Just curious how you all mic your amps. Sometimes I use one mic. Sometimes 2 Rarely I might use a condenser mic at distance. Since I'm mostly recording myself, I'm pretty lazy about mic positioning. It's so much easier, and effective, to do with 2 or more people.
It's a pain in the butt doing it solo for sure but if I had the EV and the Royer in the locker, I guess I would put out the effort. I used an LDC a foot away often but working up to recording a punk project here in the Spare Bedroom Music Studio, I spent some time and took notes and sorted out stuff for a dynamic on the grill and that's what I have been using for the raucous stuff.
Every studio that let me in the door would use some really nice Neumann that was older than me and... they always mic'd the back [email protected] ~ 2-3 feet.
I use an MXL Guitar Cube Pro I got as a MF Stupid Deal of the Day. Sounds good for the money. I also use a good old SM-57. Bill, tgo
I have a Sontronics ribbon mic that almost perfectly reproduces the sound of my amp... that is, if it’s not a perfect reproduction, I sure can’t hear it. I hang it about 12” away from the cone, just a bit off-axis.
In my recording room, I mic the amp AND the room. Catching the reflections and mixing it with the amp mic = magic. /2 cents
Ummm, did any of you feel badly for me and telekinetically send me a couple of mic cables? I swear I have no idea where these came from, they are new and in a wrapper.
you should. then you could use something instead of the Mr. Microphone that came with your morning dose Trix... which incidentally does okay by you ...if some of the stuff you put up in the past was recorded with it.
The issue is by the time I put down the guitar, walk out of the control room, move the mics, walk back into the control room, put on the guitar and play, I can't remember the previous tone accurate enough to judge it against the new tone. A couple rounds of that tail-chasing exercise, then I start to lose the vibe to want to play the song. The way I'd do it with 3 people would be to have someone go in the amp room (with hearing protection on). Guitarist and producer in the control room. Guitarist plays, producer listens, and amp-room-person SLOWLY moves the mic. When producer hears the tone he is after, he tells the guitar player to stop playing. When control-room-person hears the playing stop, they don't move the mic AT ALL, and tighten the mic stand in that position. That method usually takes only a few minutes, and it lets you hear and compare mic positions immediately.
When I was doing the homework that I had avoided that needed doing I put the amp I wanted to use and a couple of mics on stands, all up where it was easy to move stuff around and I took notes and did Mic 1 on center...record.....mic 1 half way to cone from center....record....and so on. It was excruciating but I did get something out of the effort.
Nice of you to say, thanks. I think it's really a testament to the fact that even very modest gear, at this point in time, can give you usable results. If one were to learn to totally maximize, as some have, modest gear can produce great results. I still want a ribbon mic, though.
Ribbon and RE20. Sometimes a condenser as a room Mic...several feet away. But...in this wonderful world we live in...anything is possible. And very few...if any...can tell the difference between direct and mic'd. Other than the person who recorded it.
The quality of your composition and the performance of that composition are more important than the quality of your signal path. I've head absolute crap recorded through the finest equipment in the finest studios. It's the music that matters.
A Shure SM57 and a Sennheiser MD421 are good candidates. Neumann u87? Well yeah, if you have that kind of money. The thing is, the frequency range put out by an electric guitar – especially after being focused in the mid-range by a typical guitar speaker – is not huge. You don't have to use expensive mics, or introduce real room ambience, if you're recording in a room that doesn't have great acoustics. If you've got all that good stuff on your session, that's nice, but it's not essential. Where do you point the mics? About a foot or so away at a speaker. Come mix time, you really won't know if you pointed the mic at the middle of a speaker, the edge etc...
