Studio Savvy
Inthisspecialfeature,ourresidentToneDoctor,SimonLaw,invites Paul McCartney and John Mayer sideman Robbie McIntosh, plus toprecordingengineerDomMonks,intothestudio.Together,they show us how to record rich, professional guitar tones every time
Learn to get great tones down on tape with our eight-page special on recording featuring John Mayer sideman Robbie McIntosh and Simon Law
For over 30 years, I’ve been obsessed with guitars and amplifiers and also old recording equipment. In the early years, all I had was an old microphone and a little cassette recorder. I would spend days trying to replicate these ‘big’ sounds I heard on records of the day. I’d stand in the bath tub with my microphone taped to the towel rail at the other end of the room in my attempt to emulate Jimmy Page’s acoustic sound. At the time, it was worth all the effort. Today, it probably wouldn’t sound nearly as good – rose-tinted headphones and all that.
Fortunately for me, all these years later I am still tinkering with guitars and microphones, and even getting paid for it! It got me thinking. So many of us spend so much time and lots of money on the very best mics and preamps and outboard
gadgetry just to try and capture something that we feel will be better because of it.
I had a conversation with a friend recently and he was telling me to sell all my vintage amps and microphones because he had found the ultimate piece of digital hardware to replace all of it. These things are always subjective to a degree, but, to my ears, what I heard was still a digital representation of what a recorded guitar should sound like that somehow fell short. For me, a really great guitar sound still starts with a player, a guitar and a microphone.
In this feature, I’ve enlisted the help of my professional ‘guinea pig’ Mr Robbie McIntosh, a renowned session guitarist who has worked with Paul McCartney, John Mayer and many others, plus recording engineer extraordinaire Mr Dom Monks. With their help, I will try to demonstrate how to capture killer acoustic and electric guitar tones in your home or local studio with the minimum of fuss, primarily by using the most important tone tool of all – our ears.
Acoustic experiments
The first thing we must do – before even plugging in – is to decide what we want our guitars to sound like. If it’s a solo acoustic piece, then we need to capture ‘more’ tone. When I say ‘more’, I mean from the bass right through to the treble: more of everything. If it’s an acoustic rhythm part, then perhaps we need to hear just the ‘strummy’ part without all the low-end bass response. Deciding what the finished part needs to sound like is an important part of the recording process, long before we set up a microphone or press record.
Once we have decided on our tonal goals we can find the place in our house (or studio) for the recording to take place. We’ll start with an acoustic guitar for this section. Strap on a guitar and move around the room slowly while playing it. Listen for the subtle differences in response from one place to another – even a few centimetres in one direction can make a huge difference. You can almost hear the room filter certain frequencies or boost others. Avoid corners because these can add unwanted and unnatural-sounding low-end. Try to locate the clearest and flattest-sounding position in the room you’ve chosen.
If you’re near a window, you can soften the sound reflections by draping a heavy blanket or rug over the back of two chairs or a mic stand adjusted into a ‘T’ shape. The harsh reflections from a window or tiled wall can send harmful frequencies flying towards the guitar and back into the microphone. It’s going to be slightly trickier doing all this alone, but it can be done. However, if you have a skilled guitar player to help you out, like I do, then having them play as you listen is way easier.
“The first thing we must do – before even plugging in – is to decide what we want our guitars to sound like”
Mic Placement
Next, let’s set up a microphone. For this demonstration we’re using the very common and inexpensive Shure SM57. This mic wouldn’t necessarily be the ‘go-to’ choice for acoustic guitars, but used carefully, it can sound every bit as good as a mic costing many times the price.
Roughly place the mic pointing towards the guitar where the neck meets the body and approximately a foot away – this is a great starting point. Using a pair of headphones to monitor the recording, and leaving any EQ on the equipment flat at this point, move the mic around slowly while the guitarist plays. If you’re the guitarist, then move the guitar around slowly from side to side and move closer and further away. Again, really listen to the subtle differences a very small distance can make. There is no right or wrong place here, just what sounds right to you.
