3 Guitar Amp Micing Techniques

This episode we’re going to go over recording guitar!

I have a carl Martin BandMate 15 Roadie, which is a fairly clean amp but you can drive it with a gain pedal. In this instance, I’m going to keep it pretty clean because a lot of the comments we get from people say that 99% of the recording guitar videos out there are all about heavy guitars.

So we have set up a clean tone and we’re going to drive it with a Nobels ODR-1 Overdrive which a lot of you probably know it very well. This pedal is becoming a little bit of a session players standard.

Tim Pierce is the one who introduced me to it, it’s a great sounding pedal and I ended up meeting the company and they’re nice guys.

We have an MXR Carbon Copy for Delay, we’re going to hear the tone clean, drive, little reverb, and a bit of delay. You are going to hear every variation that we can do.

There are three methods that we’re going to talk about.

The first one is just sticking a good old fashion mid-price dynamics. In this case, we’re using an SM 57. The other version is going to use the back mic because we’re using an open back cab we’re going to mic the back.

Since the back mic is going to be hearing the exact opposite the polarity if going to be flipped so that you get perfect phase. – or at least as near as possible.

And then, of course, the third version will be a double mic technique which is often explained as a 421 but has become most popular using ribbon mics. I do use ribbon mics, not often but occasionally on guitar amps and one of those favorites, of course, is the Royer 121 which is a relatively expensive mic.

However, Royer has brought out the Royer R-10 which we reviewed about a year ago which is a much more affordable ribbon mic. – so we’re going to use that ribbon mic!

So we’re going to go over 3 completely different techniques and we’re going to hear them with different kinds of sounds so you can get an idea of what might be best for you given what kind of guitar sound you’re going for.