At the start of our second day in the recording studio, we began tracking guitar. See the Gear tab for a detailed explanation of the gear and microphones we used. We used two microphones on the guitar cabinet. A ribbon mic, to pick up the lower beefier tones as these microphones tend to have a warmer and mellower sound, and a dynamic mic, to pick up the high ends and raspiness of the guitar tone. With these two mics combined, it gave a very deep audio image.
When all of the gear was set up and we had soundchecked the guitar, we were ready to begin tracking. We began with the same process as we used for bass and drums, we began with Bad Habit. We recorded the main guitar takes which were sounding fine, there were no problems there. We then went on to record the overdubs and multitrack the guitars. In order to make the guitar sound as big as we wanted to, we quadruple tracked the guitar in the choruses. This means that we recorded four different takes of the same guitar part and stacked them on top of each other in the mix. This resulted in a really fat, heavy tone for the choruses which gave more emphasis. One thing that we noticed when recording the guitar was that during the slow section, when the guitar is playing arpeggiated chords, the bass is playing a melody, the guitar plays a solo on top of all that in the second half. All of this together sounded really messy as there was too much going on at once. We fixed this by keeping the guitars as they were, simplifying the bass part and re-recording it for that section. We changed it so that the bass was only playing root notes. This made the whole section sound a lot cleaner and more organised. However, this is something that could’ve been avoided if I had done more pre-production such as recording demos of the songs. This is something that I have learned from this process and will carry this lesson with me in future, to record a demo first to see if there is anything that we want to change about the song before going into the studio.
The second part of the guitar tracking process was recording Smackhead. This was the same process as recording Bad Habit, including tracking. As with the other instruments, this was by far the easier song to record.