“In my home studio I have an isolation booth about 50 feet away from my control room. I like to put my guitar amp in there to record tracks, but it’s much easier for me to play in the control room. How can I get my guitar signal to go 50 feet to my amp without any losses?”
This is a struggle. Here are few ideas. None of them are perfectly ideal for everyone, but they all work. Pick your poison.
Sometimes you can just hook up a 50 foot guitar cable and it will work pretty well. This is not something that is easy to find, and you probably wouldn’t want one of you could, but you can make your own. If you do it out of really high quality wire you stand a chance of getting it to work. Don’t make it one foot longer than it really has to be.
If your guitar amp uses a separate head you can simply put the head near you and run a 50 foot speaker cable to the cabinet. Just be sure to use heavy gauge cable (12 AWG or better) so you don’t lose any punch.
Run your guitar into a passive direct box, then run a high quality mic cable to the booth where you connect it to the output of a second passive direct box (you’ll need to change the male XLR connector on the cable to a female to do this – or use an adapter). Then run the guitar cable from there to your amp. The first direct box will balance the signal and change the impedance; the second one reverses this process and returns your signal to normal to go into the amp. This technique tends to work better on guitars with active electronics. The problem is that you’re putting two transformers in the signal path. The guitar itself is only going to be effected by the first one, but on a guitar with a sensitive output (like an old Strat) sometimes that’s enough to change the tone.
You can run your guitar through some type of preamp (with a balanced output) before sending it out to the amp. This works great, other than the fact that it’s likely to change your tone (I’m assuming you’d already be running your guitar through a preamp if that’s what you wanted to do). It may also be necessary to pad the signal back down before it goes into the amp. Again, a passive direct box used in reverse may work, or you can just use a commercially available pad to lower the balanced signal down at that end, and then use an adapter to unbalance it. Depending upon how particular the input stage or your amp is either of these techniques may work well. Usually more modern amps have more tolerance for this type of thing (particularly the higher levels of the preamp without a pad at the end).
Use a wireless system. This is arguably the most idiot-proof way to do it. Just be sure to get a good one. Cheap wireless units can change the tone of your guitar a little bit. This generally isn’t a killer on a live gig, but in the studio you will notice it.
If anyone out there has any other ideas that have worked well please send them in and we’ll run them as a follow up.
