Who re-amps their guitars?

[Codyeatruck]

Yerppp.

So I spent a few days in a studio recently and the engineer recorded guitars direct so he could later send that recording through an amp, then recording said amp. That technique was news to me.

How many of you gals and guys use that technique? Pros/cons?

I’m a not good mixer to begin with, distorted/fuzzy guitars are my shit and I suck at mixing them in.

I adore the guitar tones on the blue smiley albums (rip) would kill to get raw tone like that.

https://bluesmiley.bandcamp.com/album/ok

[MechaGodzilla]

On our last set of demos, the engineer wanted to record me DI and reamp it. I said it was pointless coz I wasn't interested in doing a billion takes and fussing over the mix and I only wanted to use my one Traynor on everything. Plus, I believe* that running old school stomps like transistor fuzz/LDRunivibe/inductor wah into a desk and THEN into an amp will be neither fun nor effective.

*"believe" meant in the truest sense coz I've never tried reamping

[Pepe]

I do it in a similar way with my guitar demos. First I record them on my BOSS RC-20XL looper and afterwards after having done all the takes I like I run the recorded loops through my tube amp. It sounds exactly the same and on top I can balance it correctly that way to avoid clipping and unwanted distortion - even make it sound fatter with the right amount of gain which hadn't been possible otherwise.

So, it's not the worst thing to do. BUT: when doing fuzz recordings, I hate to do them through headphones only - in that case I need the loud amp during recording the loops, but afterwards I proceed in the way as above again.

[Psyre]

I like to re-amp already amped tracks

Probably wouldn't do anything for me in the 2 situations you guys had though. Engineer was probably just more comfortable with amp Sims and not so much with micing techniques?

[MechaGodzilla]

Probably wouldn't do anything for me in the 2 situations you guys had though. Engineer was probably just more comfortable with amp Sims and not so much with micing techniques?

I think he just wanted to labour it or put it through his amp and control the whole guitar sound that way. He had mics, he had really expensive mics, but I was quite happy with the sound from an sm57 for the sake of a demo. If you're recording your magnum opus, it might be a different story.

[Pepe]

Don't forget that your standard setup might get drowned in the mix. So it's a good thing to experiment with your un-amped signal and make the best of it. The same goes to micing. Man, a single cm in the wrong direction can mess your sound up!

[Kacey Y]

I think it's fine as a safety or great for expanding tones/sound when you've got a live room recording that you want to keep under control and do some overdubs with later. I don't like it as a go-to recording technique for guitar tones, because you can't get any room interaction (feedback, feel of the amp as you're playing), it can get fiddly with pedals (but that can be pretty easily resolved, usually) and more importantly to me, it tends to lead to a very bland approach to recording, where there's no vision or choices made ahead of time and everything can just be endlessly fiddled with later. Those sorts of projects can come out technically very polished, but I usually don't get excited by them. It works better for certain tones and styles of music than others. One of the technical benefits to it is being able to edit the performance before it goes to pedals/amps. Which I prefer not to do, but it is a convenience if necessary and available.

If it's a practical issue for someone and reamping is the best way they can really record, I think that's fantastic and should be utilized to its fullest and most creative extent. If it's a safety net to make creative decisions later and not really be bold or decisive upfront, I don't like it.

I've reamped snares, that's fun. I've recorded a very straight forward but nice bass track live, with a DI, then reamped the DI track into a distorted amp for character. I've used reamping to get room ambience on close mic recorded tracks and I've reamped normally recorded tracks through clean amps/monitors for the same purpose before (although now I typically just use a nice IR based reverb send for that) or to get some dirt and or room sound on a vocal. There's some creative uses of reamping that can be very fun and interesting.

[sears]

you can mess around with effect parameters when reamping since you're not playing

[goroth]

We recorded our album live. The studio we chose wasn't big enough for the band though - we could have had one amp in the corridor but we wanted the door to the drum room open so we could get some room sound from the corridor. So we ran Arvid's guitar through an amp sim while we were tracking, then swapped out my amp for his JCM800 and mic'd it up then re-amped his tracks through that.

I think it worked pretty well.

We would have preferred to do it live through his amp as well, but we couldn't so
Probably doesn't make a difference.

[ognoy]

We recorded our album live. The studio we chose wasn't big enough for the band though - we could have had one amp in the corridor but we wanted the door to the drum room open so we could get some room sound from the corridor. So we ran Arvid's guitar through an amp sim while we were tracking, then swapped out my amp for his JCM800 and mic'd it up then re-amped his tracks through that.

I think it worked pretty well.

We would have preferred to do it live through his amp as well, but we couldn't so
Probably doesn't make a difference.

This!
Never had to do it myself, but in our new studio we only have one live room, so if some band wants to record live, but don't want any guitar-bleed in the drums they have to go direct, and then re-amp.

[Codyeatruck]

great responses per usual on here, thanks for the info guys!