How To Get Expensive
Guitar Sounds From a Cheap Home Studio
I'm always amazed by how many people working in
home studios think you need a $750,000 console, a 48-track digital machine, an
arsenal of $2,000 microphones, and tons of outboard gear to make your tapes
sound "professional." It's just not true.
What you need is some basic knowledge about the
physics of audio (most of which you can learn by dropping a pebble in a puddle
of water), and some pretty basic and inexpensive equipment. This is especially
true for recording the electric guitar. Trust me--if it were brain surgery, I
would have become a brain surgeon and made my mother a much happier woman. And
while I have the opportunity . . . for all you kids who want to grow up to be recording
engineers--don't do it. Become brain surgeons. They make a lot more money,
drive nicer cars, and never have to worry about where their next gig is coming
from.
The single most important factor in getting
great electric guitar sounds (of course) is that the sound coming out of the
amp should be great. That's determined by the guitar, the amp, and the person
playing it. In the interest of brevity, let's assume that we have met those
conditions and move forward.
A well-rounded complement of inexpensive
microphones for recording an electric guitar would consist of a Shure 57 (a
must have), an inexpensive condensor mic or two (I like some of the AKG models
like the C-1000 and the C-3000), and an inexpensive compressor/limiter (dbx
makes a few models that are a great value). If you have, or can borrow these
mics, it almost doesn't matter whether you're recording on a 4-track
Porta-Studio or using a Mackie 8-Bus with 24 tracks of adat, your guitar will
sound great.
As a general rule, I'll set up the 57 right
against the amp's grill cloth, pointing it directly in to the speaker
(sometimes at a slight angle from the outer rim of the speaker pointing toward
the center). I'll usually place a condensor about two to three feet in front of
the amp (at the same level as the amp) and point it at one of the speakers, and
if I have another condensor available, I'll place it about five or six feet
away, in front of the amp. I'll also raise the "far" mic to a height
of approximately five or six feet off the ground.
Obviously, what I've done is to give myself a
choice of three different sounds--a close, ballsy sound, a mid-range room
sound, and a more distant room sound. By setting all three mics up at the same
time, putting them each in a different input, and assigning them all to the
same track on tape, I've given myself the option of having any one of those
sounds immediately available to me, or a combination of them.
And now for that physics lesson. Imagine you
are looking at the aforementioned puddle from a bird's-eye view. Drop an
imaginary pebble in to it. Little waves radiate out in all directions from the
point of impact. Sound waves emanate from your amp in much the same way, but
more so from the front because speakers are directional in nature.
Now imagine the puddle again, but this time
imagine some wood blocks (12 inch long 2x4's for those of you with rusty
imaginations) that are placed on their sides in the puddle in the shape of a
three-sided box with the open side facing the pebble's point of impact. The radiating
lines go in to the box and bounce back or reflect off the walls. Soon, there
are so many lines radiating around in that imaginary box that they all collide
with each other and become a random, jumbled mess. Eventually, the size of the
lines and the number of them diminish. That my friends is reverb.
One line bouncing is an "echo." Many
lines bouncing randomly is "reverb." If they bounce around for more
than a second, it's called reverb. If they bounce around for less than a
second, it's Kosher to call it "room ambiance." If the radiating
lines are in a room with no reflective walls, they wouldn't bounce back at all,
and the room would be called "anechoic." By the way, my imaginary
room is only two-dimensional. Real-life rooms are three dimensional.
Sound images are very similar to visual images.
If you're in a large auditorium, but standing on stage right next to an actor's
face, you will see every nuance of his face, pimples, pores and all. You will
not see his whole body though, and you won't see him in the context of the rest
of the stage or the room. If you move back to the tenth row, you will lose some
of the facial detail, but you will gain perspective. If you move to the rear of
the auditorium you'll lose all the detail of the actor's face, but you see the
whole enchilada in perspective.
The microphone set up I described earlier will
give you a similar effect. The close mic gives you great detail (in audio
terms, top-end, treble) and warmth. The mid-distance mic will give you the
perspective that the amp is in a room, but without too much loss of detail. The
far mic will tell you in no uncertain terms that you are definitely in a room,
and with any luck, the listener's brain will process that information and tell
the listener what size the room is (I'm not talking exact measurements
here--just rough approximations). There will be a fairly significant loss of
detail though. The combination of any of the mics will give you varying degrees
of perspective and detail.
Today's modern rock guitar sounds tend to be
"drier" (less room ambiance and reverb), and most often use the close
mic technique. There's really nothing to it. Simply use the close mic, run it
through the compressor, set the compressor at a 3:1 ratio and adjust the
threshold so that the compressor is usually working, but not squashing the
signal too much. You will be able to make most of the tone adjustments you need
at the amp or guitar, and chances are you won't need to tweak the console' s
equalizer at all.
For a slightly more distant, but fuller sound,
bring up the fader on the mid- distance mic. Slowly add that signal to the
close sound described in the previous paragraph. You'll have the detail of the
close mic, but with the fullness that comes with adding some "room"
sound to it (just like sitting in the tenth row). This is a pretty standard
approach that will give you a pretty standard rock guitar sound.
The far mic will give you a bigger, more
heavy-metal type of sound with a more pronounced bottom end on it. The reason
for that is low end sound waves take much more distance to fully develop than
high end waves. Someone once told me that a low E note on a bass guitar takes
thirty-three feet to fully develop. Whether or not that is true will only be
known by people who have enough time on their hands to calculate such things. I
do know that if you take a tuning fork that's vibrating with a high note and
stick it in the imaginary puddle of water, it will generate waves that are
small in comparison, and closer together than what a low note will make. Simple
physics.
The key to getting a great guitar sound really
is in the hands of the engineer, not his equipment. I've gotten great sounds in
multi-million dollar rooms, and topped them in the smallest of home studios.
You can do it too. The key is to constantly experiment and apply some basic
physics. Try different mics, try moving them closer and farther, try different
angles, try putting the amp in a corner, try putting the amp on a concrete
floor, try it on a wood floor, try it on a floor with green shag carpeting,
just try anything!