Recording cab IKEA hack
Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2020 10:23 am
Got an idea for yet another recording cab...I've tried building one in various ways.
I had a spare 12" guitar speaker and I got a piece of big sturdy plywood and saw this white IKEA plastic box...
Stuffed the box with dampening material pretty full and glued in the baffle once I cut it...some breathing holes around it too...left enough space so I put two layers of foam over it and stuck a mic through it so it points at the speaker.
After some tests I found out it's not good to put it flush against the floor (although quiet it gets a kinda honky tone aka Money For Nothing), it's best with the speaker upright, but I can lay an old carpet over it and a pillow and it kills enough sound I can record with ease, yet doesn't really change the sound from the mic.
The mic is an old AKG lapel mic, so far from perfect, but at small volume it picks up the gist of the guitar sound quite well enough, and some of that hard to describe 'ambient' roundness cab emulators try to mimic. Alone, it's a bit lacking but the basic sound is there, and mixed with a speaker-emulated output the two support each other really well. It's much more 'real' and beefy sounding without the bzzz than the emulated sound alone, yet far stronger and more immediate and in-your face than the miked sound alone.
Next, I need to test it with an SM57 but I reckon this works really well as is.
has to be at least like 5 gallons in size, or it gets boxy.