Ear in speaker

I've been dialing in sounds. It's an essential part of how we work, because we don't get a ton of time in the studio. I figure out 90% of the guitar settings for each song before we ever arrive!

It takes about 30 minutes a sound, unless I get complicated. I usually have a good sense of which amp to start with, but sometimes I'm wrong, and I have a couple choices of speakers, so there's some A/B comparing. When I finally dial in what I want it ends up as notes, like this:

Not About Girls

Basics

Tenor Humbucker
Board (stereo)
Out 1 into Super 2 vibrato: 5.5 | 8 | MIN | MAX | MIN | OFF | OFF
into Z cab
Out 2 into RXES HI: 8 | MIN | 6 | MIN
into Creamback

In the example above that's a low-tuned, four-string tenor feeding a clean, Fender-style amp into a Weber Blue Dog on the left with a cranked, souped-up Voxish thing going into a high wattage Celestion Greenback on the right. Certainly not an off-the-shelf situation!

By the time Steve gets off the plane I'll have several pages of notes like this, reflecting maybe 15 hours of work. It's fun and tweaky, though a little hard on the ears... especially since I try to get close a bit to suss the bass the mic will read. Ow.