Recording a noisy guitar amp

[adam]

I have this old silvertone amp from the 50's. I love the way it sounds but the noise floor is fairly high, even when not playing and with the volume down to 0. I am working with my amp repairman to get it fixed, but I wanted to see what other folks around here where doing when recording noisy amps. Would you use a compressor/limiter or noise gate and set the threshold to a point above the noise?

Adam

 

[Tom Hicks]

Filter caps are likely shot.Are they dry and crumbly?An amp of that age will need to be serviced before you will get a good tone.Consider having your tech replace the original commercial parts with military spec. components.They are valued to 1% tolerences as opposed to 6% or so on the commercial stuff.Instead of paying .25 for a resister you might pay .40 or .50.But the payoff in tone is amazing and can bring an old amp to life.
My first guitar was a silvertone,with a generous 1/2" string clearance.My buddy had the guitar with the amp built into the case.We thought that was really cool!Good luck.

Tom

 

[adam]

Thanks Tom. Yeah, I have the amp in case model too and I love it. The amp I am talking about is their twin 12 combo. The tone is exactly what I am looking for. My amp guy has been playing with it for a few months now - it had to get completely overhauled, new tubes, 3-prong cord, etc. The noise is 2 fold - the noise floor is high and also, I sometimes get a loud pop when I attack the strings. I think they are looking at replacing the filter caps and trying some other things. I hope to check it out later this week.

I am hopeful the amp will become quieter but not sure how quiet it will get. Also, I am fooling around with sampling some music from analog sources, such as old 78 records from a victrola.

How do I minimize the noise, in general, from noisy sound sources (amp, records, etc.)?

 

[iqi616]

I recently did some taping from some much abused singles. The first thing I did was to use a limiter to crop any scratches that were louder than the loudest bit of the music.

I also tried the trick of using the HF EQ to cut the high frequencies and then resynthesize them with an Aphex but that was only slightly helpful. There's a limit to how far you can go with this before the harshness of the Aphex becomes more annoying that the scratches. Also, it synthesizes new HF noise from the lower frequency surface noise. It did help a bit though because the originals didn't have very good top end and there was a small improvement in clarity and presence.

The other tools you can use are gating (or close cropping with your sampler) which doesn't usually work very well. It's better to use an expander to increase the dynamic range or use a dynamic noise filter which modifies its characteristics to suit the music (similar to, but not as extreme as, recording the music on a cassette with no noise reduction and then playing it back with Dolby C switched on). I haven't seen an expander or dynamic noise filter reviewed in a magazine for at least 10 years but you might be able to buy/rent/borrow one.

If you have a computer there's lots of noise reduction software around.

The other alternative is to leave in the noise as an artistic choice but then you have to do it in such a way that the listener will realize that you did it on purpose. For example, start the track by having the sound of the guitarist plugging in the guitar, switching on the amp, counting-in, and then Kerrannggg!

Cheers,
Mike.

 

[adam]

iqi616 -- Thanks for the thoughtful response and great tips. I will give them a try. I am moving from a standalone to DAW system so the software option in particularly attractive.