If you're anything like me as a guitarist, you probably have a couple or several amps laying around collecting dust, that you have not used in forever because you've been enthralled with virtual amp sim plugins for years. Maybe you like Amplitube or Guitar Rig 5, or Shred or Neural DSP's Fortin NTS Suite, or whatever it is you use most. Well it may just be time to blow off the dust, spray some contact cleaner into the volume pots and plug that bad boy in again!
What I'm getting at is that when I decided to try reamping in Mixcraft 9, I was super excited to hear my old faithful Rocktron mAxe guitar preamp from the late 80's, doing it's thing on my newer tracks which I originally used sims on.
I had known about reamping for a while but never tried it because it seemed to me, to be a waste of time. I mean, why not just play the guitar live, right? After a few people started asking about the process and how they might do it in Mixcraft, I thought I'd give it a shot, and man am I glad I did. Hearing my old tone rocking my newer music is really cool to say the least.
Reliving the tone glory days isn't the only reason for reamping either. Let's say you're crunched for time to get some tracks recorded before your next platinum album release date, but you have to spend the weekend at your in-law's place, watching home movies to appease the wifey (Unless you enjoy that sort of thing). You can sneak away to the sewing room, wade through the cats, plug your guitar right into your laptop or tablet, record the parts dry and clean, and then transfer the recorded file to your computer daw once you return, then reamp it and it will be just like you are playing it right there on the spot! You can also run the outgoing reamp signal through anything you want. Maybe you've got a pedal board you use live and want the same tones and effects in your recordings, or any number of other reasons.
Before we get to the video below, I'll give you a short explanation of how it works in Mixcraft.
- Record or load a clean guitar clip on any audio track
- Add an Output Bus Track and set it up to push signal to the hardware channel of your choice
- Take sip of beer
- In the Mixcraft mixer, set your guitar track (the clean one from above) to output to the output track you created
- Mic up the amp and plug the mic into your interface on whatever channel you want
- Arm a track with the channel you plugged the mic into.
- Hit record and the clean track will now play through your amp, which then gets recorded on the armed track
- Open another beer
Check out the video below!