What are some of your favorite processing and resampling techniques?
I have a few amps and outboard effects in my studio that I love running things through.
Often the goal isn’t even to make things sound ‘better’, the sounds are already so good. It’s more to give them more of a unique sound of my own and almost make them slightly smaller and bring them into my world more.
I honestly barely use any effects plugins in my sessions because I’ve learned that I get more unique sounds by using what I have in my studio. You could obviously do the same thing with plugins, but I like limiting myself as much as possible to what I have that’s around me. I feel like people are drowning in options these days, and it’s kinda a luxury to be limited. So almost every instrument I record I either mult the sound out (meaning send it to and record back in) while I’m recording to my Stereo Space Echo RE201 setup and Dimension D.
I then just have those tracks as the effects already in my session and I can blend them as I see fit. I’m very conscious of phase and so I always make sure that the Dimension D or whatever I record back in is phase aligned using a plugin called Auto Align that is very useful, it might seem like a small thing but you’d be surprised at home much of a difference it makes, especially over the course of a whole session.
So after that initial recording, depending on the sound, I’ll try reamping the sound through one of my amps (I have a Vox AC30, a Fender Twin Reverb and a vintage Ampeg SB-12 that live in my studio) which then goes to an ISO cab called a Rivera Silent Sister (which I found out about from RAC) and I have two mics that live in there. Of course in the reamping it’s also very important to use a reamp box so that the impedance etc is correct for an instrument level input on an amp.