I've had really good luck with this technique for recording "quietly". Take whatever head or combo you usually use, and get like a 6" car stereo speaker. (It is important that the speaker has an impedance of at least 8 ohms so that you don't blow up your amp's transformer). Connect the speaker to your amp instead of a cabinet, or use the "external speaker" jack. Make sure that the cord is long enough to allow you to place the speaker on a pillow in a closet. Turn on your amp with the volume completely off, and then SLOWLY turn up the volume till you can just barely hear sound from the speaker. Place a mic on the pillow in front of the speaker, and experiment with mic placement and amp volume.

I've gotten some killer sounds this way, and you can monitor yourself with headphones from your deck. Great for apartment dwellers.

Stephen Keay wrote:
>
> Just thought I'd post back some info as I got many responses to my
> post about DI setups for guitar. I found a great setup that is soooo good for
> direct recording, I had to pass it on... I had several pieces of
> equipment in boxes for several months that I forgot I had so I
> assembled them as follows and it puts out practicaly any tone I
> believe one could want just by modifying your component of choice.
> Now my Direct Inject chain is:

guitar
wah/overdrive
Peavey Classic 20 mounted in a rack
slaved to a Groove Tubes Speaker Emulator (a good one, not an early, bad one)
a channel on a Mackie 1202 mixer
insert point [fx loop?] from that channel to an Alesis 3630 comp./limit./gate back into the Mackie
an older ART FXR Elite multi Effects unit in a parallel effects loop of the mixer
the main outs to the 8 track's mixer
Alt. 3-4 outs to an aux. input of the monitoring power amp (stereo)
the second effects loop send to a guitar dedicated power amp to an old Boogie speaker cabinet.(when a little noise is ok)

(To clarify, his main strategy is:

preamp distortion
tube amp
inductive load and speaker simulator
compressor
multifx [not *before* the tube amp!]
flat-response monitor amp
full-range monitor speakers (implied)

The funny thing is, if he uses his Boogie cabinet as a final monitor speaker and it contains guitar speakers rather than full-range speakers, then he would be putting his signal through both a guitar speaker emulator *and* an actual guitar speaker, which would sound very dull. -- Michael)

> It sounds great through the flat-response amp and headphones, and it also sounds killer when it is cranked through the Boogie guitar-speaker cabinet. If
> I had a second cabinet it would be stereo through the speakers but
> at least it's stereo into the tape deck from the mixer for recording.
> This setup offers a lot of control over the level and tone going to
> the Mackie deck.

> Now I know the purists out there (like me, really) will
> probably flame me, but it's not good to mic a Marshall amp cranking
> away at a well tuned volume at 12:30 at night with any other humans
> even remotely close, and an isolation box for a large amp can be
> quite a feat to fit into an area while leaving that area usable to
> other things... Unless of course you have an isolated, sound proofed
> studio which few of us mere mortals do...
> This is a fairly inexpensive setup and all the components or similar
> ones can be found second hand reasonably cheap...
> Someone also suggested (thanks Dave M.) putting a speaker in a closet
> and baffling it which didn't occur to me so thats a great idea I'll
> try this weekend too...
> Anyone else ????
>
> Steve K

Jeez, I wish I had sent my early-model Groove Tubes Speaker Emulator back to the shop for the treble-increase mods. Mine was obviously saturating its power tubes, but the speaker simulator was *way* overboard as far as cutting out *all* the treble. It sounded like there was a cranked tube amp on the other side of a wall.

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