thoughts on recording dry

[daltyboy]

I have a Roland VS 1680, and cool edit pro.

what are your thoughts on recording dry (clean) into the roland and then adding Distortion and other effects on CEPro.

note:my main concern is getting good distortion

 

[dobro]

The American approach tends to be the one you just described - record dry and add effects later. Brits have tended to be a bit more adventurous and track some things wet. If it was distortion on an amped guitar I was after, I'd try a few takes to see if I could get a decent distorted sound straight to the recorder - the Brit approach, in other words. I don't think I'd do it with reverb, though, not unless I was really sure.

 

[JuSumPilgrim]

CEPs distortion isnt very good and is usable only in very moderate doses like if you double a track and pan it to give a vocal or instrument color. I havent heard too many good sw distortions. The only thing with enough flexibility to get good sounds out of is actually craig andertons multiband distortion (who reviewed CEP 2.0 oddly enough) which I think is distributed by steinberg.

 

[schnoops]

good distortion

You can get extremely cool distortions using plugins such as:

- alien connection's revalver (tube like)
- ohmforce predatohm (synthetic coarse fuzz, my favorite for indus guitar tracks)
- cakewalk fx amp sim
- steinberg warp 1.0 (amp simulation)
- PSP vintage warmer (tape-like dist-comp when pushed high enough)
- Stomp'n FX vol1 an d Vol2 (sims of boss-like stomp boxes, pretty cool stuff)

go for the dry recording solution, you can patch those FX real time and see how it fits the mix and adjust all the parameters to fine tune your sound.
the wet way is ok if you've got extremely expensive micrphones, amps, and a recording room with good acoustics... and you allways get background buzz...

with digital dist, you can achieve great results for almost one tenth of the live recording gear gear.

that's just my opinion...