ReAmping Mixcraft 9 Pro Studio

  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.

1. Record or load a clean guitar clip on any audio track
2. Add an Output Bus Track and set it up to push signal to the hardware channel of your choice
3. Take sip of beer
4. In the Mixcraft mixer, set your guitar track (the clean one from above) to output to the output track you created
5. Mic up the amp and plug the mic into your interface on whatever channel you want
6. Arm a track with the channel you plugged the mic into.
7. Hit record and the clean track will now play through your amp, which then gets recorded on the armed track
8. Open another beer

Check out the video below!

To Free Or Not To Free, That Is The Question - Here Is The Answer!

 Way back in the stone-ages when I first started recording music, we didn't have plugins, or a daw, or running water ... :-)
 We had hardware; A reel to reel tape machine, a huge mixing console with knobs the size of silver dollars, and any effects we wanted to use, we had to go out and buy, borrow or rent the actual rack mounted hardware and plug it in, in-line with the mixer. What a pain huh?

 Luckily for all of us, now we have digital everything. Which means there's no shortage of effects, or daws, virtual mixers, virtual instruments, the list goes on and on. My point is that back then, we'd have given our right arm to have access to an endless supply of free equipment like we have now. The freebies would have been welcomed with open arms (and ears).

 That being said, I thought I would compare a mastered commercially released mix which uses high dollar, paid plugins within Mixcraft Pro Studio 9, with the same mix but using freebie plugins in the same daw.

While there's no way I can explain the results to a degree of understanding that you would get from simply watching the video below, I do want to make a few points before we get to the video.

 For the high dollar mix, I used plugins from Waves, FabFilter, Toontrack, PSP Audioware, Studio Devil, and Hofa. Check out the awesome Hofa IQ-Reverb to the left.
 From Waves I used  a compressor, and a couple different equalizers, the Scheps channel strip, along with one of their reverb plugins.

 Tootrack provided Superior Drummer 3 which is actually on both mixes. I wanted all the instruments to sound exactly the same when dry, which meant not changing the virtual drums to something else. That would be like recording a different guitarist and expecting it to sound the same as the original.

PSP Audioware makes some cool plugins and I have used the PseudoStereo in my mixes for years now. I met the developers from PSP at NAMM years ago, where they gave me an NFR license for all their products, and I have used them ever since.

For the freebies, I simply looked around the net for some good ones that are easily available to anyone who looks.

 The first one I would like to give mention to is the awesome little TSE BOD Bass pedal. What a little gem this is!
 When playing out live on stage, I use an Ampeg SVT4 Pro bass amp. It has a unique, extremely powerful sound that I duplicate with the Studio Devil VBA Pro. With the TSE BOD pedal along with some compression and EQ, I was able to get pretty close to that sound, for free!

I also used the Modern Compressor (2 instances) and the TB Parametric which comes with Mixcraft Pro Studio 9.

A few other awesome freebies made the mix too, as you'll see by grabbing a beer and watching the video below. Watch it, enjoy it, share it!