Hi Friends, I hope you’re marvellously well! A few days ago, I shared a cool excerpt on recording Snare Drums from our latest course “Producing & Mixing at Echo Bar Studios“ with you. If you’ve missed this tutorial, you can watch it here.
Today’s video is all about recording electric guitars.
Engineers Erik Reichers (Snoop Dogg, Bono) and Bob Horn (Usher, Nelly, Timbaland) showcase several recording techniques to shape the tone of your guitars and achieve a powerful sound.
Topics covered in this tutorial:
- A special recording setup that will allow the full band to play in the room together, while maintaining isolation and avoiding bleed in your recordings.
- Microphone choices and microphone placement to shape the tone of your guitar recordings to your needs.
- Maintaining a full-bodied guitar sound by keeping the microphones in phase.
- Differences in sound of various cabinet designs.
Thanks Bob and Erik for sharing your knowledge with us!
Producing & Mixing at Echo Bar Studios:
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I hope this tutorial has given you new insights on how achieve a great guitar sound. Please comment and leave any questions you might have below!
Have a marvellous time recording and mixing,
Warren
Quick question on mic placement. Since the cabinet has 4 12″ speakers, couldn’t you place one mic (sure 57) towards the end of one cone, and place the Royer dead center to another cone? As long as they are side by side relative to each other wouldn’t that give you more solid signal without phase issues? (again as long as the two mics are side by side distance from the individual speakers?
Just seems a waste of good speaker cones to just use one single speaker cone when you have four lovely 12’s to work with. Just curious?
Chances are not all 4 speakers sound exactly the same, it’s safer to mic one speaker only, one sound, one response. Plus visually you can line up your mics much easier this way, rather than having them a foot away from each other 🙂
okay, cool…makes sense. I was just curious since that was such a great amp/cabinet combination…seemed like why not take advantage of having four supreme speakers to make full use of. Thanks for the in sight. Peace!
Interestingly @martin_weeks:disqus my friend Dave Jerden has a cabinet with 4 different speakers in it! He mics each speaker and then chooses the one he likes best! Have a marvellous time recording and mixing many Warren
Great discussion @martin_weeks:disqus and @plap-disqus-4734ba6f3de83d861c3176a6273cac6d:disqus! Yes, I’ve seen both! I personally usually mic just one speaker, when I worked with Jack Douglas he had me micing many speakers and the room mics and we got a huge guitar sound. So the moral is whatever works, works! But ultimately I agree with eX Cess, usually I stick to one speaker. Have a marvellous time recording and mixing many Warren
Yes it seemed to me that it would make sense. Regarding the “Phasing Issue” wouldn’t a simple “ruler” or straight Edge of some kind resolve any issues about mic placement (geometry right?) thus allowing for one mic to focus on the strong tone of a dynamic mic, while the other could be more focused on hearing the brightness of the other speaker?
I have a 2 input interface, thoughts on using 1 channel to record direct, 2nd channel mic the speaker, mix and match the two…no phase issues, have you ever tried it, and what do you think?
Now that sounds interesting.
I have a Fishman loudbox acoustic guitar amp. I’ve been pondering the idea of miking directly my acoustic guitar and miking the amp in the same manner…using input one for one and input two for two. That however, seems to me that it might wind up with phasing problems as it would be harder to make certain that the two different mic’s are the correct distance from the source. (that’s why I’m still pondering and not doing.) 😛
You could experiment, eyeball the distance for both mics, hit record, and play one quick chord or note, then playback and adjust till the transients line up…