Best Way to Record Guitar For Album

[Wolfeman]

Dude don't sweat it about the plugins. A lot of people have 'rented' them, it's just a good idea to not say anything and keep quiet about it.

That being said, there are a ton of good plug ins out there that you can buy for cheap or even free that will get you by without having to pirate.


I think with your equipment, you can get great recordings micing your cab. you just have to work with it. I know a lot of us on here record our cabs in small cramped bedrooms and still manage to get workable tones. Just start with one 57, make sure you move the cab away from the wall, and go from there.

 

[kenfobert]

Ya lol I'll remember that for next time, thanks dude.

I think I'll give mic'ing a try. Probably build a wall of foam around it like suggested earlier. I just always thought you absolutely needed to have the cab separate from the room that your computer and DAW was, but that's why I wanted to ask to see what other guys have done. The basement is one huge room so I'm sure I can get the cab far away from the computer and face the opposite way. I'll see what happens.

Thanks man

 

[462studio]

Ya lol I'll remember that for next time, thanks dude.

I think I'll give mic'ing a try. Probably build a wall of foam around it like suggested earlier. I just always thought you absolutely needed to have the cab separate from the room that your computer and DAW was, but that's why I wanted to ask to see what other guys have done. The basement is one huge room so I'm sure I can get the cab far away from the computer and face the opposite way. I'll see what happens.

Thanks man

I recently moved into a new house and my Mesa 4x12 is in a very large open basement right now. My 'control room' is a room upstairs, so I don't have the issue of being in the same room, but with a decent pair of headphones, you should be fine.

I get more than adequate results with a setup as below. Do this and take a DI both, so worst case scenario you get some miking practice, and you have the DIs to be reamped if you aren't happy with the tone you get recorded.

Keep the cabinet about 1/4 into the middle of the room, and not parallel to the wall, place some carpet or a blanket in front of the cabinet on the floor, about three to five feet worth, place a boom mic stand in front of the cabinet in a T position at the end of the carpet or blanket, and drape a large blanket or comforter over the stand. Mic up one of the speakers with a single SM57, dead straight on. I find that this mic stand with a blanket is enough to cut down the room sound and tighten things up, without removing all of the rooms resonance and leaving the tone completely boxy and lifeless.

Record a few takes, including doubles if you are doing that, and adjust the amp and microphone placement until you are happy.

PS: When you're trying to get your tone going, don't fucking touch any plugins. No EQ, no compression, nothing. If the tone doesn't make you happy all by itself with double or quad tracking, you aren't done tweaking yet. I personally NEVER EQ my guitars and would be really irritated if I had to.

Good luck.

 

[kenfobert]

Thanks for the awesome tips man. The whole basement is carpeted already so I'll try the idea of putting a blanket over a boom stand in front of the cab. I might end up buying some foam and put foam in front and to the sides of the cabs. I would imagine that cut down a lot of the emptiness and keep it wounding warm.

Thanks again for the tips guys

 

[462studio]

Thanks for the awesome tips man. The whole basement is carpeted already so I'll try the idea of putting a blanket over a boom stand in front of the cab. I might end up buying some foam and put foam in front and to the sides of the cabs. I would imagine that cut down a lot of the emptiness and keep it wounding warm.

Thanks again for the tips guys

I don't think you'll need it to the sides, but if you want to try it, just using two more booms and blankets will probably cover it and save you the money on foam.

 

[Metaltastic]

PS: When you're trying to get your tone going, don't fucking touch any plugins. No EQ, no compression, nothing. If the tone doesn't make you happy all by itself with double or quad tracking, you aren't done tweaking yet. I personally NEVER EQ my guitars and would be really irritated if I had to.

Good luck.

I have to disagree with this, IMO the tone shaping controls on most (all?) amps are far too blunt and imprecise to necessarily get the tone exactly perfect, at least to my standards; I don't have any clips yet to back it up, but I'm currently mixing the guitars I re-amped through my Dual Rec (before selling it) for my EP, and I've got a few cuts in there that, while subtle (none more than 2 dB) are really essential IMO, and couldn't be achieved by changing the amp settings/mic position without sacrificing something else (e.g. farther away from the dustcap, less bite/clarity, turn down the bass to lessen palm mute whoomp, lose overall fullness, disable the TS to get rid of the slight excess of 700 Hz, lose the tightness). In fact, considering how ridiculously imprecise amp settings are, I'm amazed this notion of "NO EQ ON GUITARS OR YOU DID IT WRONG" came into prevalence (I guess because Andy has said he often doesn't, though I'm sure many here are aware I personally think the TGE tone could benefit from a cut or two in the fizz region, for example). Anyway, go with what works, just my opinion of course.

 

[462studio]

I have to disagree with this

You can't disagree with an opinion. (I know, this is the internet, people do it constantly.)

I certainly don't disagree with your opinion that some EQ is essential. For you, it obviously is.

The OP is obviously a bit green in audio engineering if he is asking for advice on how to record a guitar amplifier and I would personally have preferred someone had told me to stop fucking with the EQ, etc, when I was learning the engineering ropes many years ago.

 

[Metaltastic]

The OP is obviously a bit green in audio engineering if he is asking for advice on how to record a guitar amplifier and I would personally have preferred someone had told me to stop fucking with the EQ, etc, when I was learning the engineering ropes many years ago.

Yeah, to clarify, I definitely think one should work to get the absolute best tone possible direct from the rig in question, I just think a little polishing afterwards is often necessary.

But how can someone not disagree with an opinion? Not following that one...

 

[462studio]

Yeah, to clarify, I definitely think one should work to get the absolute best tone possible direct from the rig in question, I just think a little polishing afterwards is often necessary.

But how can someone not disagree with an opinion? Not following that one...

