Guitar Tests
Rob and I decided to get together and work on guitar sounds to make sure we are getting what we want to get out of the equipment we all have. We planned to use a lot of guitar-amp-cabinet combinations to see what we would come up with. We don’t really have any preconceived notions, other than we know what we don’t like. We were originally going to do it once but it turns out we got together two nights and will also do a third as soon as we get a piece of gear we are waiting on. On one of the Saturdays we were off, we spent about 10 hours going through stuff and we learned a lot about some “problems” with existing gear that would not have shown up but for the microcosm of the recording environment. What follows is actually two sessions but the first session I don’t think we actually recorded anything, we just played and listened.
Obviously we have two guitar players and so Dean will be mixed on the left (like the last record) and Rob on the right, just as you see the band live. My original plan was to use a miked cabinet on one track, and a Palmer PDI-03 Speaker Simulator on the other from another amp head and mix the two. I had used the Palmer on some demo stuff and it sounded killer. The one I have is the original, the same model used on all the legendary Def Leppard albums and also used by Eddie Van Halen back in the day. These original ones are quite rare and extremely hard to find. I was lucky to get my hands on one because it sounds incredible. We recorded two tracks of the same performance, one with the Palmer and one of the cab. We had to decide what guitar to use and what amp settings to use, including which guitars were great or unusable and which guitar sounded better through the amp or the Palmer, so we planned on recording with every combination of every thing we had. We wanted to hear them in context with each other.
The first thing we did was put my old Marshall cabinet down the hallway. We used a vintage ’72 100 watt Marshall head on loan from Ronnie Younkins. It’s been modified by some amp guru in LA and has a couple of bells and whistles on it. Mostly mods of convenience rather than for a different sound or tone. Since I had been using my Marshall JCM800 Lead 50 with the Palmer and we loved the sound, we went with that amp on the Palmer – it was after all already plugged in and wired to it! We also have a ’67 Fender Bassman that was just worked over by a specialist and it sounds really warm and has a ton of character. Most people outside the biz might think we are using it for recording bass, not the case. It’s a fantastic guitar amp, but not a very good bass amp. In fact when Jim Marshall first started building amplifiers, his amps were all based on the early Fender Bassman circuitry. I also have a “guitar magic” kit from Torres Engineering installed in this amp so it’s definitely a guitar amp at this point, cleaner than a Marshall and silkier.
For guitars we had on hand Rob’s PRS, Lucky, Lucky II, my ’76 Les Paul Custom and a Fender ’72 Telecaster Deluxe re-issue I just got a hold of. We stood out in the hall with the amp cranked up pretty good and tried different settings and different guitars for a while. The PRS had to have the shittiest pickup in it, we found that guitar is unusable until we can install a real pickup, then we’ll try her again. In it’s defense, the model Rob has is the Santana which is their cheapest model (still not “cheap” but it’s the economy model on the PRS scale of things) so I would not expect it to have a great pickup in it. We found that Lucky II had way too much fret buzz and Rob planned on working on that later. Lucky was WAY too distorted, it has a very high gain Duncan in it and its just too much gain for rhythm and we’ll keep it in mind for lead tracks. The Les Paul sounded incredible, crunchy without sounding “metal” or thin. Rob doesn’t like playing that one too much, it has smaller frets than he is used to and he has to dig a little harder to squeeze some attitude out of it, it’s just a playing comfort thing. The Tele Deluxe really had our hearts this night. It had all the good things about a Les Paul and all the good things about a Fender rolled into one. The Deluxes were made with Strat head stocks and two humbuckers in the early-mid 70′s and this is a faithful Fender re-issue of the originals. It sounded great and Rob loved playing it.
We were having one problem though. No matter what head or guitar we used, we could not get the sound to clean up the way we wanted it to. Even with the pre-amps on say two, the Marshall was really pretty distorted, not in a bad way, it was breaking up all wrong and was just plain dirty. I had been having misgivings about my poor old Marshall cabinet even when we did the last record. We recorded most of the guitars on “Skin” through this cabinet. It was made 
sometime between 1970 and 1973 and when I got it in the mid-80′s it was in great shape. I used it for years playing in bands when I played guitar, I loaded that thing into my old Pinto wagon so many times. I left it in the heat in the car, in the cold in my various garages over the years, (I even lent it to Ronnie once in like ’86 and he left it under the stage at The Bayou for a week (but that’s a whole other story, shiot, now I’m in double parenthesis again, what’s the punctuation rule for getting out? This?)) My point is, that thing has got to be tired with all the abuse I have put it through. Since I was only just suspect at this point, I decided to see how much it would cost to replace the speakers in that cabinet. Brian Forsythe had been raving about a Marshall cabinet he recently purchased that had Celestion Vintage 30′s in it and he played me a Rhino Bucket recording they had done for a movie that sound really good. A lot like AC/DC guitars. I had Celestion 25 watt Greenbacks in mine. So I convinced myself the speakers were worn – had to be after 30 years right? Fucking-a right! I placed an order and after I put those new speakers in there and fired it up, I thought the world was going to end! That was exactly the problem, the sound was considerably tighter and more defined, we even had to turn the pre-amp up to get a little more edge out of it. That made such a huge difference I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.
