DESCRIPTION:
Legendary Recording engineer Bob Clearmountain shows how to mic and record an electric guitar amp using one mic and an Apogee Duet audio interface. This includes mic selection, mic placement technique and tips on proper gain staging.

See photos and hear the finished track: http://www.apogeedigital.com/blog/record-electric-guitar-part-1
Learn more about Apogee Duet: http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/duet


Today we’re talking about micing electric guitar amps. We’re going to start with the single mic technique when we get into multiple mics later.

Starting with this Vox AC 30, which is one of my favorite guitar amps, you can use any amp you want, of course it doesn’t matter, your choice.

My chosen microphone is the Shure SM57, which is one of the most common microphones in the world, it’s very inexpensive, they only cost about $90. It’s usually the go to mic that gets used for guitar amps more than any other mic. There’s a lot of other choices, but this is kind of the most common. For some reason it compliments most guitar amps quite well. There’s not that much to it, basically you want to point the mic at the amp (chuckles) and not away from the amp.

There’s two speakers in this, two twelve inch speakers, I’m using the off axis technique a little bit here, you can put it directly, it doesn’t make that much difference, I mean there’s a little difference in tone and you would have to play with it to see what actually you like better. I usually prefer the off axis, I’m not really sure why. If you want an edgier tone, you’d want to move it away from the speaker a little bit, you don’t get as much proximity effect. If you put it real close, you get sort of a warmer sound, scooping the upper mid range out a little bit.

Lot’s of different mics you could pic depending on what you have in your microphone arsenal, you might want to go through a few different types. The condensers are going to give you a more of a Hi-Fi sound. If you want a warmer sound, a more round and not as edgy sound, you might want to use a ribbon, like a Royer 121, or something like that.

We used to change the sound when we used to record analog, and some of you maybe still do record analog, in which case it is quite important, if you really push tape hard you get a bit of a compression effect and that can actually be advantageous for a guitar sound.

Nowadays most people are recording digital and it doesn’t really matter, no matter what gain setting, as long as you set your preamp so it’s not distorting, and you’re not in the red, it’s going to sound pretty much the same. I’ll ask a guitar player to play the loudest thing he can possibly play and then set it so it’s just a few dB under full scale, under going into the red, that’ll work fine, and if it’s a bit lower than that that’s not really going to make a whole lot of difference.




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