Slipperman Guitars from Hell - Translation needed

Excursion is the physical limit of the speaker, what he is saying is you need to know the physical limits and where it sounds best !

Thanks for the translations , he never explains any of that .

So if the cab gets involved before speaker excursion that would be a bad thing , bad cab .

I don't know , that whole read seems kinda like a bunch of rambling wasted time .

Why not just say " turn the volume up and down until you find where the guitar rig sounds good , then move the mic around the speaker until it sounds good , done , HOHOHO "......

It's one of those amusing things you follow when reading a lot hoping to get better at recording, but in the end it IS a bunch of crap.

Even positing that there is a single "right" way to do things makes you instantly wrong, although time had certainly weeded out the approaches that don't deliver.. but even then, sometimes those are exactly what you need.

I've read professional recordists who have stated everything from turn everything completely to 10, to set the amp volume barely above audible..

I think you're missing the point about cabinet involvement.

However, first a bit of an aside about the author.

Slipperman (Tim Gilles) was until recently the proprietor and guiding light of Big Blue Meenie Studios, a large studio in New Jersey that was known largely for their work with heavy metal and hard rock acts. Consequently, much of what Slippy says here relates to recording LOUD guitars (you might have got a bit of a hint by the title of the article?)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Blue_Meenie_Recording_Studio



When  a guitar amp is playing loud it responds somewhat differently than an amp that is playing, er, not so loud. I'm not talking about distortion per se, although that does enter into it. However with modern equipment you can get plenty of distortion without being particularly loud. However it just doesn't really get the same sort of excitement - something's missing.

What's missing to a large degree is - you probably guessed it - cabinet involvement.

Cabinet involvement is what happens when a sealed cabinet (or sometimes a ported cabinet) is driven to the point where the cabinet's panels become excited and start vibrating enough to make a real conrtribution to the sound in the room. (Hence the term "cabinet involvement".) A cabinet generally has to be driven pretty hard to reach this point. Using a low power head or a power soak won't do it - you generally need AT LEAST 40 or 50 watts and preferably 100 to get those panels vibrating - If they vibrate at all.

Not all cabinets are created equal, and this is one of those weird cases where what can be desirable for a guitar amps diverges sharply from what is regarded as "good practice" in the rest of the audio world. Specifically, a cabinet like a classic Marshall 4x12 which is fairly lightrly built out of plywood with virtually no bracing is vastly superior to, e.g. a Mesa Boogie 4x12 which is heavily built and well braced. The latter has virtually no panel resonance - it is "dead", which gives you more or less only the sound produced by the amp and speakers, with no additional coloration.. The Marshall, however, has lots of panel resonance which contributes to the harmonic richness of the combined tone. (Of course not every lightly built, resonant cab is desirable - some sound good, some not so much.) Cabinets made of MDF are generally not desirable, as MDF is pretty non-resonant, as well as being heavy as hell to cart around.


No, you probably DO NOT want your drivers hitting maximum excursion before the cab gets involved. That's the way you tear up your speakers.

What Slippy's saying is that you want the entire thing vibrating synergistically as a whole to achive a good hard rock/metal tone, at least according to his philosophy of recording.

This is something that's often missed in these days of little amps, amp sims, virtual recording, bedroom studios, neighbors, etc. It's one of the big reasons that a lot of "heavy" music isn't so heavy these days.

Eh, I'm not sure I did, but our opinions are our own I suppose.

Most speaker cabs are semi-reinforced for minimal sympathetic vibration.  When designing speaker boxes, the box is not supposed to vibrate at all.  It's merely a shell to hold the proper amount of air to support the Fs of the speaker for low frequency extension.

If they were built to "enhance" the speaker vibration, then nobody would reinforce them and they would be built with much more flimsy materials that vibrate much easier.

Slipperman's contributions are not without validity, and also not without serious flaws. It's a very stylized approach - this is how you might work in an overdub based facility making metal records. It's not really of any benefit to someone working a live band session, or recording a country act. However the stuff on cabinets and cabinet excursion and stuff is interesting science to be aware of - though I never bother with it outside of being aware of it. Just get the sound the guitarist likes and uses, and go from there. Reinventing the wheel to sate your own fetish of having a 'process' is not enabling good art.

