Anyone experimented much with the impact of where in a room you set up a guitar amp?

[DrewPeterson7]

Still wortking out studio layout stuff at my new place, and as I'm primarily a guitarist, this will be a priority. I'll cut to the chase and say yes, I plan to experiment, but I also wondered if this was something that any of you had spent some real time on.

This is a closed back 4x12, so things like proximity to the nearest wall for an open-backed cab aren't going to be a factor. Right now I've got it tucked in the corner of the long end of the room facing roughly towards the opposite corner for space/usability considerations, though as this means it's pointing towards the corner with a door, I'm thinking of flipping it to the other corner just to minimize the projection into the rest of the house a little more (I was surprised, while doing some reamping, how much sound carried out through that door and into the rest of the basement if I'd walk around while a take was playing back through the cab).

My without-testing priors here would be the exact inverse of monitoring position, facing down the long axis of the room, centered, and maybe 1/3 of the way down, would be a good theoretical starting point, and the amp is on casters so its easy enough to move.... though I couldn't leave it permanently mic'd up here, of course, so this would be more of an "I'm taking the afternoon off work to reamp all my guitar tracks, let's roll the amp into position, fire it up, and get to work" sort of thing.

Close mic'd, if that matters, sm57 and md421 probaby a half inch or so off the grill, maybe a hair more, so while the room sound is still a factor, it's arguably less so than if I was also using a condenser a couple feet back or something.

This also strikes me as fiendishly difficult to test - cant exactly replicate the close mic position as I move the amp around, it's not a small room but it's not nearly big enough where I could hang a single distant mic and move the cab around and not have how close to that mic being on-axis be the major impact on what you hear through it... I think the best I can really do is just move the amp around while playing and trust my subjective impressions as I walk around the room around the amp. If anyone has better testing ideas, I'm all ears though!

 

[DrewPeterson7]

And, what the hell, just so this isnt JUST a boring wall of text, this is about where I am now, this was a quick scratch reamp of the project I'm currently tracking, through the amp which you really can't see because it's in the corner directly behind me. Mesa Mark V 90 into a Recto 4x12, though I also have a Recto Roadster in the shop that's going to see a lot of action here too (and, while I'm still playing, on some of the stuff with more minimal less guitar-driven backings, layering the two for leads sounded VERY promising in some of my early testing).

 

[Papanate]

And, what the hell, just so this isnt JUST a boring wall of text, this is about where I am now, this was a quick scratch reamp of the project I'm currently tracking, through the amp which you really can't see because it's in the corner directly behind me. Mesa Mark V 90 into a Recto 4x12, though I also have a Recto Roadster in the shop that's going to see a lot of action here too (and, while I'm still playing, on some of the stuff with more minimal less guitar-driven backings, layering the two for leads sounded VERY promising in some of my early testing).

Sounds to me like you have had some success - myself I use a Helix now and don’t worry about it - I have a 100% success rate with getting sound - back in the Amp days - studios would have optimum placements - or my home studio I would have several go to locations - and I could play loud and proud all I wanted too - most of the time it worked - often it would take a combination of mics to get the sound I was looking for - and it would take experimentation to get there - even day to day minute things would change - most of the time a tiny EQ tweak - a very slight increase in (or decrease) in reverb or delay - would make it right again.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Thanks! Yeah, I mean, this is the maddening part of recording, right? I'm very happy with the sounds I'm getting, and if I'd played these quickly-tracked and essentially unmixed clips to myself 10 years ago, I'd have jumped for joy.

But, can I make it better? Haha. It never ends. As it stands I want to move the amp to the other side of the room, which would mean moving a bookshelf to the side of the room the amp is on now, possibly, and would at least open the door to wall-mounting my guitars again (this is a finished basement, mostly below ground level, and when I started drilling into the studs to mount cross-pieces, I learned the studs were metal. I'm not sure, but it seems likely enough to at least warrant a test drill that this is only true of the exterior wall studs, so the back wall or the other side wall may allow me to wall mount after all...) And I figure if Im moving around anyway, I should fire the amp up and at least audition it in a few different spots, and see if it really does make a difference.