Incidentally, back pedaling the timeline for a minute, I was in Victor Litz music during the interim while I was waiting for my speakers to arrive and I spied a dark green cabinet over in the corner, way out of the way. I asked Jeff Adams about it and we moved a bunch of other gear out of the way and it turns out it was a Trace Elliot 4×12 guitar cabinet! Wow. Rare find indeed. I knew from being such a gear head that these cabinets have a reputation for sounding great AND that they weighed in at roughly one metric ton. I bought the thing on the spot for dirt and it was in perfect condition. Not a scratch or tear on the thing. So I got it home, recruited my neighbor to help me hump it up the stairs, (most other cabs I can carry upstairs myself, not this boat anchor) take the back off the thing and guess what speakers are in it? Celestion Vintage 30′s! It also has much heavier wood and much different bracing inside compared to a Marshall. Cool so now we have two 4×12′s we can use. I hooked up the Trace right away to the ’72 Marshall and played the Les Paul through it – for a moment I was Angus incarnate, all I needed was shorts and some talent. THE tightest sound, just fabulous. I called Rob and got him all excited about the new cab. We planned to get together that Saturday after I had loaded the Vintage 30′s on order into the Marshall.
This time since we had made some decisions on what configurations we wanted to try, we were able to get right to recording some test tracks without too much fucking around. I put a 
Sennhieser 421 about eight inches away from one speaker and a SM57 on the other about the same distance. Ideally the diaphragms of the mics should be exactly the same distance away to avoid phase problems. I decided rather quickly I did not like the 421. 57′s have a lot of midrange frequencies and the 421′s tend to capture more highs and lows. I plan on mixing two different mic inputs to one track as we record. I’m going to try the 421 again later but I went with the Neumann instead this time. I learned a neat trick that I’ll share with you for using two mics on a guitar cabinet and recording them down to one track.
Start with the mics exactly the same distance away from the center of any two speakers, I use the top speakers usually on a 4×12 cab. (To avoid the proximity effect, use at least 8 inches) Run them both into your mic-pre and whatever outboard gear you want to use then into the recorder. Bring the fader up to zero on one mic. On the second mic, invert the phase. Bring the fader on the inverted phase mic up slowly, around -5 or -3dB you should start to hear the sound getting thinner and sounding terrible. Find the spot where the sound is weakest, thinnest and worst. Leave the fader there and flip the phase back on the second mic, what you hear should kick you in the head. What this accomplishes is finding the spot where the mics are most out of phase, which when they are flipped back, they are the most in phase. Of course there is no way to hear that while both mics are the same phase and this trick is a nice little shortcut.
We were able to record about 18 different tracks to one of the drum tracks from the first session that we were going to trash anyhow. Each time Rob played one “expression” rhythm track and one cleanish track. When I say cleanish, think Pete Townsend on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Cleanish is not a great description because what we’re looking for is anything but clean, it’s just not as dirty as the other track. With each pair of tracks we recorded, whatever we used to record one side, we’d use a completely different rig and guitar for the other side. We mostly used the Tele and Les Paul and used the Lucky’s here and there for comparison. We mixed the Palmer track and the miked cabinet track so each side really had two tracks simultaneously recorded. The Palmer really lived up to its reputation, it’s pretty amazing sound from that little box and you can run the amp on 10 without hearing a thing as the speaker output plugs right into it. We liked the sound of the Bassman for the cleanish stuff and the ’72 Marshall for the expression track. I wish I could get my hands on a Hiwatt amp and really go for that Townsend sound. The guy from Green Day records his cleanish sounds with a Hiwatt and uses an old Marshall like the one we have for his main sound. Rob and I both really like that sound a lot so if anybody out there has a Hiwatt head they wish to lend us for about six months, or sell at a reasonable price, let me know. We tried Rob’s JCM800 head and it is still just a little too dirty for what we are looking for.
We ran some CD’s through the analyzer to compare our frequency response to the big boys. We looked at the intro to “Highway to Hell” and other than plainly hearing the difference, we could see we had way to much middle in there compared to Angus’ guitar. It is a combination of having the mids on 10 where Rob likes his amps to be and using an SM57 (along with the Neumann) to mic the cab. I eq’d out what we didn’t need there and the sounds were really beginning to take shape. Next time I think maybe we’ll either use a different mic or get rid of the mids altogether and let the mic do the mid frequency work for us. If you leave a bunch of mids in the guitars, it will fill up the mix so fast that there will be no room in the frequency spectrum for vocals and bass, the mix will sound muddy. So we have to leave like 200Hz to about 800Hz just a bit subtracted, like maybe -3dB. When you look at guitar sounds you like through an analyzer, it really helps you to nail down frequencies to subtract from your guitar sound. You have to find a spot on the album you want to look at that has nothing but guitar and look at it that way through the analyzer. Sometimes if the spot I want to analyze is real short, I’ll use Soundforge (or Acid Pro or whatever is handy) to copy and paste like 10 copies of just that spot together in one big wav file and play that through the analyzer. I’ve found it quite helpful over the years. Of course guys who engineer and mix for a living can identify frequencies to subtract spot on every time, but I on the other hand need a little help. The spectrum analyzer is my crutch. Nothing much happens on a guitar sound above 7k so you might as well shelve that off. There’s not a whole lot needed in the lower mids either nor is there much but rumble below 180Hz. Take a look at your favorite guitar sounds through an analyzer, you will be quite surprised what you see versus what you think you hear.
We had not planned on using any of these tracks, this was just some equipment testing we wanted to feel out before we do it for real. We had a few other amps yet to try, the Soldano Hot Rod 50 XL which I have really high hopes for and the Mesa Boogie head. Did you know that the knobs on Soldano heads go up to 11? How great is that? I bet it brings a tear to Nigel Tufnel’s eye! We’ll try both of those through the Marshall and the Trace cabinets and see where we get with that. We’ll try one of Dean’s 2×12 Mesa Boogie cabinets too and see where that takes us. I’m not a big fan of Boogie cabinets but we’ll give it a listen and see what it sounds like.
I’ll be checking back soon – Mark
