Behind the 'vision: Studio Diary. Entry # 015 - Heavy Rhythm Guitar Tracking
Time to get heavy. But never as easy as expected!
Picking up from the last post, I was excited to get moving forward on my heavy rhythm guitar tracking. After doing some much needed household cleanup in the fall, I was able to unearth my 4x12 cabinet, and bring it into the house and get it set up for tracking.
***Warning, a lot of this post is best enjoyed by the gear heads out there!***
This cab shown here is my Ampeg V412C. It is loaded with Celestion G12T-75 speakers, so it is essentially the same as a Marshall 1960A cab. Back in the day when we were rehearsing regularly at full volume, and on the precipice of hopefully playing some gigs, I wanted to get a good 4x12. Arguably, the go-to cab for Mesa amps in the past few decades is the Celestion Vintage 30 loaded Mesa Dual Rectifier cab. To be fair, there is a reason you see those cabs on stages EVERYWHERE. While playing with Angel, I had a chance to play my rig through one of those cabs, as he owned one then (and numerous ones now!). While it sounded good, to my ears, and for my style, I thought my amp sounded better through this cab. And honestly, it sounded AMAZING through both! I’m not alone in that thinking, as another highly regarded 4x12 cab in guitar tone circles is the Bogner Uberkab, which is 2 of each of those speakers. After trying out that combo, I understood why. (This piece of information will have even more relevance in a few paragraphs! 😊)
So when the opportunity arose to purchase this cab, I did, and things were good. As a matter of fact, while perhaps not the best capture of it, some of my demo tracks for these songs were recorded with this cab, at the very least, “Under The Knife” definitely was.
That all said, I haven’t had a need for this cab, or played through it in at least…13 or so years. So I admit I was kind of excited to blast through it, especially after the Mesa’s relatively recent factory service. It was time to split some ear drums!
I got everything setup, even got mics setup and ready to go, and everything seemed to be a go. But…something wasn’t right. I did some test recording and it sounded kinda….eh? Not great. So I started tweaking some of my settings on the amp. But like…I KNOW my amp. I knew that I was up against something else. Even trying some of the more extreme settings on the amp, was yielding unexciting results.
I had to sanity check myself. So I brought in my “control”; the original 1x12 from when this amp was a combo:
I fired it up, and wouldn’t you know it, night and day improvement! I think the best analogy was that the 4x12 made my guitar tone sound like there was a sock in it. I wish I was exaggerating how much worse the 4x12 sounded compared to the 1x12, but it was drastic.
So my next thought was that I’d just use my 1x12 for rhythm guitar tracking then:
It wouldn’t be the first time. I have done MANY recording sessions with this setup, and always got wonderful results; lead or rhythm. As I had mentioned, the original plan was to use this setup just for lead guitar recording, so there was some fundamental tonal separation between lead and rhythm tones, since the amp and guitar were the same. Initially I thought I’d overcome that by using different mics and/or placement.
But then I did a little soul searching and thinking about what I was actually doing. I realized that what I was doing with the different mic placement and utilization, was in essence kind of simulating the response and tonality of different speakers. And while it would work…maybe I should really just be using different speakers!
This approach was really just “filling in” because it’s what I had. However, I realized something else I had, for even longer than the 4x12 cab, was an empty 2x12 cab. A dent/scratch Avatar cab that I got for super cheap back in 2007 or so. Before I had the 4x12, I toyed with the idea of getting two 2x12 cabs, but abandoned the idea when I got the 4x12. For even longer than it had been since I used the 4x12, this empty 2x12 was just buried in my shed!
For historical giggles, here is a picture of James and I jamming in late summer 2007, and the 2x12 is in action! I had it loaded with the EVM-12L from my 1x12 cab, and a random Peavey speaker I had at that time. Of note is the fact that I had hair, lots of it! Also of note is that to the far right is Angel’s Mesa 4x12, and directly behind me is my Ampeg 4x12, before it was mine however. These were the days when I was experimenting with all this stuff:
Cutting back to 2024, realizing that I had this cab, and that I really wanted to pull out all the stops for this record, I came to the conclusion that there was no time like the present to put together a 2x12 with one each of the speakers that sounded so great together, in order to get the best tone for the record! The mission was on to build what I’ll call a “Jake” cab, essentially a Bogner Uberkab as a 2x12!
I unearthed the cab, got it cleaned up and ready to go. I was able to source lightly used (i.e., broken in) 16 ohm Vintage 30 and G12T-75 speakers, to make a nicely matched/Mesa friendly 8 ohm cab. And that’s exactly what I did!
So after all this, what was the result? Was it worth all this effort? And all this story telling? The short answer: Hell-freaking-yeah!! THIS is a speaker setup worthy of this amp’s potential. It sounds SOOO good. It has so much life, and open-ness. As I had experienced before, these speakers complement each other perfectly with my amp, and the result in the room is monstrous. This FINALLY sounded like the rhythm tone I wanted to hear.
I quick threw a pair of SM57s in front of it, one on each speaker, at where I usually approximate my starting point; on axis, right about where the dust cover meets the cone. I did a quick preliminary recording test, and that was it. Absolutely captured what I was looking for this whole time. And again, interestingly, neither mic /speaker sounded perfect on it’s own. Probably could have been tweaked a little to dial either one in just right. But together…that was the magic. And I didn’t even move the mics from my initial placement! I just marked it off so I wouldn’t lose the sweet spots.
Phew!
So, in order to get some actual recording progress made (remember, I was trying to record guitar? For an album? 😜), I figured I would crank out the few bits that were actually going to be done with 6 string. A few moments on the record are in drop-D tuning, so I thought I’d crank those out first. So I broke out my blue Ibanez RG “mutt”, gave it a bath, restring, and setup touch-up, and we were off!
On Dec 6th, I tracked all of the rhythm guitar for “Lost In The Storm”, and half of the rhythm guitars for “Losing Control”. Yes after all that, there actually WAS some recording to speak of, even if not all that much yet!! But most importantly, the process, capturing, and especially THE TONE, was in place.
I have my signal set up to split into my amp, as well as my Chameleon on a preset I wrote that I think complements the natural amp tone really well. And wouldn’t you know it, having the 2 mics and Chameleon blended, really nails the tone I have in my head. So much so that for my preliminary mixes, I didn’t need to add any effects at all. I’m sure there will be some tweaking in the final mixing, which is to be expected, but I feel like it will be pretty minimal. Because wow.
Stay tuned for (presumably) more straightforward recording updates and further progress with actual guitar tracking!
-Jake 12/29/2024
(P.S. Happy New Year!!!)