When multi-tracking guitar, experienced engineers know how to identify and take advantage of the phase relationships that exist between different signals. Adjusting phase is not just a corrective technique either, it’s also a powerful creative technique for tone, as well as for special effects.
You can use the TimeAdjuster plug-in to flip phase and to adjust timing in single-sample increments, as described in the next sections.
Electric guitar is often recorded to more than one track, such as one dry or DI track, plus one or more tracks of a mic’d amp. The different signal paths of direct tracks versus mic tracks affect the timing relationships of the audio. Depending on the signal chain of each track, the signals can get so out of alignment that they nearly cancel each other out.
Sending a single source track through multiple, unique amps can pose an additional challenge in that each tube stage in an amp usually inverts the signal. So, depending on whether the number of tube stages in an amp is odd or even, that amp will either be inverting or non-inverting, respectively. If you send an identical signal to two amps and one is inverting while the other is non-inverting, signal cancellation will result. All amps in Eleven accurately model the number of amp stages found in all the original hardware.
If each of the mics used on a single cabinet are not positioned carefully, comb filtering and other frequency anomalies can occur. With real amps, the engineer moves one or more mics to find their optimal positions relative to the source, and to each other.
To hear the effect of small adjustments to the phase relationships of signals, do the following.