Reamping Re-Amping an Acoustic Guitar

Yesterday I posted on my Facebook page that I was re-amping an acoustic guitar that had been recorded direct. Ugh ;-( I was trying to breath some life into it. I almost never record guitars of any sort direct, but I was just mixing this track. Overall the production of the album was great, but they had a logistics issue on this one song and had to do the guitar direct for one song, so they get a pass. Several people on facebook asked for info about the re-amping, so here it is…

I have no details about how the guitar was recorded except that is was direct.

We ran out of pro tools into an original REAMP box.

Then into my Rivera TBR-2SL tube guitar head out to an old Mesa-Boogie 4×12 cabinet.

We miked it with a Shure SM-57, but not too close because I wanted to get some air into the sound.

The SM57 went into an A Designs Pacifica, then compressed a bit with my LA-2A and back into Pro Tools with my Agogee AD-16X.

Here is the original DI guitar (all levels have been bumped up a bit for the online samples. I would never record with levels this hot!!)

Acoustic Gtr DI

Here is the re-amped track

GTR Reamped

Most of the mixed just used the re-amp track, but a couple spots I used the DI guitar and the re-amp track panned hard left and hard right. The natural latency of the re-amping made a nice stereo spread. Of course I checked the mono compatibility and it held up OK. Probably not enough to use for the whole track for fine for a few bars. To warm up the DI track, I EQ’ed out some honkiness with the stock Pro Tools EQ, and compressed and saturation it a bit with the Kush UBK-1 plug-in.

Both tracks Together

The end result will not turn a DI guitar track into a track that sounds like it was recorded with a Neumann U47, but it can create a track that blends into the mix much better, has interesting character and sounds a whole lot less like a demo tape.