Thursday, March 19, 2026

47 thoughts on “Guitar Amp vs Portastudio, which do you like? #musicproduction #guitar

  • I might have the coolest, most lukewarm take here, but I think they're both sick and contextual. The DI is more lofi imo. Through an amp and mic, especially with processing, it sounds great. Together sounds cool too. Do whatever you want

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  • On Street Fighting Man, Keith Richards used a little cassette tape recorder – which were by then widely available – and recorded acoustic guitar through the cheap little plastic mic tha came with them.
    Due to the compression these devices applied to signal coming through the mic input – and likely by overdriving the input – Richards achived an interesting, unique-sounding distortion on the acoustic guitar.
    (Rather looks like, but this is Not written by A.I.)

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  • Mkgee is not the first. It’s been done since consoles existed. It’s just that Mkgee happens to be trendy and aesthetically appealing from a commercial standpoint. It’s just 80’s/90’s soft rock with the tone of post grunge early 2000’s.

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  • Have you tried the Reel Deal or Reel Dealuxe from Templo? Josh demo’d it like 2 years ago and you could see the wheels turning.

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  • Does anyone know if any of the Mk.Gee songs were recorded to cassette and then dumped to DAw? I imagine that would make a difference in how the album tones turn out too

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  • Amps sustain and have way more attractive harmonics. DI is great when you want something a little uglier with rawness.

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  • Still have my old Tascam 4 track. You know this shit would sell for thousands if a renowned guitarist said that was the “secret” to his sound, but it’s largely bullshit. You can get a really nasty, shitty, DI distortion out of these things which sounds quite cool but it’s nothing you couldn’t recreate with some pedals, an amp and some imagination. Or even…dare I say it, a decent DAW!

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  • Very different sounds. Similar to hard vs soft clipping in od pedals. I still love the sound of tubes vs solid state

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  • The fender tone is going to be more suitable and versatile to a wider variety of mixes. The tape deck sounds cool, but is seriously like a "2 tracks off of the album" kinda sound. Honestly with any semi competent audio engineer, they should be able to mix the fender tone to sound very similar to the tape deck with post processing. Not knocking the tape deck, just buying case use specific gear is maybe a little out of budget for me personally.

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  • I really hope Mk.Gee’s next record has more rock songs with solos and cool riffs. I loved Two Star and the Dream Police and I hope it doesn’t end up being a fluke awesome record. I’m not so big on his earlier stuff except “absolutely” by Dijon.

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  • I run my Tele direct with a reverb on send 1 and a modulation into a delay on send 2 ..
    very clean and if you want some dirt , try a dirt pedal of choice . I like the preamps of the Tascam but there’s a different sweet spot for every different instrument.

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  • My first “amp” was my dad’s old Sony reel-to-reel tape player, because it had a guitar cord sized input. The distortion sound it made was creamy smooth and sounded fantastic, until I blew it up. Today I’d try to make a pedal out of it but back in the 80’s nobody would think to do that

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  • Portastudios are great for practice. I tried to get into amp sims, but it's so hard to play other audio in the background to play along to. I have a Bluetooth adapter plugged into my 424 along with my stereo bass rig, I can play any audio on any device I'd like, mix it, and jam to it.

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