Recording a decent electric guitar sound is a bit harder than recording an acoustic guitar. It’s hardest to capture a decent distorted guitar sound; you may well think that you’re amp is making a great sound, but as soon as you stick some microphones in front of it and hear the recorded result you may be in for a shock. Don’t worry, many people experience difficulty in capturing their electric guitar sound. We’ll start from the beginning…
Equipment
The type of amp you use has a big effect on your recorded guitar sound. Valve amplifiers tend to yield the best distorted sound, and the difference in quality between them and their solid-state counterparts is rather noticeable when recorded. The problem is that when driven, transistors (as found in solid state amps) only tend to distort across the higher end of the frequency spectrum. This tends to lead to a slightly fizzy and tinny distortion. This isn’t very noticeable if you’re blasting out power chords at high volume, but under the unforgiving scrutiny of a recorded tone the fizzy distortion becomes very obvious indeed. Valves distort across the whole frequency spectrum, allowing for that warm, powerful distortion we associate with the expensive Mesa Boogies and vintage Marshall amplifiers. As you are probably aware, however, valve amps tend to be a tad on the pricey side. So my advice for all you solid-state users is as follows:
- Turn down the gain! A slightly cleaner sound will allow the actual notes you’re playing to cut through a bit more. Too much distortion and the whole recording turns to mush.
- Spend a long time finding the right sound by adjusting your amp’s settings. Make sure you record everything, and use the recording to determine the settings you use.
- Get the sound as close to what you want as possible before doing any mixing or processing in your DAW – get it right on the way in.
- Now that you have the sound you want, it’s time to get recording
Mic positioning
Many engineers tend to just stick a Shure SM57 in front of the amp and just get on with it. For example…
I find this is fine for cleaner guitar sounds, and in fact can work fine with distorted sounds too. If you’re working on a budget you will be able to get reasonable results from this method. I would certainly recommend using the SM57 over other dynamic mics – it’s a tried and tested mic for exactly this application.
I personally prefer sticking a few more mics on there. This is my tried and tested 3-mic technique:
This is particularly effective in recording a better distorted sound than from just a single SM57. The 57 is good at picking up higher frequencies, and recording some of the ‘power’ of the sound. Therefore by itself recording the distorted sound of a solid state amp the result can be quite thing and fizzy. The central mic is a Sennheiser MD 421. It’s another dynamic, but is a bit better at picking up the middle of the spectrum. So these two should work together to record the top half of the spectrum, and give a nice powerful sound. The far left mic is a Neumann KM 184, and is a condenser. Normally I’d go for a large-diaphragm condenser here, but I think that’s all I had kicking around at the time! The condenser will give a much more detailed reproduction of the amp’s sound, but will not be as well suited to conveying the power of the performance. Therefore when all these are combined, a powerful sound across the whole spectrum should be achieved.
Obviously you can’t be expected to have three expensive mics at your disposal. However, I reckon a large-diaphragm condenser and a dynamic mic should be fundamentals of your home studio: for a dynamic you can’t go wrong with the SM57, which usually retails at about eighty quid. Dolphin have a good selection of cheaper large-diaphragm condensers.
To record your amp put them both about 5 or 6 inches away from the speaker, with the condenser right in the middle and the dynamic right next to it, exactly the same distance away.
If you don’t have a great amp, or great microphones, don’t fret because there is an alternative…
Virtual amplifiers
Virtual guitar software that can mimic an amplifier and record the sound straight to your DAW is available from as little as the £50 mark. All you have to do is load up the software, plug your guitar into a cheap DI box and then plug the DI box into your audio interface. For simplicity’s sake I quite often use a program called Guitar Rig by Native Instruments. This is a very powerful bit of software that allows you to choose the type of amp your using and choose the type of mics and their position to mimic your favourite recording technique, and is has loads of effects and stomp-box simulations too. I think the cheapest version of Guitar Rig costs around £70 at the moment, which is a bargain really. This is a dead simple way to get a decent recorded guitar sound. It won’t sound as good as a properly recorded guitar tone, and the professionals will be able to tell the difference quite easily. However, it will sound better than using a cheap dynamic mic by itself on a solid state amp, so is definitely worth investigating!
SoundShift is a professional recording studio in Potters Bar, just north of London. We offer a range of audio-related services at very reasonable prices, with friendly and highly experienced staff.
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