Metal guitar recording methods used by majority are far from optimal?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kraku
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To add to what @TheGreatGreen is saying the speakers are constructed differently, especially the magnets. That and guitar speakers interact with the 'load' coming from the Output Transformer and the Power Tubes. All 3 interact with each other. It is very dynamic. Where FR/FR speakers are well....flat.

This snippet from Google Gemini sums it well too. Assuming that TheGreatGreen has boiled this down correctly.


"How FRFR Speakers Differ from Traditional Guitar Speakers:
Traditional guitar speakers
.
are designed to color the sound, often emphasizing certain frequencies to create a unique tonal character.
FRFR speakers
.
aim to be neutral, providing a flat response and allowing the user to shape the sound through their digital modeling device. "
 
The goal of an FRFR is often to reproduce the sound of that particular cab mic'd up a certain way. In that case it just becomes a transfer function, which is certainly possible, and the mechanisms for which are completely understood.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to exactly mimic that particular cabinet in a room with you, I think @TheGreatGreen laid it out pretty well with a host of supporting evidences why it is unlikely to happen. I wouldn't go as far as to say it is impossible, but I wouldn't bet on the possibility either
 
pipelineaudio said:
The goal of an FRFR is often to reproduce the sound of that particular cab mic'd up a certain way. In that case it just becomes a transfer function, which is certainly possible, and the mechanisms for which are completely understood.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to exactly mimic that particular cabinet in a room with you, I think @TheGreatGreen laid it out pretty well with a host of supporting evidences why it is unlikely to happen. I wouldn't go as far as to say it is impossible, but I wouldn't bet on the possibility either
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Welcome to Rig-Talk @pipelineaudio

With 3 posts you've already shown more knowledge than a some I've seen that have been here for months, maybe even years with no real contribution in talking about rigs :lol:

Enjoy your stay here :cheers:
 
BeZo said:
Same is true with pizza. You get more pizza by getting more smaller pizzas than you do with one big one.
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Tell em Bezo 🍕👨🏻‍🍳

18 inch Pizza = π(18/2)²
= 254in²

14 inch Pizza= π(14/2)²
=154in²

Two 12 inch Pizzas = 2π(12/2)²
= 226in²

Much like subwoofers… It must be an 18” to beat 2 of those 12s..

Now, while 2 medium pizzas often provide more total pizza surface area, the best choice depends on individual preferences & the specific deal offered by your pizza joint. 👍🏽
👨🏻‍🍳
 

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Omnipotent1 said:
Tell em Bezo 🍕👨🏻‍🍳

18 inch Pizza = π(18/2)²
= 254in²

14 inch Pizza= π(14/2)²
=154in²

Two 12 inch Pizzas = 2π(12/2)²
= 226in²

Much like subwoofers… It must be an 18” to beat 2 of those 12s..

Now, while 2 medium pizzas often provide more total pizza surface area, the best choice depends on individual preferences & the specific deal offered by your pizza joint. 👍🏽
👨🏻‍🍳
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And four 10in pizzas is 314in², which will feed way more than one 18in pizza.

You're lucky I'm out to eat already.
 
pipelineaudio said:
Often the answer to this like so many other recording questions about gear choice and technique is because "that's how everyone else does it and I'm afraid to think for myself". Luckily with micing a cabinet, the results are immediately audible, unlike magical or false claims about mic preamps and other faith based gear claims, so it may just be that its because that's the sound they like, regardless of what they claim they are after
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That is my main guess also at the time of writing this.
 
TheGreatGreen said:
I wrote up a pretty big effort post in this thread the other day about this but decided not to post it because it seemed like the discussion had died down, but I can see it hasn't, so I'll try to rewrite some of it.

Look, it's great you're wondering about stuff. And you should always look for ways to improve things, whatever they are, guitar or otherwise. However, in this case, we've been trying to tell you something that you have been unwilling to hear, so I'll say it as clearly as I can...


In the digital modeling industry alone, the concept of developing some method for "making a monitor or PA speaker mimic the exact sound and behavior of X,Y, or Z guitar cab" is something that has been chased by everyone, including some of if not the smartest and most innovative people in the entire guitar gear industry for the better part of at least two decades at this point. Many of these people have vested financial interests in cracking that nut, lots of whom have effectively all the resources in the world to make it happen. And do you know what literally all of them have concluded?


