… feeling isolated (Grendel Dead Room) …

Recording electric guitar can be a pain in the butt. Guitar amps that use tubes for their preamps and power amps generally need to be cranked up really loud in order to get a nice interaction between the pre/power amps and the speaker.

A while back, I posted about an guitar isolation cabinet called the Axetrak. It is a very small and almost dead silent solution for recording guitar. It sounds good for many things and is very simple to operate … you plug in your amp and you plug in a mic cable and you’re done. This has many advantages for people that just want to track guitar parts. Ultimately, I found that I just couldn’t get some of the sounds I needed out of the Axetrak.

I (maybe unfortunately) have a deep curiosity when it comes to exploring different sounds so I turned to the Grendel Sound Dead Room. I looked to be of a better build quality than the Randall Iso cab, cost about the same (at the time I purchased it), is made in the U.S.A., and has loads of speaker options.

After an extended ordeal that I don’t wish to go into at this point, my Dead Room showed up last week and I started playing with it. I like that it has two mic mounts so that you can double track your guitar with different sounds and mic placement. I will say that it was a pain in the butt to get the enormous Blue Ball mic and a 57 to get along inside the cab. The mounting bracket that is built into the Blue Ball was really loose and I had to take the mic apart and rig up a system to tighten it down so that it wouldn’t sag.

Anyway …

I’m not going to post any sound samples until I get a handle on this thing. Once I feel competent, I’ll probably run my Bitmo modded Blackheart 5 watt tube amp into it and the Axetrak and post some comparison samples.