass, and drums). I've done this before with good results. I've got a main tracking room that's well isolated and a second adjacent room. In the past I've run the bass direct, placed guitar heads in the tracking room, and placed the cabinets in the adjacent room; routing the speaker cables through a breakout box between rooms. That way I can keep the drums isolated well.

For this project, the guitarists both play small combo amps; so I won't be able to split the heads/cabinets between rooms. If I place the amps in the adjacent room, I'd likely need two 20 ft cables patched through a tuner pedal or something to make up the distance. I'm concerned that this may affect the tone adversely though. Alternately, I could keep the guitar amps in the room with the drums and just try using some gobos for isolation. My tracking room is fairly small (approx. 15' x 20'); so I'd likely get some bleed of the guitars into the drum mics regardless. My room is pretty well treated with bass trapping, but I could still see building up some mud-frequencies in this case. For drum micing I like to use 2 overheads as well as a room mic placed out front of the kit.

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have. Are the cable lengths as much of a concern as I'm thinking?
 
with good cables you should be fine, but with cheep ones i think you may hear it. 20 ft, while not short, is not an insane run.

a 20 ft monster cable probably sounds better than a 5 ft piece of crap anyway
(be pre paired to pay)

are the tracks going to be all keepers? because if they're scratch tracks it dosen't matter anyway
 
They want them to be keepers. I got another suggestion to use a pair of direct boxes with balanced cable running between. Anyone have thoughts on this?
 
My room is a little smaller than yours. It's treated really well and I can track drums, bass and guitar in there with very little bleed if I use a couple gobos.
 
AlexW said:
They want them to be keepers. I got another suggestion to use a pair of direct boxes with balanced cable running between. Anyone have thoughts on this?
Click to expand...

yea, lets put as many needless things in the line as possible
that'll clean it up ;)

really, don't take that personally
 
It actually makes sense to me (less high frequency loss and noise with the balanced cable). I'm thinking it would be better than 40-ft of instrument cable.

HangDawg--I could see it for maybe the small combo amps playing clean stuff. I might give it a shot for that case. How about larger amps for punk/metal--you still get ok isolation?
 
i have got an 8 ch snake with 4 TS, 2 TRS, and 2 speaker cables running between the main room and my studio garage. (which i place guitar amps and cabs in) this gives me the option to run fx loops (TS), channel switches (TRS), and cabinets remotely. so, i can put a combo in the garage and still have access to fx loops and channel switching. the snake is 20 ft long. i have not noticed any problems with this setup. when i set my guitar amp up live, i use a 20 ft cable from my pedal board to my amp. no problems there either. dont know if i would go any longer than that..
 
Yeah, that's my issue. I don't think a single 20-ft cable will make it.

I guess my other option is to stick the guitar players in the room with their amps (I can run headphones out there easily); but I think most bands would prefer to have visual sight of eachother.
 
you might be ok if you bought some top notch cable... you would probably have to make it up yourself. dont know if it would be worth the money for you or not...
 
Yeah, that and there's no way to really try it out before the session; so if it didn't end up working it's a lot of money and time wasted. Thanks for the input anyway.
 
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