Generally speaking, if the mic is closer to the soundhole, then you will get more volume and bass response. If you angle the mic toward the bass strings, then you’ll get even more bass response. Angle it away from the bass strings and towards the treble strings and you’ll lessen the bass and increase the treble. A most popular place is roughly where the neck meets the body; this seems to give the smoothest overall balance of tone. Once again, the most important thing to use here is your ears. Next, we can make a test recording and make any necessary adjustments.
Most recording packages and mixing consoles have a feature that is most important in this instance: the low-pass filter switch. It’s a circuit that actually filters out everything below a certain point and lets everything above this point pass through. It usually has a filter point of between 80Hz and 100Hz. This is pretty low and usually totally unnecessary when recording acoustic and electric guitars. However, this filter gets overlooked a lot of the time, meaning the engineer or home producer has to equalize the low-end out of the recording later in the process. What we’re trying to achieve here is the need to do very little of this after the event and to capture what we need to hear straight off the bat.
Once we’ve done these final adjustments and tweaks, it’s time for the recording to begin. Hopefully with some ‘ear exercise’ you’ll notice how some prep work
beforehand can reap huge rewards later on in the recording process.
take two
It’s always good fun to try a second mic position as well, maybe to capture a little ‘roominess’. The reflections from a harder surface can add a little ‘vibe’ and charm to a recording. Also, it can be a way of capturing a true natural reverb so you may not have to add some in later. Correct phase is what is important here. Sometimes adding a second mic can be totally disastrous – phase cancellation can literally kill the tone of a single-source instrument. It’s never as easy as recording two channels and mixing them together. One channel can cancel the other one out and so on, leaving the recorded instrument sounding thin and squashed.
To explain it basically, if two microphones are placed in different places, the sound from the source arrives at the mics at different times. An acoustic guitar has sound ranging over several octaves and all those notes have different wavelengths, so when these hit multiple-mic setups, problems can occur because out-of-phase frequencies from multiple sources cancel each other out. Luckily, there are a couple of ways to avoid that. One way is to use the 3:1 rule. This means that if the first mic is one foot away from the source, then the second mic needs to be three feet away from the first mic… Simple.
Another way is to place the second mic at a 90-degree angle from the first; it’s a simple ‘mid side’ style that usually involves two very expensive mics set at different pickup patterns. We can do our version with even a pair of SM57s, or anything really. The first mic captures the direct source from the acoustic guitar, and the second mic captures the distant sound of the guitar at the very same time because of the close proximity of the second mic. You can point the second mic either towards the headstock end or the body end. One way will give the sound brightness and airiness, the other will give you body and warmth. All this sounds complex, but in reality it’s a simple case of ‘a tweak here and a tweak there’.
Amplified tone
Now it’s time to try some electric guitar recording. Years ago, I loved nothing more than cranking my 100-watt Marshall up and recording it really loud. And you know what? It always sounded really small. The main problem was that the room I had my amp in just couldn’t cope with the volume – and neither could my cheap microphone or my neighbours!
Skip forward and I have discovered the true beauty of recording small guitar amplifiers. When I say small, I don’t mean 0.5-watt mini amps; I mean 15- or 22-watt amplifiers. These smaller wattage amps, when dialled in correctly and recorded well, can sound huge and even way bigger and louder on the recording than that big old 100-watt amp you’ve been coveting.
Some of the biggest guitar sounds over the years have been captured with smaller amps. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Jimmy Page, Jack White and Brian May, to name a few, have all used smaller-wattage amps to record enormous guitar tones. Once again, the most important thing here is to find the correct place within the room or studio to place the guitar amp. Just like moving around the room with the acoustic guitar, moving the amp round to an optimum spot can yield huge tonal benefits.
