The Guitar Silencer

Ok … the truth is I love recording, but I hate recording guitar. I can never get it to sound right. I have a 57, a Blue Ball, a 414 and various other mics that just don’t seem to capture the sound.

I guess it’s because I never crank my amp up loud enough.
(post on scaring the squirrels with amp volume)

So I’ve been looking into isolation cabinets and …….

My Axetrak showed up today! It is really small and light.

I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed that my guitar wouldn’t sound like Steve Stevens jamming in a cardboard box through such a strange device – but my fears were unjustified.

The isolation cabinate houses a 6″ speaker and is completely sealed off – except for the bass plug.

When I first plugged it into my Delta Blues 210, I thought it was broken. It was dead silent. I plugged it into my SCA N72 preamp and loaded up a song in Sonar. It sounded pretty good in headphones. Then I realized … it’s totally isolated! I cranked up my monitors and for the first time in my life I was able to play through my amp and adjust the tone while sitting directly in front of my monitors. No feedback or bleedthrough.

It is my “missing link” in finishing “Bits”.

I played around with some higher gain distortion settings it sounded pretty good! Recording a six inch speaker in a tiny box sounds very dry, but I can run it through the toolbox for some spring reverb.

Booted up “Brain Games” and tried out some clean sounds. I liked it.

Here are the results:

No vocals yet – just a section of the beginning of the song

Guitars sit pretty forward in the mix to give you an idea of the sound. No EQ. The amp was set flat as well. I’m sure I can dial in better sound, but I wanted to grab some neutral sounds first.

I added a little toolbox reverb (couldn’t help myself).

Brain Games – intro
[audio:bg.mp3]