AMALGAM AUDIO:
CAPTURES THAT FEEL REAL

At Amalgam Audio, we create premium captures of iconic amplifiers and studio gear designed to sound authentic, feel inspiring, and perform effortlessly in real-world playing situations.

Using our extensive and ever-growing collection of 140+ legendary guitar amps (check out a large portion of our collection here), we obsess over every stage of the process – from amp preparation, tube selection, dialing in sweet-spots to mic placement and high-end signal-chain design – to preserve the nuance, response and analog character that make exceptional gear special.

Our captures are made to be more than accurate representations. They are crafted as genuinely usable, musical tools that can stand as a serious alternative to high-end analog rigs, whether you are recording, performing live or playing at home. With every release, we continue refining our methodology with one goal above all: putting the best tones we can create directly into your hands.

Some of the extra miles that we go for the very best attainable results in our capture process.

Rigorous testing and regular maintenance of our amps so that they perform at their best and can easily handle the punishing volumes that we run them on.

All of our vintage amps have the original mains and output transformers and original to the amp or at a minimum era-correct vintage speakers: from the early Celestion G12 Alnico and Jensen Alnico variants from the earlier models, iconic ceramic speakers of the 60s like the G12H30 55Hz Celestions with original Pulsonic cones up to EV 12Ls and other icons are an important part of the recipe.

Hand-picked and tested premium NOS vintage tubes from the likes of Mullard, GEC, Brimar, GE, Sylvania and other vintage manufacturers.

We run the amps loud. If we are doing DI format captures, the amps are hooked up to the cabs/speakers they were intended for and a line-level signal is tapped directly from the amp’s output. This way the load the amp sees is exactly what it is designed for, which also affects the tone/authenticity.

We capture the speakers/cabs with industry standard mics: Royer R121, Neumann U87, Shure SM57, Beyerdynamic M160 via UA Apollo x8 Gen 2 preamps.

Our multi-mic setup of 3-4 microphones is meticulously phase-aligned to ensure a phase coherent tone that lets every nuance of the amp itself shine through, giving you an authentic touch response and dynamics that will not only ensure an authentic tone, but also maintain the feel of a real tube amp in our captures.

We monitor the amps and captures through Beyerdynamic DT770 PRO headphones and Dutch & Dutch 8c monitors to leave no space for guesswork on the results.