Once you’ve chosen an amp placement, you must decide how the amp needs to sound. Is it going to be clean or dirty, for example? The amp wants to be a reasonable volume level so as to keep a good signalto-noise ratio. We don’t want to hear the background hiss or hum over the guitar tone. Likewise, if you’re using a guitar with single coils, try to find the optimum place in the room where the guitar picks up the least amount of interference from strip lights and dimmers and so on. Again, walk around the room with the guitar plugged in and turned up and you’ll hear the hum come and go. Find the sweet spot and try to stick to it.
Next, let’s put up the same SM57 in front of the amp. The usual thing lots of people do here is to slam the mic right up against the grille and only move the mic from side to side. This is actually counterproductive to getting good studio guitar sounds. It’s an okay way of doing it ‘live’ when you don’t want too much spillage from other instruments getting into that mic – but in a recording situation, it’s much different. Start with the mic about a foot away from the speaker cone, pointing at a slight angle towards the face of the cone. A good rule to remember here is that the speaker sounds more trebly as the mic position moves towards the centre of the cone, and then warmer towards the edge of the cone.
Using a pair of headphones to monitor the sound, move the mic around a small amount at a time until you hear exactly what is coming out the amp. You can also
“I have discovered the true beauty of recording small guitar amplifiers… When dialled in correctly, they can sound way bigger than a 100‑watt amp”
try moving the mic slightly ‘off axis’, which means slightly turned away from the direct sound source. This works well with louder, more overdriven tones, because it helps to soften the overall recorded tone.
getting Sounds down
Next, let’s try a test recording. Play a piece you can easily play again the same way. Press record. How does it sound? Listen for balance between strings and for the odd note that may jump out louder than others. Once again, we can use the low-pass filter on our console or recording package to filter out any unwanted low-end. This is especially useful in this instance, because it helps get rid of unwanted hum from the amp, which is usually lower than the 80/100Hz filter. Time spent moving the mic around at this stage is far better than hours spent trying to EQ the recorded track and fit it into the mix at a later date.
Play the same piece again and compare the two recordings. Imagine how the guitar is going to fit into the track. Again, if it’s a solo piece, then you may want to capture the full range of tone from bass to treble. If it’s a funky rhythm part, you may not need as much low-end, so you can tweak the amp and move the mic closer to the centre of the cone to attain more top-end. If it’s a jazzier, more bluesy tone you’re after, then you need more of everything – so we can dial the amp in for that and move the mic further away.
A second mic can work really well when recording electric guitar, because you can set it a good distance away from the source and capture a completely different sound to blend in with the first mic. You could try putting the amp at one end of a bright and ‘echoey’-sounding hallway or room. Using one close mic and one distant mic, you can blend them to create the ultimate in ‘home’ guitar sounds. There are some amazing products out there to help with the mic’ing process, such as silent cabinets and cabs with built-in mics. These are all fabulous pieces of kit. But at home, all we need is an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, a microphone and an amp.
The most important thing here is to have fun with the process and to try to learn along the way. Some of the biggest recorded sounds have been created by accident and certainly by experimentation. Nobody goes into a recording studio or a home studio thinking, ‘This is what I need and this is exactly how I’ll capture it.’ Half the fun of recording is the recording itself; the other half is the finished product. Spending the time early on deciding on what you want something to sound like and then spending some time capturing it in the way you hear in your head is so important and is so much fun! You never know, you may stumble upon a completely new way of recording the ultimate guitar sound at home.
Finally, I must give a huge thanks to Robbie McIntosh for generously agreeing to be my studio ‘test pilot’ for this feature. Robbie played everything from Chet Atkins tunes to clever ragtime arrangements of Bring Me Sunshine with his usual captivating style as we honed in on the sounds and mic’ing techniques we wanted to demonstrate in the tuition videos that accompany this feature (go to http://bit. ly/guitaristextra to watch). Also thanks to Dom Monks for giving up his valuable time to offer me technical assistance.
For more info on Robbie’s superb playing, both live and on his recent record releases, see www.robbiemcintosh.co.uk. Meanwhile, Dom Monks’ stellar work with Seth Lakeman, Tom Jones, Laura Marling and others can be explored in more detail at www.dommonks.com.