Brittle/Harsh recordings

  • Thread starter Thread starter sdmig
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sdmig

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Alright let me try and lay this down as easy as I can. I mostly used my V-amp2 to do all my guitar tracks and some random effects. I Usually just ran the V-amp to my mixer board, then output to Aux for recording. It always sounds great, clean and smooth with good levels.

But I've come to that point now that I would really enjoy doing some recordings from my amps, (a Marshall Valvestate and VoxBM) The thing is, the recordings sound horrible and disgusting. I usually run a 1/4" jack from the "emulated" recording output to one of the line-in ports on my mixer, and then to the soundcard it goes. Am I missing... a Direct Input box? is that the key? The recordings just sound harsh and brittle, recorded at any level. I've noticed this with headphones too in the headphone jacks of my amps, it sounds literally clipped and nasty with those. Forgot to mention, the recordings only sound horrible with distortion, clean is fine.


I know its not my soundcard (Audigy2 Platinum) I know a lot of guys don't like them, but you need to be realistic here. I use the inputs on this for all my vocals which sound flat out perfect.

If you need a list of equipment/soft:
  1. Behringer UB1002 mixer
  2. Audigy2 Platinum
  3. Adobe Audition
Cables
I have heard something about using unshielded cables for something, they mention not to use guitar cables. Any idea what that refers to? I cannot remember the source. Could this be an issue aswell?

I appreciate any advice towards this, as I am left totally confused.

Thanks for any help,

'mig
 
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Yes a DI box would help. Are you sure your mixer doesn't have DI on one of the inputs?
Your best sound will be from sticking a mic on the speaker and recording that
 
My experience has been that the direct out of almost every amp (including alot of the nice amps) sounds like shit. If you want to use your amp for recording (which you should- it sounds like you've got some nice amps) you want to mic it. Otherwise, you're probably better off with the V-Amp.

Good luck :)
 
Some amps just don't record well even with a decent mic and sound especially bad through DI. I can pretty much guarantee that you will get better results with a V-Amp than you will with a Marshall Valvestate. I'm not sure about the Vox BM but my guess is the V-Amp would sound better.
 
Yeah unless you're going to mic the amp go with the V-amp. I direct in from the marshall for practice and yeah it sounds like a train wreck most of the time. Clean is ok dirty is terrible very digital sounding. Really consider getting an sm57 or something similar and put a mic in front of the amp you'll get way better results.
 
Well thanks everyone for the quick responses :) I'm glad I didn't pick up a DI last night, and I don't think my mixer has any DI on the inputs either... gona zip around and find a good dynamic mic instead. Hopefully I can record some of my amps, only thing about the V-amp that sometimes sucks is it feels slightly shallow in tone. But I'm mostly only interested in my Vox amp for recording, gotta love that Queen sound.

And for laughs, any of you guys ever been to planet-guitar.net? It's in german, but they have tons and tons of amp and guitar clips from new products, like crate etc... I wonder what kind of setup they use, because everything there sounds professional, even those turdy guitar packages for $150 bucks.

'mig
 
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