Also his talk of diaphragm distortion to me seemed like bollocks. A 57's diapraghm can take an insane amount of punishment, if he can find a speaker clean enough to replay a 100Hz and 1Khz tone at 120dB he should play it at an SM57 and plot the output, and then knock it back to 80dB and do the same. The transformer might be driven at higher levels but the diaphragm should be fine.

Yeah, as I pointed out he's known primarily for metal, hard rock, and punk recordings and yes, it definitely is a very stylized approach. I haven't had much call to use it since I've been doing country and a bit of blues the last few years, but if I was still involved in the earbleed stuff it would fit right in.

I think it's important for all recordists to be aware of since it goes against the grain of a lot of the conventional "innerwebz wizzdom" and makes you aware of aspects that you don't get from a lot of the "orthodox" sources. Yes, there are certain things that you can only get from a real amp cranked up (or perhaps a well crafted Kemper profile of said amp, but that still starts with the amp, doesn't it?)

 And sometimes a little bit of "gonzo" has its place.

I dunno about diaphragm distortion. What I do know is that Shure's capsules are not nearly as clean as they'd have you believe and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the diaphragm of a typical 57 did distort a bit at high levels.

Interesting.

I was recently chasing guitar tones and was having a tough time getting the sound, even with identical gear to the original player.

So during my testing, I mic'd up an open back 1x12 with a V30 in it and BAM, there's my sound.

The thing is, I have another closed back cab with a V30 in it, so I mic'd that one up with the same mic, same position..  Not even close to the same tone.

So then I pulled the V30 from the open back cab, and put it in the closed back to see if the cabinet made a difference in the tone.  I used the same mic placement, and it almost matched the same tone as the open back cabinet.  Same goes for the V30 that was in the closed back cab, I placed it in the open back, and got the same tone that I got when it was in the closed back cab.

So my testing showed that the cabs offered almost no change in tone to the speaker, at any level.

However, these were both English made V30's of the same era/same impedance, and sounded like completely different models of speakers.

Based on this, I believe that the speakers themselves had MUCH more difference between each other than any cab could introduce.

That's less the point and more the point that the cabinet resonances act as a feedback network to the speaker, drastically affecting how the speaker itself sounds.

yeah, one speaker was in a 1x12 open cab, the other in a 2x12 closed cab with another speaker.  I swapped them around thinking that the cab and/or other speaker might be making a difference, but 99% of the tone moved with the speaker itself.  Having a speaker wired in parallel made a difference in tone, so I ran the 2x12 as a single speaker, and even then the tone was not very different at all to the same speaker being in the open back cab.  The bass was slightly dampened, but not as much as I expected.

The crazy thing was that these were both English made V30's from the same era, but they couldn't be further apart in tone than a greenback is to a V30.  

I used to think that boxes mattered more in tone and that speaker selection did not..  Now my beliefs are completely opposite.. That the box doesn't matter as much and the speaker itself is much more important.  

I now see why folks are always talking about "selecting the speaker in the cab that sounds the best".. I used to think that being the same make/model, that speakers couldn't possibly be that different in tone.  Talk about being wrong.

I don't think that the inverse square law is applicable when there's a direct mechanical coupling involved. Also it's not necessarily the amount of physical movement of the panel affection the speaker as much as the moving mass of that panel relative to the much lighter mass of the speaker cone(s).

Also, saying you found "almost" no difference in tone doesn't really mean much of anything as your results really only apply to the specific cabinet constructions you used and cabinet involvement does not occur at the same volume level on all cabinets in which it is a significant factor, which makes it rather difficult to set up a direct comparison. It's also one of those things where even cabinets of the same make and model might not behave in exactly the same way - we're dealing with wood here, which is not a homogenous material. Again, think in terms of the acoustical properties on an (acoustic) guitar body - two guitars of the same model can sound quite different; one might be a dog and another might be magic.

Haven't you ever encountered a situation where one speaker cabinet has something "special" about it that a similar cabinet lacks?




Everything matters. The propoprtions in which things matter relastive to each other depend on the build and the situation.