 

[Papanate]

Thanks! Yeah, I mean, this is the maddening part of recording, right? I'm very happy with the sounds I'm getting, and if I'd played these quickly-tracked and essentially unmixed clips to myself 10 years ago, I'd have jumped for joy.

But, can I make it better? Haha. It never ends. As it stands I want to move the amp to the other side of the room, which would mean moving a bookshelf to the side of the room the amp is on now, possibly, and would at least open the door to wall-mounting my guitars again (this is a finished basement, mostly below ground level, and when I started drilling into the studs to mount cross-pieces, I learned the studs were metal. I'm not sure, but it seems likely enough to at least warrant a test drill that this is only true of the exterior wall studs, so the back wall or the other side wall may allow me to wall mount after all...) And I figure if Im moving around anyway, I should fire the amp up and at least audition it in a few different spots, and see if it really does make a difference.

That’s exactly what you have to do - plus moving the bookshelf in and out on the room - was well as where everything sits - to me it’s painful.

 

[GONZO-X]

that guitar sounds great as is.


thing is, if you HAVE a great sounding room, then moving the cabs ( and the 2nd mic, if you are capturing the room sound) makes sense...
but these days,
with the advent of IR's being able to put your sound in ANY room you could imagine,
it makes more sense to close mic, and then add the room sound in mix sessions.

great thing about recording the mic tracks dry and close,
is that you can make the 'room' sound decisions later during mixdown, rather than being locked into a sound that was printed, and NOT being able to match it to the later tracks.


i love moving mics and capture different room sounds, i've done 3 albums using just that approach, but my last 2 albums i've gone more direct, and the ability to dial in sounds immediately has let me be more the musician, and less the engineer.
YMMV

 

[DrewPeterson7]

that guitar sounds great as is.


thing is, if you HAVE a great sounding room, then moving the cabs ( and the 2nd mic, if you are capturing the room sound) makes sense...
but these days,
with the advent of IR's being able to put your sound in ANY room you could imagine,
it makes more sense to close mic, and then add the room sound in mix sessions.

great thing about recording the mic tracks dry and close,
is that you can make the 'room' sound decisions later during mixdown, rather than being locked into a sound that was printed, and NOT being able to match it to the later tracks.


i love moving mics and capture different room sounds, i've done 3 albums using just that approach, but my last 2 albums i've gone more direct, and the ability to dial in sounds immediately has let me be more the musician, and less the engineer.
YMMV

Thanks! I think I can probably make it sound better, though - more careful micing, more careful front panel stuff... Heck, any time at all spent on the backing oistrumentation mix to carve out space for a pretty fat, midrange-y lead guitar osund (and this one's layered as hell - two tracks acoustic, two tracks gritty Stratocaster rhtyh, two tracks distoeted PRS rhythm gently playiung chords to let them kind ofbloom into the amp... it's a LOT of space, and it's very possible the Strat L/R pair isn't going to make the final recording just because it's so much going on at once, we'll see). I'm just capturing DI tracks for now so I still have a lot of flexibility. And again, all the rhythm gutiars are... christ, probably a 15 year old amp VST, the old LePou Lecto, simply because it sounds fine enough for demoing and monitoring, and there's no sense doing much more than that for now.

For these sort of rock tones, close-micing is, I mean, there's never "just one way" to do anything, but pretty much you''re close-micing your cab unless you have a reason not to. The sound is bouncing around inside the room though, so I co uld see an aergument being made for either getting the cab out of the corner and a little further away from a boundary wall, or maybe isolating it a little, heavy blankets over it or something to cut some of the room reflections out. Sounds like a pain in the ass though so I think more likely I'll try just putting it into the center of the room, closer to the rear wall but not right on top of it or anything, and see how things go.