Thanks man, that's so cool to hear! I feel extremely lucky that part of my job enables me to go down these rabbit holes. For me at least, there has been nothing more elusive in the world of recording than the conundrums of top tier high-gain guitar tone, so it's been extremely cathartic to be able to come back with answers and tools that others can enjoy too. I appreciate your kind words, thanks!
I'm glad the Thick cab gave you the right vibe mate, it's a cool and "brutal" sound that definitely needed to be included in Cali since I wanted to make sure all of the most famous flavours of tone are represented in there. It's also cool you're the one that sourced those Marshall cabs for Mark. I'm interested to hear those really old '87 8ohm Vintages, I think I'm probably always going to prefer the sound of the smoother early 00 speakers (I guess I've just been conditioned that way) but I look forward to hearing what Mark gets out of them for sure.
Yep, Andy is using the Marshalls almost exclusively these days, with straight off-the-shelf Chinese 16ohm V30s. He gets a great sound from them, his tones always sound like him. He's also throwing more mics up than he used to back in the day, I think it's typical 3 or 4 inputs blended to get his tones. It makes sense once you've done the single 57 thing for a while and have gotten excellent tones that way, you'd want to change things up and use unfamiliar mics or combinations to get to new and interesting sounds - that's why I wanted to make our cab IRs into actual plugins that encourage blending and experimentation, and hopefully that'll mean it stands the test of time where users can keep coming back to it and getting fresh sounds.
No worries at all. For what it's worth I've downsized my rig from the Ensemble Thunderbolt to the Symphony Desktop and I love it. I'm pretty much only mixing or tracking a single input in my studio these days though.
Thanks for the info! Hope you don’t mind us picking your brain. It’s interesting what you said about “Andy always sounding like Andy” basically. How do guys do that? I mean after all, I use much of the same exact signal chain as him often, and my tones in the raw form never turn out close to his. I don’t think you can say it’s the player that makes the difference in that case because he’s obviously always tracking different players, albeit all mostly pros, and yet, you still know it’s a sneap production. So what’s the key I wonder? How do guys develop “their” sound when they often use, Atleast in Andy’s case, pretty simple signal chains that everyone else uses? Aka: 5150, Mesa cab, and a 57? Sure you can identify that sound pretty easily, but it doesn’t mean MY 5150/Mesa/57 combo sounds anything like his. You hit the nail on the head though, recording guitars is incredibly elusive, and makes absolutely no sense at times, such as using the exact same gear as someone else and creating nothing close to those types of tones.
That’s kind of the reason I’ve been personally anti multi mic setups over the years too, Atleast when you are brand new like me and many others. But again, you can tell mark influences me still to this day a lot, and that’s his thing: “usually” a 57 and a 57 only in the right spot. He made the 201 cool though I think as well haha!
Anyways, I’m rambling, glad im not the only one that is constantly perplexed by getting great guitar tones and the elusiveness of it all, and the lack of concrete standards of it all.