Tips for Recording Electric Guitar

While already having an idea on how to record a guitar amp, Carlo suggested I use the standard Shure SM57 to capture the mid frequencies and combining it with the K2 to capture the low frequencies. To see how other industry professionals, record their guitars, I researched methods used by recording engineer, Bob Clearmountain, who shows how he records an amp using two mics and different mic placement techniques. Instead of the K2, Bob uses a Royer 121 Ribbon mic to pick up the low-end sounds. By blending the two signals, you can capture the full spectrum of the guitar. For my session, because I only have a guitarist and drummer, I decided to use both the K2 and 57 to fill up the low end and highs to compensate for not having a bassist.

As for microphone placement, because the 57 is a directional mic, you will have proximity effect if the mic is placed too close to the amp, so, during our session, we played around with the position of the 57 to make sure we were capturing the pristine high frequencies and leave the K2 to capture the lower frequencies. The amp we have access to is a single speaker amp so we placed the K2 on the edge of the speaker cone while the 57 was placed facing the middle of the cone with a bit further back from the amp.

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Bob also explains that if the amp has an open back which our amp did, you can experiment with placing a mic facing the back of the cabinet while making sure to flip the phase of the other mic to avoid phase issues. For our setup, Carlo and I placed both mics in front of the amp and faced it away from the guitarist and the drum kit to minimise bleed. In the end, it all depends on what sound you are trying to achieve but it’s always good, to begin with, the basics then building upon that and getting feedback from your artist and other engineers.

Resources:

Youtube. (2017). YouTube. Retrieved 28 April, 2017, from https://youtu.be/FmnfgvI4lD8