Our ears can be frustrating!

jlynnb1

jlynnb1

Axe-Master
I've been working on a pretty extensive IR shoutout for my Matchless patches. I recorded a couple of clips then reamped them through different IR's to maintain the same dynamics, etc. I loved most of what I heard through my CLR, then when I listened to the recordings, I hated almost everything I heard, lol.

Granted, I set my patches up to cut live, so I expect them to sound a bit then and cutting, but dang...was fairly disheartening. People always tell me it sounds amazing live but it's got me questioning my tones big time.
 
I've struggled with this as well. My live tones sound great when they're being blasted through a venue's PA. But for some reason, those same patches sound quite thin when I try to record with them.
 
Are you not playing the recordings back loud enough to get the nuances and stuff your looking for?

I always find it disheartening to be working on something for 3-4 hours and feel like i have missed the tone i am looking for. Only to come back a day later and realized I have poisoned my ears to the sound and lost the objectivity I needed. Cause it turns out it was good the first or second attempt.
 
Well I think most gigging professionals use separate tones live and in the studio for a reason. For live sounds it's pretty common to use single SM57 or E906 IRs and in the studio it's more common to blend more mics.
 
When you played them back, did you use bass and drums etc on a track with it? Or was it just your raw guitar ? If you didn't use a track try that and see what it sounds like. You can do a search for free backing tracks if you don't already have any. But try that. I ran into the very same issue you are having. Live my axe sounded amazing, alone to my ears just didn't sound very good. So I played to a track of a song we cover and bang thee was my tone cutting through and sounding great.

Let me be clear, alone my axe can sound great but it needs to have more low end put into the patches and in general just be EQ'd a little different than my live patches.
 
Last edited:
ML SOUND LAB said:
Well I think most gigging professionals use separate tones live and in the studio for a reason. For live sounds it's pretty common to use single SM57 or E906 IRs and in the studio it's more common to blend more mics.
Click to expand...

Because its hard to set them up for live? Still havent heard a band live that sounds better than their (good recorded) album at full volume. Put their cd at high SPL and sounds great, lo volume, sound great. The thing is.. theres a optimun SPL for judging sounds. And it may vary from person to person because you created better aural memory at a certain volume.
Loudness curves only make problems more apparent. If your mids suck, then at the level where that frecuency is more noticeable, will sound shit. If all your spectrum is great, theres nothing to fear. Loudness curves do not create big peaks.. its more like a gentle pultec. I'd worry a lot more of the room. And even then, bad rooms wont make a great sound shit. It just wont let it shine.
 
As above, have different tones for live. Recording your live tone will probably sound shit, but it still shouldn't sound too bad in the mix. Did you listen to it in the mix?

Further, get an isolated track from a band and blast it through your FRFR speakers. doesn't sound very flash, does it :D
 
tolchocks said:
Because its hard to set them up for live? Still havent heard a band live that sounds better than their (good recorded) album at full volume. Put their cd at high SPL and sounds great, lo volume, sound great. The thing is.. theres a optimun SPL for judging sounds. And it may vary from person to person because you created better aural memory at a certain volume.
Loudness curves only make problems more apparent. If your mids suck, then at the level where that frecuency is more noticeable, will sound shit. If all your spectrum is great, theres nothing to fear. Loudness curves do not create big peaks.. its more like a gentle pultec. I'd worry a lot more of the room. And even then, bad rooms wont make a great sound shit. It just wont let it shine.
Click to expand...

It's just a different environment. When you're doing a studio mix you're thinking about people listening to music in their homes through nice stereo setups or headphones and low volumes etc. Essentially the reason for the loudness war so that people can listen to music better on low volumes.

I think live sound will be more mono most of the time since if it would be as stereo as a studio mix then people hear something completely different based on where they're standing. Also you're listening to music in a large room/hall with natural reverberation so you might want to use dryer sounds. So essentially you're competing for space even more and you might need an IR that doesn't take too much space from other instruments but gives you the right frequencies.
 
ML SOUND LAB said:
Well I think most gigging professionals use separate tones live and in the studio for a reason. For live sounds it's pretty common to use single SM57 or E906 IRs and in the studio it's more common to blend more mics.
Click to expand...

This. Totally different set of rules between live & recording. You can get away with stuff like cranking your gain to 11 live... not so much when you're "playing for keeps."
 
So essentially you're competing for space even more and you might need an IR that doesn't take too much space from other instruments but gives you the right frequencies.
Click to expand...
What he said!
I find the bass guitar is the deciding factor for my tone live. If the room is "bouncy" it can quickly kill the tone of a whole band.... Like a audio black hole.
I ask the bassist to pull out his mids and try to carve a sonic place for myself WITHOUT adding too much volume.
I like to have a bass player who is wireless , so he can go out front and see for himself. Beats me having to convince him.
 
I don't think I worded my OP as well as I could have, lol. I understand the difference between recorded and live tones, and these tones were set up for live use. I expected them to not sound as great recorded...there was just a bigger difference than I anticipated when listening to the reamped tracks...so much so that it made me doubt my tones in general a bit.

I gigged those same tones for four hours tonight and they killed, ha!

Sorry if my OP made me sound like a noob who couldn't understand why his tones sounded different. I totally understand, was just shocked by how great the difference was. I've done IR shootouts in the past and haven't encountered such a wise difference. Perhaps I'll post it later and you can all tell me how bad they suck as well, lol.
 
Last edited:
Do it, i am interested to hear the difference. If you can explain what you feel is missing tone wise when you listen to it recorded vs live. You've got me interested from an engineering point of view.
 
It's amazing how much of an effect ear fatigue can have as well. I spent over an hour dialing in what I felt was an amazing tone one night with all kind of advanced parameter tweaks to get everything just right. I plugged in the next day and it sounded like crap! :lol
That experience changed my behavior a lot. Now I just pick an amp and cab, tweak basic controls for 5 minutes or so and I'm done.

Environment can have a big impact too. When I dial in my tones on my FRFR monitor at home in my man cave, things sound much cleaner and more balanced. When I get to the auditorium where I play the highs are really emphasized and the amp's perceived gain and dirt level seems much higher. I'm assuming the difference is likely due to having a perforated cinema screen behind me with a room behind it acting as a giant bass trap. When I stand up front and listen to the PA it sounds fine though, so I just trust my settings from home and don't sweat the difference in my monitoring.
 
Play good songs! Banging on the same E chord for hours on end, hearing for tonal subtleties is lame and boring.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom