Dream Theater studio - monitoring guitar?

[amiller]

So, I was watching the new Dream Theater DVD (documentary) last night and I noticed that most of the time JP was not wearing headphones when he was laying down his guitar parts. I've always hated the way my guitar sounds through headphones during the recording process and was very interested to see JP not wearing headphones.

So now I'm thinking I can put my cab in the isolated drum room I have and run a speaker cable through the wall and then monitor my playing while recording through the studio monitors. I know that a lot of your tone comes from the fingers and I'm thinking this might help me to hear a little better and adjust my playing accordingly.

What has your experiences been?

 

[Robotechnology]

Most comfortable way to do it. I'm recording guitar for a project now and the guy's studio is so tiny that there is no possible isolation area so headphones it is

Last studio I recorded something in however, it was as you said. My amp in the drum room and there was a switching system mounted in the wall... other side of the wall connections to mixer. Me in the control room with producer/engineer as I stand in front the Genelec monitors with NO headphones on

 

[StevieRaveOn]

Depends on how much stuff you have, have to do, and how much you want to experiment... But, I've heard of another step further that can help a lot with leads. 1) Cab in Iso room miced up, 2) head in control room for tweaking, 3) split from guitar feed to amp, 4) one side to the Iso'ed amp, 5) other side of split to amp in control room. That way, you can get any feedback FX you want without having to be in the room of the mic that's going to tape.

I think some of Appetite was done this way, but I don't have a link to back it up. The logic works out well in my mind, YMMV.

 

[Stratboy151]

yeap whenever i hit a studio we bring the heads in the control room and mic up the cabs in the live room, never using headphones. the only time that changes is for acoustic guitar when i would have to play in the live room with headphones, sitting perfectly still, no foot tapping, never moving, no clearing your throat, and trying to not breathe that loud either!

 

[amiller]

I didn't have all of the stuff I needed to set up my full rig this way but I was able to set up a little THD for proof of concept.

WOW!

This is definitely the way to go. Man, so much more comfortable...no freaking headphones tying me down. I can hear much better and it feels more natural.

StevieRaveOn, I have three cabs so I might try using one in the "mic/iso" room and one with me in the control room as you suggested. What's the best way to split the feed to the two cabs without a bunch of noise...ground hum and such?

This is way cool...can't wait to get to the local music store tomorrow to get the necessary cords.

 

[StevieRaveOn]

I didn't have all of the stuff I needed to set up my full rig this way but I was able to set up a little THD for proof of concept.

WOW!

This is definitely the way to go. Man, so much more comfortable...no freaking headphones tying me down. I can hear much better and it feels more natural.

StevieRaveOn, I have three cabs so I might try using one in the "mic/iso" room and one with me in the control room as you suggested. What's the best way to split the feed to the two cabs without a bunch of noise...ground hum and such?

This is way cool...can't wait to get to the local music store tomorrow to get the necessary cords.

As far as my experience, I haven't had any noise problems with multiple cabinets... If you're going to run separate amps to each cabinet and split the guitar signal, just make sure to use something with a quality transformer-isolated split and you should be fine.

Using only two cabs does depend on on how loud you want to use the amp... you don't want to nuke the control room, just enough to get a live feel into the leads.

 

[amiller]

I didn't have all of the stuff I needed to set up my full rig this way but I was able to set up a little THD for proof of concept.

WOW!

This is definitely the way to go. Man, so much more comfortable...no freaking headphones tying me down. I can hear much better and it feels more natural.

StevieRaveOn, I have three cabs so I might try using one in the "mic/iso" room and one with me in the control room as you suggested. What's the best way to split the feed to the two cabs without a bunch of noise...ground hum and such?

This is way cool...can't wait to get to the local music store tomorrow to get the necessary cords.

As far as my experience, I haven't had any noise problems with multiple cabinets... If you're going to run separate amps to each cabinet and split the guitar signal, just make sure to use something with a quality transformer-isolated split and you should be fine.

Using only two cabs does depend on on how loud you want to use the amp... you don't want to nuke the control room, just enough to get a live feel into the leads.

DoH!!!

I've discovered that I have two speaker outs on my XTC so running two cabs is simple...just need to knock down the ohms to 8.

Thanks for the input...your response brings up another question...hmmmm, I start another thread for dat.