We talk you through the ins and outs of re‑amping guitars in Studio One.

There are times when your best course of action is to record the guitar first and worry about the tone later. With the right equipment and some useful Studio One know‑how, you can try all sorts of different ways of amplifying your guitar before you commit it to the mix. This is known as re‑amping.

Re‑amping gives you a considerable amount of versatility and the opportunity to try different effects, tones, setups and configurations that perhaps weren’t available at the time of recording.

The basic idea is that you record your guitar completely dry by direct injection, and then route that track out of the DAW and into a guitar amp, which you mic up and record. Re‑amping gives you a considerable amount of versatility and the opportunity to try different effects, tones, setups and configurations that perhaps weren’t available at the time of recording. Studio One Professional includes a rather neat plug‑in solution for accomplishing this, called Pipeline XT. We’re also going to look at how to do it manually for those of you who are running the Artist version of Studio One, and don’t have that plug‑in in your box of tricks.

Before we turn to the computer, we need to make sure we have the right hardware in place to make re‑amping possible, or at least not rubbish.

High & Dry

To record dry guitar, you will need an audio interface with a high‑impedance mono unbalanced input. Most audio interfaces have this and it’s usually marked as ‘Hi‑Z’ or ‘instrument’. Impedance is a complex and meandering concept that revolves around the total resistance and reactance of a circuit. Hugh Robjohns wrote an excellent article all about it in SOS January 2003 (www.soundonsound.com/techniques/understanding-impedance). All we really need to know is that electric guitars have a high‑impedance output and would very much like a high‑impedance input to plug into, or they tend to lose their high end and sustain. If your audio interface doesn’t have a Hi‑Z input, you’ll need a DI (Direct Injection) box, which converts the guitar signal into a balanced, low‑impedance signal that can plug into a standard microphone input.

To do the re‑amping, your audio interface will need a spare output, and another input for capturing the sound of your amp. This loop has certain requirements to make it work properly. First of all, the dry guitar signal you are sending out is emerging from a balanced line output on your audio interface. Your amp is expecting the mono, unbalanced, high‑impedance output of a guitar, and so we need to convert the signal into something resembling that.

For the level disparity, you could simply reduce the output level for the channel routing to the amp. The problem with doing it digitally in the DAW is that you are effectively reducing the dynamic range of the signal, which can result in unwelcome noise. To change to a higher impedance and an unbalanced connection, you can use a passive DI box in reverse. However, by far the easiest method is to use a re‑amping box. It takes the output from the interface, lowers its level, increases the impedance and makes it unbalanced. It usually has a ground‑lift switch too, which can massively reduce the amount of noise and interference being generated.

Re‑amp boxes tend to be passive and rugged things that can handle themselves in a chaotic studio environment. Prices can vary from under £100 from manufacturers such as ART or Palmer, to nearer £300 for a Radial re‑amp box. They all can achieve a similar outcome, but do check to make sure the one you choose has the features you need for your setup.

Now that you have a good signal for the amp, you have to consider how to capture it again. You could mic up the cabinet, but this requires you to fully embrace the loudness of your guitar rig. You might use an amp with a direct, speaker‑simulated output, or you could connect your amp to a ‘dummy load’ box, which fools the amp into thinking it’s connected to a cabinet and gives you a direct output suitable for recording directly through your audio interface. There’s so much to think about with re‑amping that one could be tempted to simply use the Ampire software amps built into Studio One.

However you choose to do it, the next step is sorting out the routing in Studio One. We’ll look at the manual approach first.

Route Planner

Click on Song and select Song Setup from the menu. Click on the Audio I/O tab and you’ll see the ins and outs of your audio interface. I have the SSL 12 from Solid State Logic, which gives me four analogue inputs. The first two can accept instrument signals, and I normally use input 2 for recording guitar. Inputs 3+4 usually carry a stereo mix of hardware synthesizers, but for re‑amping I’m going to repurpose one as the return signal from the amp.

Next, I’m going to add a mono output and allocate it to one of my spare analogue outputs. If I label them usefully, then it’s going to be really easy to set it up on my guitar track.

When it comes to recording your guitar dry you are, obviously, playing without any effects or tone that you would normally use during a performance. This might not be ideal, as you may want to be able to lean into some kind of tone to influence your playing. To get around this, you could drop the Ampire plug‑in onto the track and monitor through that as you’re recording. Alternatively, you could use the re‑amp loop that’s already in place to monitor your guitar through as you play. The setup is the same as doing it after the recording so follow on to see what that is.

This is easiest to see if you open up the Console. On the channel strip for your recorded dry guitar, you need to set the output to ‘Guitar Out’, or whatever you called the output you’re using for the re‑amp. You’ll find this just above the panning control and below the input field. Create a new mono audio track and set its input to ‘Amp Return’ or whatever you’ve called the input for the amped guitar signal. Record‑enable the re‑amp track and hit Record. It will then record the amplified signal to the track. You can do this multiple times with different amp settings until you find the exact tone you’re after.

There’s one little bit of housekeeping you might have to do after your recording. As you’ve sent your guitar track out of your audio interface and back in again, you will have accrued some latency. With a decent audio interface we’re only talking a couple of milliseconds, but it might make your track feel draggy or a little less tight. There’s no magic answer to this other than moving it yourself. So turn off Snap, zoom into the audio and find a peak to help you line it back up with the DI signal.

Pipeline XT

Moving on to the plug‑in that does it all for you, drag Pipeline XT onto your dry guitar track. (It doesn’t really do it all for you; it’s more that it’s convenient, handles latency for you, and lets you save the routings so you can use it every time without having to set it up again.)

Pipeline XT acts as a hardware insert, breaking the signal flow of the channel and routing the audio out of the computer and back in again. You still need to create the Guitar Out and Amp Return channels in the Audio I/O setup, and you’ll still need a track to record the output to, so those elements are the same as doing it manually. However, this time we set up the routing in the plug‑in rather than in the Console.

So, in the Pipeline plug‑in, you set your output on the left and the returning input on the right. You can name the plug‑in to remind you what you’re doing and even take a photo of your amp and stick it in the middle, which is a pretty genius idea if you’re likely to forget settings.

Now we have an opportunity to deal with the latency issue. Click on the little spanner icon and Pipeline will ping itself with a short, sharp burst of audio and show the result on the display, where you’ll see two traces. The orange one is the original output, and the blue one is the signal coming back in. You’ll see that they are currently offset. Click on the Auto button and Pipeline will measure the latency and adjust so that the two signals are aligned. You can manually offset this as well if you like. There are controls over the level going out and coming back in, there’s a wet/dry mix control for parallel processing, you can change the sensitivity of the display, zoom in/out, and also just see a trace of the difference between them.

All that’s left to do is create a new mono audio track and set its input to the Amp Return path we set up earlier. Click Record, and you will capture the guitar going through your amp.

Pipeline XT is also great for setting up effects loops through hardware, and you can save every configuration as a preset so that you can come back and use the same setup again.