11.05.12
Old gear for new jobs
It’s a close to twenty year old SansAmp Classic, an analog micro-circuitry box used to do the guitars on Guns, Booze & Jesus.
It was designed to produce the three basic guitar amplifier tones — Marshall, Mesa Boogie and Fender — and all the variations in distortion, clean timbre and in-betweens one can get from them so that they could be piped directly to a recording console without the need of miking an amplifier.
About a decade after I bought the SansAmp digital guitar amp modeling hit the marketplace. The SansAmp, however, is not a computer.
Years on, I’m convinced the standard listener (and almost everyone else) simply can’t tell the difference in a recording, whether the guitar is laid down from a standing amp, a digital direct injection amp emulator, or the SansAmp. If enough time has elapsed so I don’t remember what I used, even I can’t tell.
Here are some for comparison. Can you tell? Bet not.
Guns, Booze & Jesus — SansAmp, set to sound like a cranked Fender Bassman.
The National Anthem — live miked Fender Super Champ.
Hooray for the Salvation Army Band — Adrenalin III digital emulator set to sound like a fairly clean Marshall.
Rich Man’s Burden — the live miked small Fender.
Act Naturally — SansAmp made to sound like a Vox amp.
The Stench — SansAmp front-ended with Static Egg fuzz.
GE & Jeff — can’t remember and can’t tell from listening to it.
And, appropriately, today and tomorrow, Don’t Vote for Dicks, which was trying for a country-ish sound, done by a made-in-China Line6 PocketPod, a guitar computer that’s a palm-sized kidney bean. Which I hardly use at all but which, on the spur of the moment, sounded right.
Use an app to plug your guitar into your smartphone? Eat shit. I can make something sound better with an old thing put on the market thirty years ago that’s the same size.
Snark aside, the biggest help in getting a guitar track to sound like something on a favorite record is a knowledge of what was used and what the tonal characteristics of the particular guitar/amp combination were. The rest is equalization and your hands. Specific gear made for that makes it easier to accomplish.
Would I use big old vintage amps if I were in a high end old school studio? Well, it sure would be fun.
But you’ll never convince me it would make much difference. In the end, it’s a few millivolts of signal crammed down into one song, a part among others.
Bonze Anne Rose Blayk said,
November 6, 2012 at 4:54 am
Mine is thirty years old?
I just sent it in to Tech 21 to replace the FET preamp board… the tone selector switch finally flaked out completely so I could not longer jiggle the “Normal” Boogie-type tone into action, and “for some reason” (maybe my ears going dead) it no longer seemed to be producing good treble… nice support they’ve got: estimated to be $30 + $14 for shipping.
One thing I’d like to note here is that IMO the SansAmp’s compression/distortion qualities are just amazing; it’s wonderfully responsive to touch, so you can tease out distortion just by picking harder, and still get clear audible tones when picking more gently.
George Smith said,
November 6, 2012 at 7:31 am
Mine’s had a weird idiosyncrasy for over ten years. It mostly only likes being used standing on its edge. It cuts out or sounds reduced if on the feet. flat. But stand it up and jiggle it, and it works fine. It seems like a short or bad contact on the input, nothing visible, something that position/gravity remedies.