Recording Guitars

In todays world of making music and recording there are many options in getting guitar sounds on tape orrrrrrr harddrive! The old days of micing cabs is still the way but going direct is very hot and very easy with the coming of the POD, Johnson J-Station, etc. The amp modeling revolution has made it very easy to just plug, dial and RECORD like never before. And they sound damm good. You can saves time and money with just pluggin in, calling up a patch and your off. Plus another thing is they are great for live tracking because they produce NO bleed threw to the other instruments and they are VERY quiet. Also they don't keep up anyone late at night like a Marshall stack does. But for the real thumping chest sound ....micing the cab is still the best choice.

When micing a cab there is first things first. You must make sure that your rig sounds like you want. If it sounds thin, noisy, brittle, buzzy you are already playing at a disadvantage. Make sure you have killer tone, change your strings, make sure your tubes are relatively new, your pickups in balance, your batteries new, your guitar has no fret buzz. This should be all set so you can play and sound killer. THEN its just the job of getting that on tape/disk.

There are some basics for micing a cab to make your life easy. You need 2 people. One person to listen and play, the other to move the mic around. You can do it yourself but its a pain in the ass to go back and forth and you lose concentration of the sound. Start with a the Classic SM-57 and put it in the center of the cone and move it out inch by inch. Play move - Play move - Play move...You can also try tilting the head of the mic on a 45 degree angle to give it some different frequency responses. As you can see its all just experimentation. You can NOT do anything wrong. If it sounds killer you have done it correct. Just be careful of your levels you can easily go into distortion with each move if it gets closer to the cone...

Some variations on this is to try other mics, and to setup another mic for a more ambient sound say 6 ft from the cab. Try putting another mic behind the speakers (be careful for phase, try switching the phase switch on your console). Also take the two mic inputs and try adjusting the mix of those two. Adding a touch of ambient mic can sound killer even though its very subtle. Another cool trick is take the two signals spread them left and right and put one side threw a delay of 50 to 150 ms. Sounds very thick and double tracked. Speaking of double tracked don't forget you can layer your guitar tracks to beef them up. Pan one center, one right, one left....Ok Im getting a tad nuts.

But as always remember just keep experimenting that's what true recording is all about. And the true path to finding that killer recorded guitar sound!