13
True to the Music
X•AMP User Guide
Radial Engineering
actually refining a process, which had been utilized for
decades, and exploring its possibility for use in rock music.
The process of “re-amping” is often used in film sound design
as well. In order for sounds recorded in a post production
environment to match the scene, it is common for them to be
re-recorded utilizing a reamping procedure. In film sound this
process is also termed “worldizing”.
The first use of the term “re-amping” is vague. It may have
come into the recordist’s vocabulary as early as the late
1960s, but I am not sure when the term was first utilized.
We then posed the same question to Bob Ohlsson
2
of
Mowtown fame, (Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Kinks,
Animals, Donovan, Herman’s Hermits) and Bob kindly
answered:
I began doing it in 1968 shortly after we got the sixteen-track
machines because for the first time we could separately
record direct guitars, clavinets and electric pianos. I had
never heard of it being done and am pretty sure I was the
first to try it at Motown but I can’t imagine lots of others
weren’t doing the same thing. It seemed like a very obvious
thing to do in a world where electric instruments were taken
direct primarily to cut down on bleed rather than for tonal
quality.
We then contacted Roger Nichols
3
(Steely Dan, Crosby Stills
and Nash, John Denver, Roy Orbison, Zappa) and when
posed the question: “Roger, I know you have been re-amping
for a while, when did you start using this process?”
That would be 1972 when I built the re-amper we used on the
first, and almost every Steely Dan album after that. We used it
to play direct guitar tracks back through an amp. We were
going through a lot of amps. The speakers would get tired or
the tubes would melt or something during a night of guitar
overdubs.
We would go through one amp to make sure we got the
sound we wanted, and then when the right guitar and
settings were locked in, we recorded the direct signal and let
the amp rest. After the part was completed, we ran the signal
back through the guitar amp and it only had to last long
enough to print the results to tape. I still have the box around
here somewhere.
Interesting enough, in 1980 Jensen Transformers introduced
the JT-DBE transformer and in the application note, there is a
complete paragraph discussing the use of this transformer to
convert low impedance balanced lines to guitar levels. This
same application is mentioned in the Radial JDI direct box
owner’s manual and referred to as ‘using the JDI backwards’.
