Re-amping. Not quite teleportation, but still cool.

The day before yesterday, I headed into Hyde Street for a mixing session. The plan: reampmania!

For those mystified by the word re-amp, it simply means to take a recorded direct signal from a guitar, and run that signal out to an amp. Seeing it in action is weird, though, because when you run the signal out to the amp, the amp becomes like a player piano. I mean, it’s playing, but no one’s playing. Spooky.

Anyway, I wanted to use reamping because Tim Young, the guitarist I’ve been working with, lives in LA and does not have access to my Carr Mercury amp, which I would like to use as much as possible on my album, because it sounds SO GOOD. To overcome the minor issue of Tim being about 1000 miles away, I’ve been having Tim record both an amped tone plus a direct tone, so that the engineer and I can either keep Tim’s original tone (always rocking, because Tim has a vintage Fender amp), use the Carr instead, or blend the two. For Tuesday’s session, we mostly ended up blending the two, as the Fender is bright and sparkly, while the Carr is a darker, brooding beast and together they create a wall of sound that Phil Spector would approve of.

Sadly, however, while I headed home from the session on a high, the excitement of it all put me in bed for most of Wednesday. To ease the pain and shame, I pretended I was recovering from a coke and alcohol fueled binge, further colored by pot and ‘shrooms and a late night visit to whorehouse then a brief jaunt on Lady Gaga’s jet to Vegas, where we partied with Mike Tyson and washed down the night with bloody Mary’s at the Hard Rock.