Recording good guitar sound with tube amps can be a difficult thing to achieve. In my experience it's quite easy with cleans and mild crunch but gets harder and harder with increasing gain and/or saturation. Miking speaker cabinets is a very demanding science in itself: Ideally you have a place where you can crank your amp to be able to record a sense of the air and punch of gainy and/or saturated sounds, several cabinets with different speakers to choose from, a wide range of pretty affordable to ridiculously expensive microphones specifically suited to capture certain tones, and (most important) preferrably many years of experience in bringing all those assets together.
Until now I could only get so far living in a city apartment where 1W cranked is too loud, owning one speaker cabinet, the wrong kinds of microphones, and having only a few years of self taught recording experience. I've tried several tools but nothing was close to the sound I wanted. I envied the all-digital users but wouldn't want to part with my beloved tube amp.
Luckily I found a device that allows me to combine my amp and the digital realm to a powerful hybrid package.
The Two Notes Torpedo Studio:The Torpedo Studio by Two Notes Audio Engineering is a high end speaker and miking simulator and loadbox. It offers a reactive load for tube amp signals up to 150W (4, 8, 16 Ω) based on the impulse responses of several guitar and bass cabinets (50 included, more available from Two Notes or third party IR vendors). Those cabs can be captured with 8 different microphone simulations allowing free placement (front or back, horizontal positioning, distance). You can use two cab/mic combinations at the same time with separate or mixed signals. You can also use it with your preamps and emulate a tube power amp with settings for tube type, volume, presence, depth, and triode/pentode (haven't tried that yet). Additionally it has all the important post miking effects. There's a low cut, an equalizer, an exciter, and a compressor.
See all details and specs on the product website.
I've researched the Torpedo for several weeks and bought it on my annual spend-a-day-at-a-big-music-store-with-a-friend-mini-holiday on January 4th. Within the first few hours of playing it was obvious to me that I've finally found the right device, not only for recording but also for 100% consistent and reliable live sound. Yes, it's really that good. The speaker and miking simulation is incredibly close to the real thing. People who have worked with gear using impulse responses will know how effective they are. I'll keep my cab of course, for practice and for fun and for the unlikely chance of ever recording in a professional studio with someone else taking care of all the work. But for all personal recording and live use purposes I'll bring a 2 RU 19" device instead of a heavy 2x12" cabinet.
Here are the first two clips, a very clean one and a pretty heavy one. The choice of music was based on me looking forward to the new Dream Theater album coming soon.
Clip #1: tnts_fatclean.mp3Clip #2: tnts_heavyriff.mp3I will come back to this post with more clips including cabinet and microphone comparisons and more detailled text that will be too long to read for many.
Greetings...
Nef
Topic: Two Notes Torpedo Studio (Read 3394 times)