How to Reamp Guitar (Even with No Reamping Box)

If you’re used to using amp sims, it’s time to think about reamping. Reamping is capturing the raw, unprocessed guitar track (DI) before it hits an amp, and then sending it back out through a real amplifier so you can record it again through microphones. 

If you’re using amp sims, you have DI tracks hitting plugins. This is how to get the real thing from the same performance. 

Why would you do that? To give yourself total control over your final tone. If something is bothering you about the guitar sound, you can simply do it again without needing to actually perform the song, and doing through an amp vs a plugin gives you the real tone. 

How does reamping work?

When tracking at home or in a studio, make sure you capture the DI. If you’re not quite happy with the sound of your amp or plugin tone, you can run the DI out of the compute, into a device that converts a line-level signal, back into something that looks like a guitar from the perspective of an amplifier, plug that into the amp, mic the cabinet, and record the result. The performance is identical every time. You can do this over and over. 

The technique got its name from the Reamp, a box built by engineer John Cuniberti in the mid-1990s while working on Joe Satriani records. He needed to change guitar tones after the fact without asking anyone to play the parts again. Everything since is a variation on that.

Why bother reamping at all?

• You can use real amps that you don’t own. A DI file can be sent anywhere. The amp does not have to be in your room.

• You can fix a guitar tone later. If the rhythm tracks turn out too scooped to sit in the mix, that is a two-hour problem instead of a re-tracking session.

• You can hear the amp in context. A tone that sounded enormous alone often disappears under drums. Reamping lets you choose with the full mix playing.

• You can record loud guitars without a loud room. Track the DI quietly at home, reamp somewhere the amp can actually move air.

What do you need to reamp?

How to reamp without a reamp box

You can, and people do. 

A passive DI box run backwards. A DI box is a transformer in a housing, and transformers work in both directions. 

Run in reverse, the step-down becomes a step-up, so instead of attenuating the signal you get roughly 20 to 30 dB of gain, which means cutting hard in the DAW to avoid slamming the amp. 

The reflected impedance into a typical 1 megohm amp input can end up higher than ideal, and you run some risk of saturating the transformer. Sometimes that's what you want, by the way...

Steve Albini's Electrical Audio has reportedly worked this way for years. It's a real technique.

Straight out of the interface. A line output into an amp input will make sound, though it's usually too hot, the impedance will be wrong, and with no transformer between your computer and your amplifier you have a high chance of hum.

A headphone output turned way down. Crude, but it gets the level into roughly the right territory without a pad. Same grounding problem.

What a purpose-built reamp box adds, beyond the transformer, is a resistive pad for level control, an impedance network designed to look like an actual guitar pickup to the amp (some designs literally use a humbucker with the magnet removed), and a ground lift on pin 1 to kill the hum. None of that is magic. It is just the difference between a setup that works every time and one you have to fight.

How to record your DI properly

Record it hot, peaking at -4 to -5 dbs. This is counterintuitive because everything else you record wants headroom. A DI's job is to drive an amplifier later, and an amp wants voltage. 

Watch the DI output on your amp head. A lot of heads have a built-in DI out. That's fine for going straight to a PA, but useless for reamping.

Use the instrument input, not line. A guitar is a high-impedance source. Into a line input it will sound dull and lifeless with no top end, because the signal is being loaded down.

What goes wrong when you reamp?

1. The DI was recorded too quietly

Per above, a cold DI forces you to make up gain somewhere, and every stage where you make up gain raises the noise with it. If your reamp box level is maxed and you are also cranking the track fader, the problem is upstream.

2. You blame impedance when the problem is level

The internet's reflexive answer to any reamping problem is "impedance mismatch." It is usually wrong. Impedance and level produce different symptoms, and telling them apart takes about five seconds:

• Thin, fizzy, will not break up properly no matter how much gain you add: the amp is not receiving enough voltage. This is a level problem.

• Dull, lifeless, no top end, feels damped and squashed: the source is being loaded incorrectly. This is an impedance problem.

Fix the level first. It is the cause far more often, and it costs nothing to test it out. 

3. Something got printed that cannot be removed

Cab simulation from an amp's DI out. A gate that clipped the front off every note. A compressor. A buffered pedal chain coloring the signal on the way in. None of it comes back off. The DI needs to be the most boring file in your session.

4. Ground loop hum

You have connected a computer and a guitar amplifier, each grounded through its own wall outlet, with a signal cable. Hum is the expected outcome, not a malfunction. This is what the ground lift on a reamp box is for. Do not solve it by lifting the safety ground on the amp with a three-to-two adapter. That is a genuine electrocution risk with a guitar in your hands and a microphone near your mouth.

What can you not fix at home?

Most of reamping is learnable in an afternoon. The levels, the routing, the offset, all of it is procedure. If you have a reamp box, an amp you like and a room you can be loud in, you do not need anyone's help.

What does not scale down is everything on the acoustic side of the speaker.

A cabinet in a small untreated room puts a lot of its character into the walls, and the microphone hears the walls. Moving a microphone half an inch across a speaker cone is the single largest tone control in the chain, and finding the right half inch takes a lot of listening on monitors you trust. And the amp you own is the amp you own.

 A 5150 does not become a JCM800 with EQ.

That is the actual gap. Your performance is already finished. What is missing is the room.

Frequently asked questions

Can you reamp without a reamp box? Yes. A passive DI box run in reverse is the most common approach, with the caveat that it boosts rather than attenuates, so you need to cut hard in the DAW. Expect to deal with hum, since you lose the ground isolation.

Does reamping degrade the signal? Every conversion costs something in theory. In practice the difference between a DI played back through a good reamp box and a guitar plugged straight in is far smaller than the difference between two microphone positions on the same speaker.

Can I reamp a track that already has an amp sim on it? Not usefully. If the sim was printed, it is part of the file. If it was a plugin on the channel, bypass it and you are fine.

Can you reamp bass? Yes, and it is arguably more useful than guitar, since a clean DI blended with a mic'd cab is standard practice on most bass records anyway.

What sample rate should I use? Whichever one your session already runs at. Do not convert. Just say what it is.

How loud does the amp actually need to be? Loud enough that you would not hold a conversation next to it. That is the honest answer, and it is why reamping frequently ends up happening somewhere other than where the DI was recorded.

We run a reamping service out of our studio in Brooklyn, with twelve amps, real cabinets and a Neve console, working remotely with bands anywhere. 

You can send us your DI files, pick the amp and the microphone, and you'll get WAVs back aligned to your session. See the amp list and what it costs.