Guitar recording with an overhead and a kick drum mic.

Getting the guitar sound

I read an interesting microphone technique in a book once. It might also have been featured in one of my Sound on Sound magazines, but I remember it having been Steve Albini talking about it.

Steve Albini is known for some pretty good producing and has an overall rock ‘n’ roll attitude when it comes to recording music, wanting as much emotion and feeling as possible.

But he’s not one to be ignorant when it comes to the technical side of recording. He’s not a producer that has no idea of how to engineer, being ambidextrous when it comes to both those things.

Great sounding small condenser

His microphone technique that piqued my interest was a guitar recording technique. Always trying to get the best guitar sound out of the speakers he told us about a very interesting pair of microphones he likes using.

Using a big bass drum type large dynamic and a small condenser he combined the best of both worlds. Using these two microphones he said it yielded some pretty good results.

So I decided to try it. I took an AKG D112, known for being a kick-drum mic and a AKG C391 small diafragm condenser.

I experimented with various positions:

• Both microphones equidistance, both on axis on opposite sides of the cone. The place known as the “sweet spot”.
• 391 on axis straight on the center and the 112 45° looking at the edge of the cone.
• Switching microphones I put the 112 on axis and the 391 at 45° looking into the edge of the cone as well.

The standard in kick drum miking

Of these three variations, constantly A/B’ing between them all I chose the 391 on center at 112 at 45° to be the best sounding one. It had the fullest sound without losing any definition.

We recorded a funky rock guitar with a crunchy tone so we needed it to be punchy and clear but still thick. The most surprising thing was the bass response of the 391. It sounded much thicker than I would have thought recording guitar and had a great low frequency response.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with this microphone technique as sometimes you read stuff in books that could sound interesting but you never try it. So it was a nice way to personally hear what these different microphones did together.

Do you have any fun experiments to share? Let us know in the comments.

7 reasons to love the acoustic guitar

One man band.

The acoustic guitar is my instrument of choice. Sure, the guitar in essence is my instrument of choice but given the choice between the electric and the acoustic I usually choose the acoustic. It’s the sound and character of the acoustic guitar that appeals to me, although I do like plugging in and rocking out electric guitar solos.

So as to explain better why the acoustic guitar appeals so much to me, I’m giving you 7 reason you should love the acoustic guitar.

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1. Thick strings, thick sound

• I string my acoustic with pretty thick strings, so it has a pretty bassy and thick sound. So the bassy and full sounding guitar lends itself nicely to alone-in-bedroom playing, writing songs or just jamming out riffs. I restrung my guitar once with a slightly lower gauge and it just wasn’t the same instrument after that. Strings have a lot to do with the character of the instrument so try finding the right gauge for your guitar.

2. Clean and self sustaining

• The acoustic guitar is a clean instrument with a full-range sound. So with a singing accompaniment sometimes that’s the only instrument you need. Some of my most favorite songs are by singer songwriters that only feature an acoustic and a vocal.

3. Good for all styles

• I think the acoustic guitar fits in every musical style. As a solo or a rhythm instrument it can be a part of any arrangement. Obvious styles include folk and country in popular music but it’s invaluable in flamenco and other ethnic musical styles as well. Even metal bands like In Flames and Slipknot have great acoustic songs, so it definitely has a place in every style.

4. Good for microphone techniques experimentation.

• Since it’s such a full-range and full-bodied instrument different characteristics are more dominant at different parts of the instrument. Different microphone positions and techniques lead to different results so experimentation is a must.

• Middle Side microphone technique is a favorite of mine(more about this technique later), but moving mics around listening to where the instrument sounds the best is also very acceptable. Just be aware of the possibilities of phase problems when using non-coincident microphone techniques.

5. All the different tunings.

• Sure, you can tune an electric guitar in all the same ways you can tune an acoustic, but there’s something inherently acoustic-y about open tunings. Open-G, open-D, open weirdness whatever. A personal experimental favorite of mine is drop-d tuning with a capo on the 10th fret but only putting the capo on the top five strings. This tuning has this droning d but high melodic chord notes since your essentially capo-ing a part of the d-minor pentatonic scale.

6. Has a percussive element.

• Using the body of the instrument you can get pretty cool percussive sounds out of it. Keeping in rhythm can sometimes be pretty hard when you’re trying to play complex things at the same time but some of the stuff I’ve seen people do is just amazing. Below is a video of Andy McKee playing his song Drifting, which is an example of pretty complex rhythmical and percussive acoustic playing.

7. Just makes you look cool.

Personally, I just think the acoustic guitar makes you look cool. Sure, David Gilmour’s 50 ft shadow playing the guitar solo to Comfortably Numb is cool but the simplicity of the acoustic guitar is what I think makes it one of the cooler instruments. Maybe I’m just biased, who knows.

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So that’s what I think. 7 reasons to love the acoustic guitar, I hope you agree with me on them, let me know what you think. Maybe you think the Ukulele is the king of instruments, let me know.

Mixing a great guitar

Today’s guitar segment will be divided into four parts. I’m quickly going to run through the basic steps for mixing electric and acoustic guitar, pointing out good starting points in both eq and compression. Let’s start!

