Making Of voXager

How to catch the guitar?

January 14th, 2007 at 07:37pm sven

ASK any guitarist on our planet how to record guitars and the answer will probably be: go into a studio, stick your guitar into a tube amp and record the result with a microphone or much better: use different amps and microphones. Allthough this is the “normal” way to do it, it doesn’t guarantee a good sounding result – it’s for sure a matter of recording and studio experience. Apart from that it doesn’t fit to our vision to record most of the music before going into any kind of studio using low cost DAW equipment.

SO have we got a non-starter right from the beginning?

NO way, we wouldn’t be voXager if we couldn’t find a solution According to countless colourful advertising we didn’t even have a problem, easy way out – just use a modelling amp. Knowing that life isn’t always that easy we gave it a short try…
Just plug in and adjust the level, hit the record button and there you go – but wait, what’s that? As if we didn’t knew it before the guitars were clinically dead afterwards.

DOING it the studio way just in the comfort of our own homes was not even worth thinking about. How liberal can neighbours be? Aside from that there is almost no way to create an accoustic comparable situation outside of a studio – yes, there seems to be a reason why those doggone establishments exist at last.

NOT beeing part of magic circles or using any voodoo techniques, reamping will do the magic for us. The guitar is beeing plugged directly into the computer and recorded with pure clean sound. Those tracks will – electrically adjusted – hit a real amp and then be recorded again. A reasonable agreement between efforts, time and waste of money.

SHREDDING the guitar with clean sound? It doesn’t feel like creating rock music whilst recording not even for us. Therefor the signal of the guitar is splitted and also sent through a distortion pedal. Tape it clean and listen metal
Using a spimple Y-connector pulled down the signal, much better then amp modelling but still an anodyne sound with no balls at all. A little tube preamp boosts up the sound before the signal is splitted and bestows us with a warm natural compression not reached by any kind of amp simulation so far.