Preengineering for my studio (guitar)

[G-spotrecordings]

Hello,

I'm a recording engineer from Belgium and I signed up today after bumping in on this really interesting newsgroup. I see that a lot of real engineers are on this group. I'm willing to be part of that, but I'll have to learn a lot before being part of this group. Anyway I have a litlle problem that I'm trying to tackle, and I hope you guys might help me out.

I have a pretty high end recording studio (in parts actually cause I'm going to build it within two months if my planning is ok) I'm actually going from totally digital to totally analogue (at least the front end). I do mainly rock music and recording guitar is one of the things i do best but It takes really a lot of time to get the result I want mainly because I have to go from room to room untill I'm satisfied with the sound. I mainly do a blend of three amp at all times (mostly single rectifier, marshall LM6100 and and a JCM800). What I would like to do is have the heads in my studio and the cabinets in the booth. There is a distance of around 20 meters between both rooms. Does anyone know how to tackle this problem with a minimum of signal degradation.

As I use three amp at the same time I would like to build some kind of reamp box. But I'dd like to use it as follows. One guitar in four different amps (in case I might favour four but that's extreme) and a fifth channel back into my daw through my studer 903 mixer and into my daw using Studer V8 ADDA converters. The latter for reamping if I'm not satisfied with the end blend. The guitarsignal gets balanced immediately (api 3124+ hiz input)

For the second problem I found some partial answers on this site. What I was thinking about was to split the balanced guitarsignal from the api into 6 channels (1:1 transformers) The splitter will be a sparecard I have for my studerdesk (eurocard system). The thing is to unbalance the balanced signals enough to use them as guitarampinputs going down at least 14 db. What kind of components would you guys use if the budget was of no importance? I'm not a pcb wizard I can solder well but I have just a litlle notice of audio electronics.... Any help would be highly appreciated. I would like to use this opportunity to get into building solutions to problems as they present themselves. And a lot of projects I have seen on this newsgroup got me drooling so looking really forward to learn.

Kind regards from Belgium

Geert

 

[pucho812]

Let me be the first to welcome you to the lab. have a beer :guinness:

As for running your signal with big distances from the head to the CAB I suggest running 2 DI's box's between the Cab and the Head Can build them fairly cheap and I have had good results doing that at various studios. But I believe you can do that without di's just run the cable.

As for the reamp boxes there is a schemo floating around here do a search Dave built one and has a nice schemo for it. In the Lab. Easy to modify to your needs as you could take the output which would go to the amp and split it to go to 4 amps like a Y cable.

I would like to use this opportunity to get into building solutions to problems as they present themselves. And a lot of projects I have seen on this newsgroup got me drooling so looking really forward to learn.

We like to help out and we are friendly folk aroujnd these parts. You will find a lot of info reading the meta's and such. Welcome to the DIY where the smell of solder turns some of us on. :twisted:

 

[BR]

Hey Geert,
Welcome to the Forum :guinness: :sam:

If I understood your post correctly, you want your amps in the control room and your cabs in the studio, which basically means you will have a pretty long speaker cable run. If that is the case, just use the best and bigger gauge speaker cable you can find and good luck. I won't hurt for you to get 20 meters of 12 or 10 gauge cable and just try ir first and compare it with some short 1 meter cable to hear the difference.

As far as the guitar splitter and reamp, if you have a little bit of money, you should look into the Radial Engineering stuff. They make great splitters, DIs and reamp boxes.
http://radialeng.com/di-jd7.htm.
I know its not diy, but they make excellent stuff. Check out the other stuff on their site.

take care
Gil

 

[gtrmac]

LittleLabs makes something called the PCP Instrument Distro which sounds like the ultimate tool for what you are trying to do.

It's here:

http://www.littlelabs.com/pcp.html

They also make some other useful looking and unique tools.

As far as the long speaker runs I haven't come across anything to improve that except good wire which was already mentioned.

 

[clintrubber]

[quote author="G-spotrecordings"]Hello,



Kind regards from Belgium

Geert[/quote]

Hi Geert, welcome.

Hmm, Belgium, reamping, recording guitars... sounds familiar... are you sure you're Geert and not Tony ? :wink:

He has experience in that area, to say the least. His username here is tony dB.

Groeten,

Peter

 

[G-spotrecordings]

Hi guys,

Thanx for the replies. I'll try the 12 gauge cabels between the head and the cabinet. With regards to reamping I'm working on a design that uses distribution amplifiers from my studer desk. the problem is the outputs are balanced (with is actually what I needed to have no noise buildup.) I found chematics for unbalancing it near the amp and go straight in. The thing is now that I'm planning on also using some studer limiters to tame the signal a little before it gets in the amp. I also have some bargraph plasma meters on spare I also would like to use to see how the limiter interacts etcetera. As I'm really getting wild I'm also planning on creating a HiZ input. I have enough distribution amps and stereolimiters (I can also switch to mono. I'll make a picture of the component's I'm planning to use, cause being a newbe will certainly make me want some second opinions before I start soldering... By the way I don't know Tony, if he's from belgium I might irritate him with my questions by just jumping in the car in the middle of the night :green:

Anyway, I'm visiting this newsgroup day by day and really stimulates to learn....

Kidn regards

Geert