How to record electric guitars

After drums, guitars could certainly be considered among the more ‘antisocial’ instruments you can play and record. This is particularly true of those who favour the shredded sound of high distortion, loud, treble-heavy power chords and searing lead lines. Try playing those for any length of time in your bedroom and it won’t be long before your neighbours let you know they’d prefer that you turned it down (read ‘off’). Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that amp modeling software has – like so many types of effects provision – become so popular. Suites like Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig allow you to take a ‘dry’ signal and turn it into distortion heaven, all by just taking a single lead directly from your guitar, plugging it in to an appropriate port of your audio interface and then developing a sound using software. And indeed, in any feature about guitar recording, let’s note that this is ‘Approach A’ and by far and away the most simple and neighbour-friendly. After all, your entire guitar sound can be configured with your headphones on. For direct guitar recording in this way, you should find that the audio inputs on your chosen interface are ready to receive guitar signals directly, particularly if your interface features a hi-z input. This is a ‘High Impedance’ input and is tailored for guitars and bass primarily. Simply plug in your guitar, put your favoured guitar amp modeling software as an insert channel and begin to experiment with tones and flavours. Just like recording other types of audio source in the same way, your effects choices aren’t ‘printed’ into your DAW as you record; indeed, bypassing the effect altogether will yield that slightly odd ‘naked electric guitar’ tone with which you’ll be familiar. Which in turn means you can carry on configuring your guitar tone all the way through the mix. Which all sounds convenient enough to ask why anyone would ever do it differently? The answer to which is exactly the same as why vocal producers covet Neumann U87s even if they own a perfectly serviceable vocal recording mic. For the simple reason that ‘the real thing’ sounds better than software, to many people’s ears. So a guitar plugged into an amp, and a cabinet miked up to record the resulting sound back into your DAW is preferable and, indeed, is so popular that some studios offer dedicated ‘re-amping’ sessions, where you take your dry electric guitar tracks into a session and the studio provides the mic and amp/cabinet combinations to allow you to ‘re-record’ these through greatsounding chains. Miking up a guitar cab doesn’t need to be as terrifying as many people make it out to be. The best place to start is with a dynamic mic, on a stand, with the mic an inch or two away from the cab’s grille. The closer to the middle of the speaker you direct your microphone, it’s generally true that the resulting sound is brighter, just as duller, more discrete tones are often found near the edge of the speaker. The great news is that the Shure SM57 dynamic microphone is a go-to choice for many engineers for miking high-gain amps and, at less than £100, that means you won’t break the bank from a recording perspective. As with all engineering, the best way to learn and sculpt your sound is via trial and error and this is particularly true of amp miking, somehow. You’ll find that substantial differences to tone lie in store when you move the microphone closer and further away (bringing in more room sound) and whether you keep the microphone on axis (pointing directly at the speaker) or off-axis (pointing it at an angle, across the speaker). Setting up multiple microphones (using Ribbon or condenser microphones) is effective too but record each one to its own channel, so you can set a balance later.