Recording Guitars
My background, if it isn’t obvious by now, is very analog: big studios, big tape decks, big consoles, mics all over the place and the band playing live. My philosophy back then was to record decisively. Get the sound wanted (or needed) on the tape, build the sonics of the song by making choices, so that the mix was that, a mix, rather than what we seem to have today, a fix. Bear that in mind as you read through this collection of thoughts on recording guitars.
Some of you are experts and know this stuff. Some of you have big budgets and guitar techs and amp collections. Many of you don’t. Hopefully there’s a bit of wisdom in here for everyone.
Tuning
I wrote a bunch on harmonic distortion here, and how it affects whether or not something might be perceived as being on pitch. You know what else makes things seem on pitch? Properly tuned instruments? You know what else? Properly intonated instruments.
Before a studio lockout began, I would gather up all of the instruments—guitars and basses—that we were thinking of using and drop them with a guitar tech who would do a setup on everything and, more importantly, intonate every instrument to itself and make sure all the instruments played in good tuning with each other. I can’t stress how important this is. Doubling guitars that are out of intonation won’t necessarily make a record sound out of tune, but things will tend to sound thinner or buzzy as the upper harmonics clash.
Other things that affect tuning: the amps. Yes, solid state amps and tube amps have different overtone series and they can sound out with each other. Again, not so much out of tune, but things sound thinner rather than thicker. You all are probably using amp sims so this might not be as much an issue, but do listen for this stuff. It builds up.
Some people change strings every song. I change when things are starting to die a bit—you’ll notice a loss of clarity and brightness. And of course, if a string breaks, change the whole set.
Instruments aren’t perfect, and the tuning and intonation change as one travels up and down the neck, or up and down the keyboard. Retune the instrument if parts are played in different registers. In other words, you might need to tune for parts played lower than the 5th fret, and then re-tune when parts are played further up the neck. Acoustic guitars are especially a pain in the neck for this stuff.
Always have a tuner set up on your console or DAW and leave it up the whole time, even the vocal sessions.
Guitars, Amps, Cabs, Mics
I like a lot of separation; I want to be able to hear each little part, so I always mixed up guitar sounds on a recording, using different guitars, different amps, different mics, and in many cases different rooms and even tunings. I never wanted redundancy; I ALWAYS wanted something different.
I’d typically close mic amps with an SM-57 and an AKG 414, because these two mics sounded very different from each other. The SM-57 had a bubble in the midrange, while the 414 had more bass and pronounced upper mids and highs. To my ear they fit together like two puzzle pieces. I thought the same way for guitars—a humbucker to the left, a single coil to the right; and for amps—a cranked up high gain amp here, a lower gain, cleaner amp there; and for cabinets—a 4x12 closed back cabinet on one side, a single 10” open back on the other.
Typically, I’d try to use different guitar and amp combinations for rhythm parts as well as solos. I wanted the solo to stand out, so why use the same processing as the rhythm parts?
Usually, any pedals were added as we went down to tape. I don’t think I ever tracked a guitar part with a sense of, “Hmmm... I wonder what I might do to this in the mix?” Seriously, I just wanted to mix it in the mix.
I mic’d amps as far up from the floor as possible, meaning the upper speakers of a 4x12 cabinet and putting a combo amp on a table or a chair, or on another cabinet, to get it off the ground. This was for phase reasons. You don’t want to record parts that sound like a stuck phaser... unless you want the sound of a stuck phaser.
By the way, each speaker in a cabinet sounds different. Pick the one you like best. Also, experiment with micing the sides of cabinets, the inside of a combo amp, etc. Chances are you won’t get something usable, but it can be fun and sometimes you get a sound that works.
A cool trick is to mic a solid body guitar’s body. You get a thin, flinky sound, but it can add articulation to a part, and a strummed mic’d electric body is a very cool “acoustic” guitar sound. You can also do this by taping a set of headphones to the guitar’s body and then running the headphone’s cable into a mic pre.
