Hey guys today we’re going to talk about how you can record an electric guitar amp.
Our focus will be mostly on microphone placement and technique to get a good sound.
We’ll talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of the different positions
and how the sound changes as the microphone goes from the center of the speaker to the
outside edge.
So the first step of recording an electric guitar is to find a good tone.
This will completely depend on your preference, the instrument you’re using, and what model
of amp you have.
Once you’ve found your sound, you need to pick a microphone.
For loud electric guitars, we recommend a good dynamic microphone.
The Shure SM57 is a very popular choice among musicians for recording electric guitar.
The next step, and probably the most important part of any good guitar recording, is choosing
where you are going to place your microphone.
When we’re talking about microphone placement, we generally mean position against the speaker.
Since we’re using a dynamic microphone, we like to have the microphone right up against
the grill of the amp.
Then we choose how it is positioned from left to right, as well as the angle it will be
at.
To keep a consistent guitar sound for comparison, we’ve recorded a clean track directly into
our audio interface.
We’ll plug the output of our interface into the input of the amp and record the sound
we get.
After that’s done, we’ll normalize all the tracks to -0.1 dB so that they all have
the same volume level.
First we’re going to play back the clean guitar track we’re using with
the amp.
Next we’re going to place the microphone at the center of the speaker with no angle.
This microphone position will give us the brightest sound of the 4 we are testing.
It also sounds like there’s a lot of fuzz compared to some of the other distortion we’ll
get.
I’m not too much of a fan of this position, since it can create a harsh sound that isn’t
too pleasant to listen too.
Now we’ll move the microphone to the edge of the speaker.
Putting the microphone near the edge of the speaker gives us the most low end frequencies.
It’s got a better distortion sound than in the center, but it’s also missing too
much high frequencies.
This amount of low end will definitely cause a cluttered mix when we go to add bass guitar,
unless equalization is used, particularly with a high pass filter.
Next we’ll test the sound we get with the microphone partway between the center and
the edge of the speaker.
This a common place to put the microphone.
As we’d expect, having the microphone halfway between the edge and center of the speaker
gives us the best sound so far.
We get a good clean high end without too much harshness and a solid distortion.
There is still a lot of booming in the low end, but we can easily take care of that with
a high pass filter.
Finally, we’re going to keep the microphone in the same position as the last time, but
we’ll turn it slightly towards the outside edge of the speaker.
This is called recording off-axis.
This position is similar to the previous one but it seems like it would cut through the
mix a little better and has slightly better balanced frequencies.
Once again, I would recommend a high pass filter to clean up the low end.
Thanks for watching this video on different microphone techniques you can use to record
an electric guitar.
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