When recording an electric guitar live, the most common way, which i’ve learned during the recording units at college, is to use a shure sm57, 6 inches away from the speaker, on axis, and pointed at the centre of the cone. However, this was to record a basic guitar tone, so i’ve looked into other ways to mic up a guitar amp.
After watching this video, I have learned that generally, the sweet spot for sound is to have the microphone pointed at where the dustcap meets the cone on the speaker. With the sound comparison, I came to the conclusion that having the microphone pointed at; the centre of the cone right against the grill was too bright, the middle of the cone was too bassy, off axis was less bassy sounding but still too bass heavy for my liking, the sweet spot pulled back was too dry. My two favourite sounding mic placements were the sweet spot up close, which gave quite an aggressive sound, and off axis pulled back, which had more body. I will do my own comparison in the studio to see which technique sounds better.
TONES
Our guitarist Sonny Lumsden has specified that for our first song ‘Colossus’ he would like a vintage sounding rock guitar tone, similar to Jimmy Page’s guitar tone on the song ‘Black Dog’. Whilst looking for an example amp EQ to emulate this sound, I found a template of this sound on the Fender website that showed the amp EQ, what pedals to use, and what EQ for the pedals. Here is the template:
I will use this as a guide to get the desired tone for the guitar in ‘Colossus’
For the song ‘What’s Done’ Sonny wanted a modern sounding guitar tone. A frame of reference Sonny gave me was the song ‘The Saw Is The Law’ by the band Whitechapel. Below is a link to the video:
Whilst on Youtube, I found A tutorial from the Guitarist of a band called Periphery. Periphery is a similar band to Whitechapel in terms of the sound of the guitars, it is quite a modern, high gain sound. I will use the advice given from the video below to dial in the guitar tone for ‘What’s Done’
Some tips from this video are to start with all the settings on the amp at 12, like so
This is a good base to start from as everything is equal and you can begin to tweak the amp from here. Another tip is to increase the gain to get more attack and saturation, generally by about two digits. After this, he recommends to scoop the mids a bit (dial back the mids on the amp) and increase the treble by about the same amount. He then boosts the bass of the amp to get more low end in the tone to fill it out a bit. He then recommends to use a drive pedal in front of the amp to get a better sound, but I think it gives it too much high end for the sound that we are going for. I will experiment with whether or not this is needed whilst practicing.