Technically possible, but it's kind of like disagreeing with whether or not I like cream in my coffee isn't it?

 

[Metaltastic]

Hahaha, godammit, I just went to get coffee and all the while was hoping I'd come back to find you had made some well-thought-out argument about how one can't disagree with an opinion, and then I could be all like "well I guess we can agree to disagree on our opinion of whether one can disagree with an opinion", and it would be awesome, BUT YOU RUINED IT

 

[462studio]

Hahaha, godammit, I just went to get coffee and all the while was hoping I'd come back to find you had made some well-thought-out argument about how one can't disagree with an opinion, and then I could be all like "well I guess we can agree to disagree on our opinion of whether one can disagree with an opinion", and it would be awesome, BUT YOU RUINED IT

Haha!

In all honesty, I do think it's really important people be able to get the best possible sound on the way in, and save the tiny tweaks and surgical EQ etc, for a later stage, like mixing. I personally have never been happy with any mix I've done where I've applied and kind of EQ or compression to the guitars. The only tones I've really appreciated were the ones that were rockin' right out of the box and I left alone.

I'm totally for anyone that enjoys EQing the shit out of them, using 15 instances of C4, a few L2A's and a Dolby NR unit on your tracks, if it gets you what you want.

 

[aortizjr]

We are in a similar situation. ISO rooms and boxes are hard to come by and good acoustic spaces are hard to come by. Not to mention neighbors.

Of just about all the methods I have tried for tracking guitars in a basement/rehearsal room type situation is to DI them, then ReAmp them.

Then you can completely focus on performance, get that tight as hell. Then you can ReAmp in your own space (only one day to get everyone quiet or talk to the neighbors) or rent a full day at a real studio. All the performance part is done, so it is just getting tone and running the songs.

Latency and bad tone bother me. So... to help with that I take a DI off the guitar, off the amp send (for possible Impulses), then to a dummy load. Off the dummy load I run a cheap Behringer G100 DI with 4x12 speaker simulation.

So I monitor off that. Not the best sounding, but my amp at least responds like my amp. With impulses stuff sounded pretty damn good, but the plan is to re-amp in the end.

The main benefit from this is that if you have days worth of guitar tracking (always is, performance, endurance, etc.) then you don't have to worry about the setup moving or re-micing. You can monitor with headphones and really focus on performance. Fixes now or later are cake. If you are double/quad/whatever tracking you can do them right away after you have warmed up and run the part. Or your second/third/whatever player can jump in right away pretty easily as well.

Also I find I get better results/less artifacts editing the DI and running back through an amp than working with the amp tone itself.

It also saves your hearing, since you can monitor at reasonable levels with headphones or the monitors without having an amp blasting in your face. Hmm actually this might be the main benefit... well whatever.

So.. I would do that. Behringer DI is like $35-50 with the amp sim. You can get another decent quality DI, I like ART's $25 cheapies, or EWI's (audiopile.net) are damn nice for the money to take a line for impulses. While you are tracking guitars, save for another couple weeks, build or buy a re-amp box.

When you are all done and all is edited. I would even do the rest of the tracking and even get some roughish to polished mixes. Then mic the cabs, get it all setup and just ReAmp. Then you can even focus on tone that will fit the mix with mic movement rather than EQ/Compression/etc. Killer and budget friendly.

 

[kenfobert]

Some good tips here..Thanks a lot guys.

From the way this thread first started I wasn't expecting anything lol.

Right now I think I might play around with some of the ideas mentioned on mic'ing my amp, but we're going to be recording DI's as well and I think lolzgreg will be doing the reamping.

I need to change my Dimiebucker pickup out of my guitar though. Tried recording DI's on Sunday and I think my pickup is to hot cause it was just farting out of the speakers. Plugged in my other guitar that has and EMG in it and it sounded fine. So I need to set up that guitar in a new tuning and reintonate it before we start DI's now.

 

[s34nsm411]

just record it with a pod and use the di box to record the di at the same time. then reamp later. done

and dont worry about all this isolating the cab from the room bs, as long as the mic is no more than like an inch from the grill you wont hear the room

 

[462studio]

and dont worry about all this isolating the cab from the room bs, as long as the mic is no more than like an inch from the grill you wont hear the room

Disagree!

You might not hear 'the room', but there is definitely some sort of difference to be had.

 

[s34nsm411]

Disagree!

You might not hear 'the room', but there is definitely some sort of difference to be had.

Think so? Ive played around with moving cabs to different rooms before and literally noticed no change other than the obvious change from repositioning the mic. are You sure the respositioning isnt what you are hearing different?

Im sure to an extent if you got the room small enough like a cramped closet with just a cab and a mic you would hear reflections, but if the room is decent enough size you shouldnt be able to hear the room tone over the loud ass amp that the mic is sitting right next to and has its polar pattern aimed directly at

 

[lolzgreg]

I agree. My room isn't the best, but I put four pieces of roxul two feet in front of the amp to prevent direct reflections and then one a bit off to the side of the speaker I'm micing. I don't hear many issues at all!

 

[462studio]

Think so? Ive played around with moving cabs to different rooms before and literally noticed no change other than the obvious change from repositioning the mic. are You sure the respositioning isnt what you are hearing different?

I do.

No reposition involved, the addition of a mic stand with a blanket on it makes a difference for me.

 

[mickrich]

So it's ok to use cracked plugins but don't talk about it WTF!!!
The attitude on this thread amazes me.
I would like to have waves diamond but would prefer to spend that amount of money on other things so I don't have it.
I own waves SSL and it cost me nearly a thousand quid. Part of that money I spent on Waves SSL is because somebody else didn't buy it and is using a crack instead.
So by using a crack of waves diamond, you are not only stealing from waves but taking money from me indirectly.

 

[Metaltastic]