What you are asking cannot be done. It is impossible.

Not "we don't know how to do it," not "we might be able to do it but it's too expensive and/or resource intensive," but "it is literally impossible to make a FRFR speaker enclosure sound like any specific guitar cab."


Why is it impossible? Well...

The answer is basically "physics." What do you actually hear when you hear a 4x12 cab in the room? Hearing "four speakers" is only part of it. Even if you eliminate room reflections, which are HUGELY influential to in-the-room-tone, in addition to the main four speakers, you are still also hearing the other 6 sides of the speaker cab all audibly vibrating and behaving as speakers themselves (and it's 7 total sides if you have an angled cab) in addition to the main 4 speaker surfaces. And make no mistake they absolutely vibrate loud enough to influence the sound in the room. That means for any given straight-baffle 4x12, all together there are a minimum of TEN (10) separate surfaces vibrating and emitting sound, each one with its own unique EQ signature, its own dynamics, its own phase relationship between itself, every other surface of the cab, and your ear.

There is quite literally no way to completely accurately capture and translate the full behavior of that kind of sound producing device to a given studio monitor or PA speaker, most of which have only one main driver plus a tweeter and are completely differently sized, differently built, differently internally dampened, and many of which are differently shaped as well. It's just physics. And EVEN IF you eliminate the sounds produced by the sides and backs of the cab and you're only dealing with four speakers floating in space, you still wouldn't be able to capture the identical experience of standing in front of those speakers and walking around them and translate that to another monitor, just due to the fact that the overall shape and configuration of those four cones are going to be entirely different from whatever monitors you'd use, which means the directionality and beaminess would be totally different because your exposure to a given amount of speaker surface area depending on where you stand would be different between a cab and a monitor.


We hear what you are asking. It’s not just a case of us idiots not being able to comprehend the unfathomable genius of your idea to “use a reference mic and put it a little farther away than normal and maybe use a 10 inch speaker.” It's physics, man. What you are asking simply cannot be done because of the fundamental differences between guitar cabs and FRFR cabs. The next best thing is then to capture a sound that will translate to FRFR speakers and make it as good as possible.
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I don't think it's that impossible. I'll explain:

Since we're talking about recording the cab, we're essentially talking about studio work here. So the FRFR studio monitor having to reproduce the 360 degree radiating sound is not important as we're not trying to reproduce the sound for a live gig on a stage or anything. Only what the guitar cab / studio monitor projects forward matters. (Let's ignore the idea of tiny amount of the sound radiating through the flat walls of the guitar cabinet for a paragraph or two.)

Using 4x12 cab just brings you trouble, as the combined sounds from the four speaker elements will cause all sorts of phase/attenuation/boost/whatever issues depending on where you listen to the cabinet or where you place the microphone. So it would be easiest to just take large enough 1x12 cabinet so it'll be able to handle lowest frequencies. This I why I mentioned in my OP the idea of not using 4x12 but something smaller.

Regarding any potential ideas that it would be impossible to capture a sound with a mic and reproduce it authentically through a studio monitor:
I visited Genelec factory over a decade ago, where they had arranged a day for people, where the CEO and their main engineers gave a full day of lectures about their work, research process, products, design philosophy, etc. and they answered all the questions we had without hiding any of their knowledge about anything. One specific thing they mentioned, which is highly relevant to this thread, is that to test how well their studio monitors actually reproduce the recorded sound, they recorded a guy reading a phone book. Then they put a studio monitor into a room and the same guy right next to it with that phone book. Then they did a blind test, where the listener tried to tell when the voice was coming from the recorded audio through the studio monitor, and when it was the actual living and breathing guy in the same room reading that phone book. That implies that you can record a highly authentic human voice with a mic and also reproduce it by playing it back through a studio monitor. If that process is possible to do for a human voice, it shouldn't be impossible to do for a guitar cabinet.

The above would cause some trouble if the audio radiated a lot through the guitar cabinet walls. I do not know how much this actually happens in practise, so I can't really comment on that. But I do know that it should be possible to build a guitar cabinet which radiates audio only small amounts through its walls. So if such a cabinet was a 1x12 or 1x10, it should probably be possible to capture its sound using similar method as Genelec captured the guy reading the phone book. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.) In that case you could capture and playback the authentic sound of that guitar cab speaker element: how it filters the incoming sound and how it interacts with the guitar amplifiers power amplifier section.
 
