Why project studios should buy heads and cabs

Like most project recording studio owners we have struggled with recording electric guitar, and especially with the problem of getting a good tone at reasonable volume.

The sound of many guitar tones is produced by a combination of guitar, amp, cabinet and effects or pedals. Apart from the guitar itself and the playing experience, all of these can be emulated in software. But there are problems ..

1) Using DAW hosted plug-ins whilst recording still doesn't give you the same emotional experience as a real amp, and latency is still an issue.

2) Re-amping works well, but again the performance/recording experience isn't great, especially if you're recording a DI signal to pass through amp, cab and pedal plug-ins later.

3) Using a power soak between amp and cab works quite well, but it still changes the way the rig performs and sounds.

4) Using outboard hardware, such as a Pod or Digidesign Eleven, works a lot better, but again doesn't quite feel right when you're recording. You just don't get the push/pull feedback of a real amp.

We think a great and possibly affordable solution to ensure you get a great sound is to build a sound proofed cupboard large enough to take a couple of cabs (for sound options), mic stands and mic's, with XLR tie lines to a switch, patch bay, mic-pre or audio interface.

It may be possible for many of us to build this cupboard in the corner of an adjoining room or garage. A layer of 18mm MDF, followed by a 2-3" air gap, a rock wall slab, another air gap and another MDF layer will provide a lot of sound isolation, and you can rest your cabs on some foam to isolate them from the floor a little. It doesn't have to be pretty, but if you get the MDF pre-cut you should find it simple. Hinge the top so you can adjust your mics.

There is a problem! You really need to be able to control the amps from your playing and recording position near your DAW. Therefore the logical suggestion is to buy separate amp heads and cabs. You can then arrange your heads conveniently in your control room, and switch between them with a simple patch bay. 

Looking around the project studio handbook studio, we have 3 combos, one head and a cab. It's simple enough to break the feed between head and speaker in the combos, in order to feed the signal to our cupboard, but we can't help thinking that we should consider selling our combos and replacing them with heads.

Oh, and if you're wondering why there are no pictures of our cupboard to accompany this post .. we haven't built it yet! What do you think?

Thanks for reading

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