When I added the cube to the studio I was originally thinking that it would be just a handy practice amp for Chaos. He was starting to take his electric guitar work seriously and needed an amp he could occasionally drag to class.
Then the day came that one of our guitar friends showed up to record a session for ALT-230 and had forgotten their amp. So, instead of letting the time slot go to waste we decided to give the little cube a try. We figured that if what we got wasn’t usable we would re-amp the work later or run it through Guitar Rig on the DAW.
We were very pleasantly surprised! The tracks were so good they survived all the way through post production. Ever since then we’ve been hooked. We’ve been using the Cube regularly now any time we want to do some relatively clean electric guitar work and we’ve been getting consistently good results.
The normal setup for this involves a R0DE NT2-a paired with a Shure SM57, both set about 30 degrees off axis, about half a meter away, close together and in phase (diaphragms abeam). Some times we give them a little separation from each other if we want more “space” in the stereo image. Anything from 5 to 20 cm usually works ok.
Then for good measure we’ll run the guitar through a direct box on it’s way in just in case we want to re-amp it later. This too has become a fairly standard procedure no matter what amp we’re using.
Usually when I’m setting up like this I will put the two mics on separate channels through the Furman monitor rig so I can hear them in the headphones separately and summed on demand. That makes it easy to move things around to fine tune mic positioning and any other tweaking that might be needed.
Today we had yet another successful session with the rugged, versatile little cube; and right after that Chaos plugged in to practice his guitar lessons. I couldn’t help but grin at being reminded how far this little practice amp had come. If you don’t have one yet you probably need it and don’t know it!