Guitar Gear Forum

Kinda curious to see what y'alls think.

I've always recorded with me in front of my amp. I like the feedback of the cabinet over hearing a mix in my cans. Plus... yeah.. feedback. You can't do that with the amp in another room.

Last two times in the studio I did it the other way- with a cab in a guitar room. Fucking hated it. Felt like I was phoning it in sonically and kinda more like I was taking SATs. Just weirdness for the sake of isolation.

ANYHOW. what do ye all think, and what do you like?

In the room almost always. If I do stick the amp in another room for recording, or on the extremely rare times I've been in a studio, the mic'ed amp is in another space, and there's another sitting in front of me so I don't completely lose the feel of playing the guitar. Without that it's like miming motions and listening to someone else though the monitors/phones.

Only time I don't have an amp in the room with me is if it's the middle of the night and I'm using plugins.

More often than not in the room, but that’s more out of lack of space, even tho I have made a setup where I can run my cabling thru the wall into the other room and record seperate. I just don’t utilize it much. But I have some 6 inch thick foam I use to place around my cab and mics to cut down the sound. I also made some 1 foot thick “acoustic panels” to some degree. They are filled with heavy duty insulation and then I have the 6 inch medium density foam on the side too. So technically they are 18 inches thick. I made enough to fit completely around my cab for basically a full cab “ISO box”. It worked surprisingly well. Turned out to wall shaking volume we could still have a conversation in the room. Still heard it of course and the rumble came thru cause that wasn’t isolated. But they are fairly inconvenient and cumbersome and I only break it out for recordings that I know I’m doing an albums worth or what not.

I have it in the room with me at the moment, mostly because the current setup in my house. I am planning to buy another house soon and I want to see if I can find a basement with several different rooms or I will put up walls myself.

But here everything is in one room. I keep the amp at a lower-ish volume and monitor everything through headphones. My amps have good master volumes anyway so it's not a big problem. Sometimes I use my Suhr Reactive Load IR, which allows me to record silently and hear everything through the studio monitors without worrying about mic bleed. It sounds pretty good but I prefer to use a mic and keep the amp MV low most of the time.

out of pure convenience, in the room.

Plus, I can lean over and move the mic around with the headphones on while I'm playing. That's a gamechanger for me.

the simple answer is....... it depends..... I'm fine recording from the control room... but generally my amp is in the room with me and my pedalboard and the cab in the recording booth..... I think there was only a handful of times where I needed to be in the room because I needed feedback for the part....

I like recording in the control room so I can get a better sense of what my guitar sound like on the actual recording so I can tweak the amp to suit Vs being in the recording booth and hearing the amp live and having no context of what it's sounding like mic'd up and running through whatever outboard gear the studio is using...

Most of the time I’m on cans.

seems like a lotta variation-- i guess it comes down to how you view your sound to some extent. for rock guitar... well hell.. for ANY guitar really... for me anyhow-- the percussive air moving stuff is kinda what makes it FEEL like i'm playing an electric. if i get that sound filtered back through cans... i basically feel like i'm not actually doing it it's just happening like a video game. i'm controlling it.. but it's essentially virtual. i dunno.. mebbe it's the endless classical drilling i did as a band nerd but the instrument and what it's doing can't be missing i guess.

that said-- i also really like that the amp pushes the strings some, and controlled feedback is almost always part of making the noise i make, and i know a lotta guys avoid that like the plague. i do suppose too that it makes a big difference if someone ELSE is engineering it-- cause if theres someone with ears on that isn't you- it's easier to get good tones without burning your ears out with a loud amp and cans on.

Late to the party, but I was searching for something and this popped up...unrelated!!

Anyway, since I went back to 412s, the amp is in the room with me. Actually about 3-4 ft behind me, facing perpendicular to where I face my monitor. It works...fine. When I was recording with my Avatar 212, I kept it in the closet with a mic in front of it. That was more ideal than the current situation, but a 412 ain't fittin in this closet! So whatever lol. I do have some foam sheets that I use to sometimes isolate the mic from the outside environment, but it doesn't really come out as good, and then you have to move it when you wanna change mic positions. All this nonsense.

So yeah, it works fine having it in the room. Ideally it would be in it's own room, but I don't have space for that. One day, maybe. I actually don't mind having it in the room aside from having to use headphones...which is actually what I was searching about since mine seem to have blown drivers lol.