311boogieman said:
To add to what @TheGreatGreen is saying the speakers are constructed differently, especially the magnets. That and guitar speakers interact with the 'load' coming from the Output Transformer and the Power Tubes. All 3 interact with each other. It is very dynamic. Where FR/FR speakers are well....flat.
Click to expand...
But whatever happens before or at/inside the guitar cab speaker element, doesn't matter, as it's the resulting audio itself which is being captured with that mic and then played back through the studio monitors. So whatever speaker element you might use, and even if you modified it in anyway, you would still capture the actual performance with the mic.
 
Kraku said:
But whatever happens before or at/inside the guitar cab speaker element, doesn't matter, as it's the resulting audio itself which is being captured with that mic and then played back through the studio monitors. So whatever speaker element you might use, and even if you modified it in anyway, you would still capture the actual performance with the mic.
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You're idealistic but your sig line tells me you will eventually be more realistic once you accrue some time with this.
 
TheGreatGreen said:
Yeah it seems he’s saying the best way to capture the true essence of a 4x12 cab in the room is to use a 4x10 cab mic’d with a “flat” mic from multiple feet away.

Oh and he also only listens to music that sounds “different from all the rest” so you know he’s better than everybody else and also totally right about everything.

However, I have yet to hear him put his money where his mouth is and actually record anything that way himself and then post a single clip though. I hope he does because I can’t wait to be impressed beyond words at the sheer genius of his ideas that have eluded everyone else for decades, which will surely give us this magical “true whole sound of the speaker” that he thinks is uniquely desirable for some reason.
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Honestly im open minded about most things recording, but for anything as wild and dumb sounding as the original post, ima need some clips.
 
DanTravis62 said:
A flat eq curve reference mic 3-4 feet away on a 10" speaker sounding like a 4-12 in the room.
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Let me refer you to this answer of mine which explains the topic:

K

Post in thread 'Metal guitar recording methods used by majority are far from optimal?'

@skoora said in a different thread: "Don’t get ahead of yourself now. Still waiting for your speaker shoot out."

Let's move this to the right thread which is here, instead of you trolling around the forum.

Based on what you're suggesting, I can see you lack the capacity to understand the topic of this conversation. If you had understood it, you would not have made that comment. But since you did, I feel obligated to answer you so you might become a productive...
  • Kraku

I assume you didn't read that explanation of mine yet.
 
Kraku said:
Let me refer you to this answer of mine which explains the topic:

K

Post in thread 'Metal guitar recording methods used by majority are far from optimal?'

@skoora said in a different thread: "Don’t get ahead of yourself now. Still waiting for your speaker shoot out."

Let's move this to the right thread which is here, instead of you trolling around the forum.

Based on what you're suggesting, I can see you lack the capacity to understand the topic of this conversation. If you had understood it, you would not have made that comment. But since you did, I feel obligated to answer you so you might become a productive...
  • Kraku

I assume you didn't read that explanation of mine yet.
Click to expand...

I only got through the first paragraph before disregarding the rest after the sentence " Only what the guitar cab / studio monitor projects forward matters."

Because it shows a distinct misunderstanding and/or inexperience with the subject matter :dunno:
 
If as you say "Only what the guitar cab / studio monitor projects forward matters"

Then the standard way of micing cabinets everyone has been using for 50 years is by your own definition, the most efficient way.
 
some people mic 112s, 410s, 212s whatever. a lot of places use creative mic and studio techniques that are often assumed to be 412 v30s. the simple reason they use 412 v30s is that they like the sound.

perhaps the sound of a mic'd cab is preferred in a mix vs an accurate 1:1 of the same cab in the room. I don't know if you can assume a perfect replication would be better.

if you watch the bob rock sykes video on how they got the tone for still of the night they spent like 2 weeks trying to get a good sound. people really are out there trying stuff. one of the albums I listen to had parts done on a roland micro cube
 
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DanTravis62 said:
If as you say "Only what the guitar cab / studio monitor projects forward matters"

Then the standard way of micing cabinets everyone has been using for 50 years is by your own definition, the most efficient way.
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That depends on what that method is and how the recorded signal compares to the sound that can be heard coming out of the guitar speaker. I.e. speaker output vs. studio monitor output differences.
 
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