# Silent practice and recording from an attenuator's line-out?



## Greg Ellis

Is anybody taking a line-out from an attenuator (like a Mass) for silent practice and recording?

I generally use a POD product for this sort of thing, but I'm getting frustrated by the lack of on-the-fly control (there's no floorboard option for the TonePort series, AFAIK). It's not really helping me to understand how all my pedals work either.

I'm curious about what sort of gotcha's occur in this sort of arrangement.

guitar > pedal board > amp > attentuator set to turn off the speaker completely > line out > toneport with everything shut off except the cabinet sim > headphones

I'm presuming that a good quality attenuator with a line out to the right speaker sim ought to get me fairly close to the sound of my live rig, without waking the rest of the house, and would allow me to play the whole rig as normal, with pedal changes on the fly, etc.

Are there other/better products that do this sort of thing without breaking the bank? I've seen some rack-mount cabinet sims, but they tend to be a lot more expensive than a Weber Mass, IIRC.

Any thoughts?


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## Macki

I am interested in what people have to say too. I am just experimenting with this. I did just recently pick up a H & K Red Box. Works pretty good though at low amp levels the signal is a bit low going into my digital recorder (basically it goes between your speaker output and speaker and has an XLR output tap with a speaker simulator). 

So that got me thinking along the same lines you are on;

1) Attenuator - coupled with the Red Box should give me a lot of signal to my recorder and pretty much squash the amp speaker output for late night recording. The Webers seems to be the best for their price point - I do like the idea of the "speaker" load in their non resistive models as I have heard some resistor types muffle the signal a bit. I did notice that you can get a line out jack on the Webers. I would assume then you could use this for recording but I have no idea what it would sound like or the signal level. If it did work, for me, then I could sell the Red Box. There is Tubejuice that makes pretty inexpensive models too (and others). You want a crazy expensive one - check out the Tone King Iron Man :0)

2) Resistive Dummy Load - another idea I was thinking about was just buying a 100W 8 ohm resistor and connecting to the amp speaker output + using the Red Box. Its the cheapest - you can order one for around 13 to 18 bucks. Not sure how much my sound would change though?

3) Red Box > Mic Pre amp or Mic >. Preamp - my amp has power scaling in it so I maybe able to get away with low signal into the Red Box (or even a mic for that matter) and then onto a pre amp. A supposed good cheap pre amp is an ART MP tube - I think they retail for 30 bucks. I think this is the less likely option for me though as there are some tones I like that I still have to turn up the amp for..

So yah I am mulling all these options over.....I have a feeling I will go with a Weber Minimass or Dummy load with the Red Box but we'll see. I want to try the Red Box out a bit more to see how it sounds relative to mic'ing my amp. I have done a few recordings - it is different but I haven't really put a lot of time into it yet.


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## CDWaterloo

After moving to my condo, I tried different methods for silent practicing and recording with my amp rig, including an attenuators line out. I followed exactly the same path you drawn. I used hot plate and koch load box (older version). I also used toneports cab sim as well as h&k red box. I couldn't get the quality I was looking for. imo the closest to the real thing is to use a iso-cab or change your rig to an axe-fx which I've never tried. I had an axetrak but since it uses a very small size speaker I ended up with selling it. I currently use fender g-dec 30's headphone output. It is not bad, and has other advantages as well. But I would like to try out a Jet city JetStream iso-cab.

-Cd


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## Macki

I was looking at some homemade amp iso cabs that guys have built. I guess its not too bad to try if you don't have to big of an amp.


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## shoretyus

I use a Peavey EDI box with my Sf deluxe. It goes between the amp and the speaker and you just leave the speaker un plugged. 
I like it ..

http://www.peavey.com/assets/literature/manuals/edi.pdf


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## traynor_garnet

I tried a bunch of attenuators, pedals etc, but I just broke down and bought a Line6 HD500. All the other truly low volume approaches didn't produce the greatest results.

TG


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## Guest

Greg Ellis said:


> Is anybody taking a line-out from an attenuator (like a Mass) for silent practice and recording?


Pre AxeFx this is how I played at home and recorded 99% of all my material. First with a Palmer PGA-04 fed by a Mesa or Marshall and later by a Koch TwinTone using it's built-in power soak and line out.

The key to success IMO: use an unfiltered output from the attenuator (so no speaker simulation) and then run that unfiltered output in to a software-based program that lets you load up cabinet impulse responses. Add in reverb.

Once I figured out that bit above (and props to Ed DeGenaro for putting me on to the approach) the sounds I got were superb and absolutely fun to play. I was using GuitarRig2 at the time and feeding my direct signals in to it. The cab IRs you use in software are far better than any analog speaker modeling (including the Palmer's stuff which is really good, but not as good as software-based IR modeling). And the reverb in software lets you put it all "in a room" in your headphones so you're not playing super dry -- which can be jarring.


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## Greg Ellis

Thanks for the input, everyone.

I went back and tried this again today, just feeding the output of my pedal board into the toneport, with one of the patches I use a lot for practice (built it myself: Plexi w/ channels jumped, Greenbacks, tube screamer, a bit of chorus, hall reverb and a 300ms-ish delay).

I was able to A/B the built in effects vs. the ones on my board, switching back and forth and adjusting my pedals as I went along.

It definitely sounds better when I use the Line 6 device for everything, including effects, but I can get decently close to the same sounds by shutting down the Line 6 effects and using my pedal board in front. Close enough to learn the pedal changes on some songs I'm prepping, work out good settings for the pedals, etc. which is what I was hoping for.

Looks like I don't need the attenuator after all.


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## Greg Ellis

One caveat - the input circuit on the Toneport certainly does NOT respond to signal strength in the way that the first preamp tube in my amp does.

Playing with the volume level on my dirt pedals or kicking on my boost pedal really doesn't make any difference to the sound when running through the Line 6 device.

The "dirt" character makes a difference; it's just the boost (coming from any of my pedals) that doesn't do anything.

Whatever; it'll do for now.

I find it interesting that the amp model I'm using cleans up when I back off on my guitar volume, yet it doesn't seem to respond to input signal manipulations on the other (louder) end of the spectrum. Maybe I'm missing an input sensitivity control somewhere? Or they've got a limiter running on the digitization stage, or something like that.


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