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 | | | | Nov30Written by:Rip Rowan
Tuesday, November 30, 1999 6:00 PM  So now we have four tracks worth of audio: a direct bass, a distorted bass, and a stereo drum track. Time to get busy with guitars!
Acoustic Guitars
First up is acoustic guitars. This is easy work with Four Mile Mule. We were recording with a nice-sounding Seagull acoustic with a piezo pickup. For this track I recorded the guitar direct as well as miked with an SM81. We used a rather typical miking position at about 2 feet away from the guitar pointing roughly at the 12th fret. You really need to be careful in setting up a mic on an acoustic guitar as tiny changes in the mic's position can dramatically change the sound. The direct track and the miked track were panned left and right to create a large-sounding acoustic sound that is more focused than a doubled track. The idea for this song was crisp, jangly energy.
For rock rhythm acoustic, I like to compress the acoustic hard. Heavily compressed acoustic rhythm guitars are something I learned to appreciate listening to a lot of Boston albums. For these tracks I set up a compressor with fast attack, medium release, and a high ratio (7:1). The compressor was set up for about 6-12 dBs of gain reduction.
For rhythm acoustic I also like to cut most of the low-end out of the tracks. A warm-sounding acoustic will have a lot of questionable program material in the 80-240 Hz range, and if this is rock music with bass and electric guitar, you probably don't need any of it. Getting a well-defined mix involves eliminating what you don't need, and a bassy acoustic is a good place to start.
You may be surprised by the sound of the acoustic by itself. On other material I might not make it so thin. But on this song the purpose of the acoustic is to add energy with its rhythm, not to fill up the sound with thick-sounding chords. On this song, that's the role of the electric guitars.
Electric Guitars
There are three tracks of electrics here: a doubled rhythm track (this is what is playing the chords in the song's intro) and a third track that plays the hook. The guitarist played a hollow-body Heritage guitar (similar to a Gibson) over an ADA Electronics Rocket amp. The Rocket has been reviewed here on ProRec. If you can get your hands on one, do so immediately. I've yet to hear a bad tone come out of one.
In all cases I prefer to record with a low-wattage tube amp. 100-watt Marshall stacks might sound great live, but when recording in a studio you're going to be dealing with an absurd amount of volume by the time you get the amp loud enough to do its thing. After all you're dealing with an amp loud enough to fill up a large club, and you're stuffing that amp into a small tracking room. I find that I get better sounds with smaller amps.
You need to be careful when recording guitar with one amp. In particular, using the same guitar, amp, speaker, and mic over and over can print the same sonic fingerprint into all of your guitar tracks. The result can be that individual parts blur together, and certain frequencies stick out, making the sound "honky" or "pointy" or just plain dead. By using different guitars, and by making subtle changes in the mics, mic positions, and speaker selection, you can get a bigger sound and help the listener differentiate each guitar part, even if the overall tone is more or less the same.
For this song we wanted to get bright, edgy guitar sounds. Four Mile Mule keeps it simple and usually does not double their guitar parts, preferring a more natural guitar sound. But we wanted a powerpop production style on this song, which required a big guitar sound. Therefore we chose to double the main rhythm part using different speakers on each part, a 12" Celestion Greenback and an EMI Eminence 12". We also slightly changed the amp's tone and gain to create slight differences in the quality of the distortion. When it came time to record the solo, we kicked the gain up a notch and rolled off a little bass to get a more "pointy" sound that would cut through the mix.
We miked the cabs with single mics, using an SM57 on the rhythm parts and an AT4050 on the solo. The SM57 is a guitar cab standard, and is always an easy choice when miking up a cab. Like the 57, the 4050 also has a presence boost, but it has an extended treble range that the 57 does not, and is less "covered up" and boxy than the 57. I think the 4050 is the perfect compliment on guitar cabs to the 57 and I like using them in conjunction this way.
I like to close-mic powerpop guitars to get them "up-close" sounding. Room or distance miking can really take the edge and attack off the sound which can move the guitars back in the mix. This is not what you'd usually want in a powerpop production. The problem with close miking is that the mic's proximity effect creates a bassy sound.
Guitarists, listen up. The thick, chunky sound of a close-miked distorted guitar may sound fat and heavy when the track is soloed, but if you throw that track into the mix, it's probably going to turn into mush. A tough guitar sound will sound surprisingly heavy in a full mix even with a lot of bass rolled off. For these guitars we applied a low-shelf to cut about 4-6 dBs of midbass at about 400 Hz. This dramatically lowered the mud factor and helped the guitars to cut through nicely.
And here again, compression is the key to getting good sound. When you drive an amp into power amp distortion, you're going to lose a lot of attack. By setting a medium fast attack and a medium release, you can add back a little extra "bite" into the attack and help the rhythm guitars to have more punch. This is the key to the classic British guitar sound, and I compress every guitar track. I have also been known to jack up the compressor's output until I'm slamming it's peak limiter to get a more "distressed" sound (for an example of the "distressed" sound, check out the guitar solo on the song "Two Silver Dollars").
Take a listen to a bit of the guitar mix on Black and White Movie to get a better idea of the tone that's making it into the mix.
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