Electric Guitar Recording Essentials

GUITAR RECORDING ESSENTIALS

Hey Friends.

I thought I would share some of my guitar recording essentials. These are a few of the tools that I rely on to get great guitar tones. I'm going to touch on the obvious ones for everyone: great guitarist, great parts, great guitar, great amp, great room. These should be a given by now -- they are absolutely your top priorities. If I had to put them in order of importance, I would probably say: 

1. Great guitarist  2. Great parts  3. Great amp  4. Great Room 5. Great guitar.

​This may surprise you, but honestly, I've done a lot of tests with mic'ing guitar amps in different rooms, and as long as the room isn't HORRIBLE, you can usually get by just fine with a close mic on the cab. Now if you're mic'ing from even 1' away, the room becomes a much more important part of the equation. The biggest thing for the guitar is that a) it's not terrible and b) the guitarist is very comfortable playing it. If they give a great performance on a mediocre guitar, it's almost always better than a mediocre performance on a great guitar. The amp is so key ​to the electric guitar equation. For recording, it's hard to go wrong with something that is 30-50 watts, 212 speaker cabinet. Something like a Matchless, Dr. Z, Fender Twin, etc. There are so many amps out there, but in my world, tube amps are and always will be king. 

BUT LET'S GET TO THE NUTS AND BOLTS of this article: guitar recording essentials. These are tools that I use to get great guitar sounds and that have made my life a lot easier. 

1. RADIAL SGI

The Radial SGI is essentially a buffered line driver. Unbalanced instrument signals are problematic. 1) They're unbalanced and therefore MUCH more prone to noise. 2) They degrade easily with long cable lengths 3) They're not easy to run between rooms. The Radial SGI solves that problem. With the SGI, you use a standard XLR cable (or snake) to connect the two units. The TX unit goes in the control room and the RX unit goes in the live room, booth, iso room, etc. This allows you to keep guitar cables VERY short and get ZERO signal loss by running over a buffered balanced XLR line. I have three of these and they will never leave me! 

2. CREATION AUDIO LABS MW1 STUDIO TOOL

You could say this is a dirty little secret of mine. This box has solved so many nightmares for me. It's a DI, it's a reamper, it's a clean boost, it's a buffer, it's an amp splitter, it's a variable impedance device, it's a ground loop isolator...it's a little bit of everything, and it's worth every penny.  I got turned on to this in 2015 and have fallen in love with it. It really has made my life so much easier in every way. This allows you to plug your guitar into one spot, get a DI from it, send it to multiple amp outputs, lift the ground switches (great when you're using two rooms and two electrical lines!), adjust the impedance of the input and output, and if need be, boost your signal into the front end of the amp. It has made my life a LOT EASIER.  LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MW1 ON THEIR WEBSITE (CLICK ME!)

3. GUITAR CAB PATCHBAY (CUSTOM MADE)

I built this handy tool back in 2013 for about $200 total and I must say, I am very proud of it. It allows guitarists to audition any amp with any cab in the entire room. As you can see, I've got quite a few. 9 amps, 9 cabs, and a few empty slots for when guitarists want to add their cab/head into the mix. The key to remember here - always put your amp on standby before unplugging / plugging in speaker cabinets. Without seeing a load, you can damage your output transformer. Believe me, I've done it before. It is not a cheap repair. 

NOTE: I have since replaced the jacks with isolated jacks - I didn't think about using multiple amps and cabs at once (DUH). Oddly enough, if you check the impedance when multiple cabs are plugged in, it remains unchanged, but I just didn't get a good feeling about it, so I replaced all of the jacks with isolated jacks to be safe. And here's another tip - you can use standard lamp cord for speaker cables. Yes, the kind you buy at the hardware store. I bought 250ft of the stuff for $50. It is absolutely dandy for speaker cables. You may not want to do it with a 200 watt amp, but I have been doing this for years now and my amp tech actually turned me on to it, and he knows his stuff! In fact, he custom built half the amps in this room from scratch! Saved me a bunch of money when building this, and trust me, I've done A/B tests to make sure I wasn't crazy, and seriously, it works perfectly fine. No weird voodoo marketing can save you here. 

4. KORG RACKMOUNT TUNER

I love the Korg rackmount tuners. They are extremely precise but provide the best tune of any other tuner I've ever used. There are two tricks to having a rackmount tuner:

1. Everybody tunes with the same tuner. No Snarks, no handhelds, no pedals. I make everyone tune to this tuner. I never have to worry about it getting lost, losing battery, getting fumbled around, needing power...it sits in the rack and does one thing: TUNES. 

2. Rather than plugging straight into the tuner, I have the tuner set up on a headphone mix. This means that any signal, coming through any channel will be picked up by the tuner. You might think this is annoying, but the tuner is out of my view, so it never bothers me. It's visible at all times to guitarists that sit behind me in the control room. This is great because if someone is singing a note, it will register the note easily. I can hook it to my talkback mic and leave it on while tuning vocals. This way I don't always have to go by sight when tuning vocals - I can tweak in microtonal adjustments based on the same tuner I used for guitar and bass. It also allows me to actually tune to the signal being picked up by the mic. Sometimes this can cause problems as upper harmonics will often confuse  a tuner, but in this case, it's not a huge problem. The easiest solution is to tune with the tone knob down on the guitar. This removes the upper frequencies and allows the tuner to hear only the fundamental. Also, and this should be obvious, tune with a clean signal, not distorted. Best of all, these things are affordable, look great, and last forever. 

5. RIBBON MICS

It should be no surprise to any of my podcast fans that I LOVE RIBBON MICS. I use them often. My go-to mono overhead mic on drums is a Beyer M160. My go-to room mic on drums is an AEA R88. My go to electric guitar mic is a Royer 121 or 122 (and recently, the AEA N22!) They really have an amazing way of capturing loud, bright sounds without getting harsh, colored, or pokey. For a long time, I preferred condenser mics on electric guitars, and on some sounds, I still do, but for the most part, a good ribbon mic placed on a cabinet correctly will yield amazing results. There are some less-than-stellar performers...The Cascade Fathead is a great mic, especially for the price, but it's very phat and very dark. If you've got a small sounding amp, or a very harsh / bright amp, this mic is perfect. BUT if you've got a nice balanced tone coming from the amp (the goal, right?) the Fathead I often find is too fat. The Fathead, however, works great when paired with an SM57 or some brighter mic. 

For the most part, I try to capture electric guitar with one microphone. I find it to be the punchiest, clearest sound with zero phase issues. I like that a lot. Every now and then I'll put up a room mic (again, usually a ribbon), but that's only certain situations where the mix has the space for that to be present. They are absolutely essential to me in getting great guitar tones! Every model has a different character, different bass response, and different midrange content, but they all sound so right to me on electric guitars specifically. 

My recommendation: AEA N22. It's an active ribbon, so it's easier to mic quieter sources like strings or quieter guitars, acoustic instruments, etc. It also has reduced proximity effect, allowing you to place it very close to the guitar cabinet without excessive bass buildup. The Royers are amazing, but if you're using a 412 or something with a lot of low end, the Royers need to be backed up to combat the proximity effect. Sometimes this is fine, but other times, it's not "upfront" sounding enough. The AEA N22 may be THE MOST VERSATILE RIBBON MIC that I own. It really does work on everything and is slowly becoming my new favorite for its versatility alone. If I could just have a cross between the N22 and the 122, I would be in heaven. 

I hope you enjoyed this blog. Feel free to leave a comment. What do you struggle with when recording guitars? What cool gadgets or tools have made it easier? Leave a comment below!