1. Electric guitar

• Compression – It depends on the instrument and how it is played if you need compression for electric guitar. Saturated rock guitars usually do not need compression because they are already compressed when distorted. But funky electrics and clean chords may need a bit of compression to even them out a bit and pull them up in the mix.

• Equalization – You can usually filter the electric guitar quite severely if you have a nice bass track in the song. The electric guitar is a mid-frequency instrument and therefore has a lot of it’s energy in the middle of the frequency spectrum.
• For extra oomph and body-thickness try augmenting a few dB’s around 240 Hz and for if your guitar lacks bite I would  scan through the areas around 2 – 3 KHz.

Process well and they will love you for it

1. Acoustic guitar

• Compression – For chord strums I usually fiddle with the threshold at around -10 with a fast to medium attack. I play with the ratio depending on the feel of the song, but it’s usually around 4:1 – 8:1. For me, I never compress the same way, and I don’t really have a method. Especially when it comes to acoustic guitar, it’s a case by case basis, so you’ll have to fiddle the knobs until it feels right.

• Equalization – Looking over a few of my mixed songs I seem to favor the 500 Hz when it comes to equalizing the acoustic. Just a little boost seems to give mine a little more character.
• For a lack in thickness you can sweep around 240 Hz but for more bass you can go all the way down to around 100 Hz. I like giving my acoustics a little air and shelve them a couple of dB’s up from 8 Khz. Maybe even at 12 Khz?
• Just make sure you’re not boosting around 3 Hz if it gets in the way of the vocal. The acoustic has enough frequencies as not to have it fight the territory of the vocal. That said, you can get a little bit of the sounds of the strings and strumming at around 5 Khz.

This was supposed to be a quick post but I got a little sidetracked with researching my mixes and resources. I hope you can use some of these tips for future projects. And as always, every instrument and player is different. These setting may not work, but they are a good starting point.

For that silky 80′s guitar sound

One small tiny tip for today. As it is Wednesday I’m giving away a guitar tip but it’s going to be a short one.

For that 80′s guitar sound, dial up a chorus with a slow rate and at around 20% intensity. Also use judicious amount of reverb and some delay for solos. Obviously this is done by the guitarists themselves that are using the Chorus pedals or rack effects but you can still get a pretty decent chorusy eighties sound using your plug-ins in your preferred DAW.

That’s it for today. It’s Independence day for me so I have to rock out in the kitchen instead of on the guitar. If you are interested you can ask me to post more detailed settings and tips on this or similar topics.

Super flangy rhythm on guitar tip wednesday

I’ve been listening to Alanis Morissette these last few….well years but these couple of weeks a little more because I absolutely adore the production value many of her songs offer. There is always a lot going on and many interesting effects used throughout her first albums.

On the track Forgiven off Jagged Little Pill there is an interesting clean effected guitar. I could never quite figure out what it was until I accidentally stumbled upon it when recording a track for my own song.

In Logic you can emulate this quite well with just the flanger plug-in. Gives a nice shimmer to your strums, but you can’t play fast or it will all sound garbled. For that heavily flanged, but still not detuned or out-of-whack use the following settings:

• Feedback at 43%
• Rate at around 0.233 Hz
• Mix at 50% (Or you can put it as a send and there have the mix at 100%)
• Experiment with the intensity from 50% – 80%. I used around 75 because I had only sustained chords strums.

There, you may not be an Alanis fan, but you can certainly use these settings to experiment with whenever you are in a rut and need a new sound.

The first thing you need to know when recording guitar

Last Wednesday I mentioned how to make sure you’re never stuck with a crappy guitar sound. Guitar sound is hugely crucial in modern recording and almost every record has at least one guitar track. So from now on, Wednesday will be dedicated to the Guitar. Recording tips mixed with playing tips, cool, chords and ideas for getting out of a guitar-playing rut. And to keep the ball rolling, here’s a quick tip and a fundamental thing to keep in mind when recording your guitar.

Please remember to tune your instrument before recording, and preferably change strings on if they are old and worn.

There is nothing worse than needing to re-record a guitar track because you forgot to tune your guitar and it sounds a quarter tone flat to all of the rest of the instruments you want to add on top.

Also, keep in mind that the older the strings are, the worse they sound. I change my strings every three months or so and it makes such a difference having an instrument that consistently sounds amazing, just because of a little maintenance.

So please keep this in mind the next time you’re going to the studio you paid good money for. Tune and restring your instrument, it will make all the difference.

How to make sure you never end up with a crappy guitar tone

After recording a great guitarist that demanded his own special way of making his guitar sound….well like crap, it sucks to be stuck with a guitar sound you just can not make work with the rest of the song. Here’s a tip you can use next time to make sure you don’t end up with something unusable:

When recording guitar, make sure you record a dry DI signal with it. That way you always have the clean performance and if the guitar sound the guitarist selected sucks you can always change it. With the DI you can use different plugins in your chosen DAW or you can re-amp the signal, sending it to an amplifier and getting the guitar sound you know you need.

Hope that helps some of you aspiring hair-metal recordists. Do you have any experience and stories regarding completely changing a guitar sound for a record? Share it in the comments.