choosing the right guitar amp for a bedroom recording

[Daenn]

I know people have talked about this before but I wanted to see what the general opinion was.

Like many other people here, I do all my stuff in my room in an apartment. While I can be somewhat liberal with making noise during the day, I can't turn up my amp enough to get a sound that I'm really happy with. At low volumes it's always too mushy, too many low mids and no highs. I picked up a j-station, and while I like some of the clean sounds, I just can not for the life of me get a heavy guitar sound that I like. Exciter plugin can help make it sound less dead, but even still I just can't get a sound I'm happy with.

A lot of people have mentioned micing those little 5 watt amps. I listened to an mp3 someone here posted a while ago using one of those, and it sounded pretty good clean, but what about with overdrive? I record a lot of heavier stuff, and I like my guitars crunchy. I have a 60 watt Kustom that sounds pretty ok when cranked, but I can't crank it. At low volume, it still sounds better than I can get the j-station to sound, but I'm just not happy with it overall. Basically, in my room with the windows shut on the 2nd floor, I can hear my landlord having conversations outside below my window. Cranking an amp is not going to happen. So I wanted to see if anyone else has been using those tiny amps, and how that works. What do you think?

 

[Bulls Hit]

I've had reasonable results micing a 10W practise amp. For a crunchy sound I play through a Metal Zone with Distortion on 0, Level about 3. This gives it just enough gain to get it dirty without being fizzy. Sure it's not a super heavy sound, but definately crunchy

 

[chessrock]

Let's see. There's iso cabinets. There's power soaks (hotbox, for example). There's also something called the Palmer Speaker Simulator -- works as a power soak and speaker emulator at the same time. Allows you to push your amp in to the red without danger of blowing anything up.