Reamping electric guitars seem to have become a hot topic in recent years and with the rise of the home studio. As if we don’t have too many options and decisions to make in this crazy world of digits already…
The most immediate problem I thought of when I first heard about the idea of reamping a recorded electric guitar signal was the fact that people in the digital age tend to delay too many decisions to the editing and mixing stage already, and avoid committing at the recording stage. This blurs the lines between the recording and mixing stage and creates a mental overload and defocus that eventually leads to inferior results. But regardless of all that, to me, the recording stage, the way I see it, is all about capturing a beautiful sounding performance here and now – not necessarily a perfect one by the way, but one that conveys something meaningful. If the mixing stage involves too many artistic decisions, you need to ask yourself who is the artist here and who’s performance are you trying to capture…
Now, to me, reamping is one of the worst instances of that digital age disease of postponing decisions. Why one of the worst you ask? Because it alters the performance of an artist playing an instrument retroactively and overrides an organic and interactive process after the fact. And if I'm not mistaken, that was the reason we started recording in the first place - an artistic statement made by an artist performing art, right?
A good guitar player cares much about the sound of his or her instrument. The reason for that is that different guitars, effects, and amps feel different under the fingers and react differently. That drives the player to play differently, simply because the resulting sound is more rewarding. Reamping is problematic in that sense because in the recording stage, the artist hears one thing and plays accordingly, but then later, that guitar performance is processed through a different patch or amp. While it might "sound good" to some, from that second, to me, that is no longer a guitar player performance. It's more like a DJ performance to me, which is fine, but the recorded artist is detached now and you can't take it back!
If you want to capture a good artist, that is in, my opinion, not the way to do it and I would never do this on my projects.
I believe I made my point, so I will stop here and you take some time to think about it if makes any sense to you.
Cheers.