Getting the guitar sound

I read an interesting microphone technique in a book once. It might also have been featured in one of my Sound on Sound magazines, but I remember it having been Steve Albini talking about it.

Steve Albini is known for some pretty good producing and has an overall rock ‘n’ roll attitude when it comes to recording music, wanting as much emotion and feeling as possible.

But he’s not one to be ignorant when it comes to the technical side of recording. He’s not a producer that has no idea of how to engineer, being ambidextrous when it comes to both those things.

Great sounding small condenser

His microphone technique that piqued my interest was a guitar recording technique. Always trying to get the best guitar sound out of the speakers he told us about a very interesting pair of microphones he likes using.

Using a big bass drum type large dynamic and a small condenser he combined the best of both worlds. Using these two microphones he said it yielded some pretty good results.

So I decided to try it. I took an AKG D112, known for being a kick-drum mic and a AKG C391 small diafragm condenser.

I experimented with various positions:

• Both microphones equidistance, both on axis on opposite sides of the cone. The place known as the “sweet spot”.
• 391 on axis straight on the center and the 112 45° looking at the edge of the cone.
• Switching microphones I put the 112 on axis and the 391 at 45° looking into the edge of the cone as well.

The standard in kick drum miking

Of these three variations, constantly A/B’ing between them all I chose the 391 on center at 112 at 45° to be the best sounding one. It had the fullest sound without losing any definition.

We recorded a funky rock guitar with a crunchy tone so we needed it to be punchy and clear but still thick. The most surprising thing was the bass response of the 391. It sounded much thicker than I would have thought recording guitar and had a great low frequency response.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with this microphone technique as sometimes you read stuff in books that could sound interesting but you never try it. So it was a nice way to personally hear what these different microphones did together.

Do you have any fun experiments to share? Let us know in the comments.

After recording a great guitarist that demanded his own special way of making his guitar sound….well like crap, it sucks to be stuck with a guitar sound you just can not make work with the rest of the song. Here’s a tip you can use next time to make sure you don’t end up with something unusable:

When recording guitar, make sure you record a dry DI signal with it. That way you always have the clean performance and if the guitar sound the guitarist selected sucks you can always change it. With the DI you can use different plugins in your chosen DAW or you can re-amp the signal, sending it to an amplifier and getting the guitar sound you know you need.

Hope that helps some of you aspiring hair-metal recordists. Do you have any experience and stories regarding completely changing a guitar sound for a record? Share it in the comments.