That training can also be a hinderance ? Historical accounts alone bear this out. But personally, I have lost count of the accounts that I've read or heard from musicians, writers, musicologists, producers and engineers, pluggers, DJs, publishers etc that have had to concede that their training prevented them from seeing something that the untrained saw and pushed and ultimately changed. I'll just mention the sound of the electric guitar and how, if training had been adhered to, guitars would still be sounding like Charlie Christian and/or Wes Montgomery or how it was thought that Eastern and Western music simply could not meet or how training militated against close miking bass drums on their own.
An untrained guitarist and writer called John Lennon told the mighty trained George Martin and the trained engineer, Geoff Emerick that he liked different parts of the two vastly different versions of "Strawberry fields forever" that his band had recorded. He wanted the start of one and the second part of the other. The trained recording expert Martin told him this was impossible as they were in different keys and at different tempos. The untrained Lennon had heard the sounds in his head and simply said those groundbreaking words, "You can fix it". Fortunately, Martin went beyond what he had been trained to do and discovered by slowing down one recording and speeding up the other, the keys matched and the tempos were close enough for no one to notice the difference.
Ironically, training still got in the way after that. "You can't compress sax sections"...."You can't record string quartets without the players using vibrato"......."You can't have brass that trebly"......Fortunately, the untrained pushed the barriers.
There are hundreds of examples I could give you. I'm even reading a book at the moment in which the engineer writing the book admits to learning stuff that his training would have hindered him to had he not been open minded enough to give things a try.
Why do you think the notion and the phrase "there are no rules" came about ?
For the record, I disagree that there are no rules. There are plenty of them. The key is in knowing when to apply them because they are not fixed in and for every scenario.
At the basic level you need to know certain things and the reason behind them. Just fiddling with it doesn't make you a genius.
I never said that it did. I don't think I've ever agreed with not knowing the basics. But one needs to be careful here. On a manual for a cassette based portastudio, you'll be told to get as loud a signal as possible without clipping, the logical inference being that clipping is bad. But often, clipping sounds fantastic.
You need to know the absolute basics and that is the level that the op seems to be.
I don't recall ever arguing or stating that it was not necessary to know the basics.
I don't know what level the OP is at but I didn't get from the opening post that they were exclusively using it as part of the intrinsic recording chain. The OP spoke of the amp's potential for effects {they mention that twice and once more in the thread title} and just to see what it would sound like.
I think you guys are working from opposite ends of the perspective and both can be cool. It is really important to have a grasp of basic recording. Some people like to make weird shit - circuit bending and the like. Nothing really wrong with it. I made distortion boxes from old $20 radios and loopers from old answering machines. Got good use out of the shitty sounds for some tunes, learned a little and moved on. That never stopped me from working hard on learning to record well.
This is pretty much what I've been getting at. I simply cannot see that the two elements are incompatible. I agreed with Pahtcub in one sense, sometimes experimenting before being able to record at a basic level can be a hinderance. To some extent, it happened with me all those years ago. In the absence of any guidance and being full of the joys of experimentation and the excitement of being able to record multiple tracks, my earliest attempts were crap. One could argue they still are
but my knowledge of getting a basic thing together has caught up with the delight of trying all kinds of off the wall jiggery~pokery.
In retrospect, my chief fault back then was
impatience.
you lead with a contradiction:
but then follow up by agreeing with Pahtcub:
If you record it properly there shouldn't be problems.
I'm confused....
When I said "I don't know about that", I was referring to Pahtcub's point about 'impedance mismatch'. I didn't know what he meant. It sounds like something from a professors' dating agency
. The bit about recording it properly; say, for example, the OP sticks a guitar through the Realistic amp and runs it out to a guitar amp and tweaks the Realistic and as a result comes up with a crunchy sound that they like and they stick a mic in front of the second amp to record it, what I was saying was that I don't understand why there would be any impedance issues. I was looking at it as a self contained sound that one mics. As long as clipping is avoided {unless the recorder is a tape recorder then it won't matter so much} it should be OK.
When I first started playing bass, I didn't have an amp. I borrowed one but after a few days my mate wanted it back. Then I discovered through experimenting, that I could plug the bass into one of the mic inputs of my Hitachi tape deck, set the deck into record/pause mode with a tape in there, have the stereo amp on 'tape' and bingo, the sound came through the speakers loud and clear. By messing around with the treble and bass knobs on the stereo amp I could alter the sound of the bass. That's how I did the first recordings I ever participated in with my neighbour playing guitar. I used that set up at home for the first 8 years I played.
That's kind of what I had in mind when I encouraged the OP to experiment.
I agree with the notion about getting the basics down first. Don't experiment without an educated guess about the results.
Experimenting may carry an educated guess about the results.....or it may not. That's part of the nature of experimenting.
I used to have a Hammond organ and just for the heck of it, one day I held a chord down while it was switched off and I switched it on. Because it didn't come on to full strength straight away, rather, it took a few seconds to warm up, the sound of the chord sort of went "Weeeeoooouuuuuuwwwww" and it was like bending strings on a guitar but with all these weird overtones. I thought it was fantastic and I used it a number of times in songs. When I first did it, I don't know what I expected. It was a case of 'oh, I wonder what will happen if.....'. Whereas with my 6 string acoustic guitar, the neck broke and after it was repaired, I noticed that I could bend the neck so while playing, I tried it, expecting a string bending sound and that's what I got. I always thought it was a great sound and though it was easy on bass, I was rubbish at string bending on a guitar as I was a chord strummer.
I like pie ..............
I used to.