Processing
Beware hitting preamps too hard and driving them into saturation. Yes, it can sound cool and add interesting distortion, but clipping removes attack and articulation. If you need clicky guitar parts, give them headroom. Same thing with recording to tape or using tape emulation. You won’t have nice note separation and articulate parts if you get rid of transients.
If you need click, don’t clip.
I never recorded guitars with noise gates. I hate the sound of gates. There are other ways to get rid of hum and noise without screwing up the decay of notes, especially these days.
Guitars don’t have particularly fast transients, so compression is more about the overall sound of the circuit and the gain reduction needed. I preferred dbx160s, especially the units with the dial VU meter. In the box, it’s our Pawn Shop Comp or the VCA-based simulation on the Korneff AIP. Something about a VCA compression circuit on a guitar always feels right to me.
Don’t compress guitars too much to tape, or DAW. But also don’t be afraid to compress everything while tracking down, and then compressing again in the mix. If you’re shaving a little bit of dynamic range down here and there all over the mix—a dB or two here, 3dB there—the net result is a louder sounding recording that doesn’t sound compressed. I love compressors, but if I hear the artifacts of compression I usually think it’s cruddy engineering. So, lots of pumping, loss of brightness, and that “grind” sound compressors can impart, I’m looking to avoid that.
Recording
I used to track bass and guitar overdubs in the studio, with the player sitting across from me, both of us behind the console. With my right hand, I would operate the tape deck via its remote, punching in and punching out as needed. I’d use my left hand to do whatever had to be done when the guitar player ran out of fingers—muting strings, sometimes fretting notes, sometimes squeezing notes into tune behind the nut. This is actually really commonly done in studios, and if you’re tracking parts without lending a helping hand, you’re doing the music a disservice.
I have a good sense of time and an even better sense of groove. Often, if a player couldn’t get the feel of a part, I would tap my foot on their foot to impart both the tempo and the feel. Some people can’t tap their foot on time. I can’t imagine it but it used to happen.
Squeaky strings? Have the guitar player rub their fingertips on their forehead or sides of their nose to get a little oil to lubricate the strings. This usually gets rid of squeaks.
Put the amp in the bathroom. Turn off the water to the toilet and flush it. Stick an SM-57 down in the bowl and move it around til you get a cool sound. Obviously, don’t put it in the water. Toiletverb.
Toilet paper tubes, paper towel rolls, pieces of PVC piping, these are all fun to stick mics down and then point at an amp, or an acoustic guitar. Studios used to have water coolers with those big replaceable bottles. These are fun to drop a mic down as well. Just make sure they’re dry.
You can also stick mics down orchestral instruments, like tubas and such, and point them at amps for cool sounds. This actually works well for vocals too. Get a tuba. Have someone sing into the bell, stick the mic by the mouthpiece.
Experiment with pulling patch cables half out of pedals. Usually, it sounds awful, but I had a few fuzz pedals that would turn into oscillators, the pitch adjustable with the knobs. Got some pretty out guitar sounds doing this.
Overdub strummy guitar parts with open-tuned guitar parts, and then pull them back in the mix, or use the open guitar part just to feed the reverb and have none of its dry signal in the mix.
Alligator clips—those little pieces of wire with a grippy jaw on the end of them that you find in the workshop area of a studio—clip these on guitar strings for a very strange sound. It will fret a note, but the overtones are really different.
If you want a guitar part to sound further away, mic it from further away.
You can make a talk box by sticking a small speaker, like an earbud, into someone’s mouth and then putting them in front of a mic. Actually, you can run an entire mix through a pair of earbuds in someone’s mouth, and then mic their face, and then track that down into the DAW and use it in the mix somehow. Use cheap ones. They will get all spitty.
I am sure I will think of a bunch of bizarre things I did once this gets published, but for now... sayonara and happy recording.