By Jay Graydon http://www.jaygraydon.com This is the first in a series of columns on recording the guitar – and recording in general. I’ll share numerous tips with you, as well as interesting stories from my career as they relate to the process of recording guitar. The “Recording the Guitar” column will cover recording in detail and will help you achieve the best possible tone and recordings, whether you’re working in a home or pro recording studio. Check back eve....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com I know you’re eager to jump right to the recording process, but before you can hit that red record button, you’ve got to set up your gear. Baffles are an important part of that set up, both because they help eliminate leakage and because they just might keep the neighbors from calling the police on you. They’ll also help save your ears for hour upon hour of recording session wailing. So here is Part 2 of my ongoing series, “Recor....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com Now that we have the best mic position set and the mic stand and cable is anchored down (read previous part) and the amp baffled if needed, before we EQ the guitar signal, you may ask the guitarist to change amp tone control settings. Of course, if you Before we get the mic's out, a word about amplifier speaker cabinet grill cloth, grill cane, or metal grill covers. These things are passive frequency filters, meaning they hurt frequency response and ca....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com Dialing In The Guitar Sound for "Clean" (Non Distorted) rhythm playing for Pop, Rock, Country and any other similar styles. Most of the information in this article series is based upon a separate mixer and recorder. Yes, in this era, computer hard disk recorders have built in mixers and are becoming the norm. Throughout the series I'll make sure to note how to work with computer hard disk recorders/mixers, but I'll default toward separate c....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com Dialing In the Guitar Sound For The "Clean Lead" Sound Or "Hand Muted Single or Double Note Pseudo Rhythm Guitar." In my last article I explained the mixer and recorder setup for tracking and EQing the guitar for clean rhythm sounds. If you missed that article, click here to read it before proceeding with this article on recording clean lead guitar tracks. So, without further delay, here are the EQ settings that will help you rec....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com Dialing in the Sound of a Jazz Guitar In the third installment of this column, the article titled "Recording the Guitar -  Part 3 Miking the Guitar Amp," I explained the microphone, and the mixer and recorder setup. If you missed that article, click here to read it before proceeding with this article on recording and EQing jazz guitar tracks. A Few Tricks You Might Need to Try First Before I get to the EQ settings for recording great....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com Dialing In The Guitar Sound for Chord Melody Solo Electric Guitar Sound In the third installment of this column, the article titled "Recording the Guitar -  Part 3 Miking the Guitar Amp," I explained the microphone, and the mixer and recorder setup. If you missed that article, click here to read it before proceeding with this article on recording and EQing for chord melody solo electric guitar tracks. Many Jazz guitarists love to play....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com In the third installment of this column, the article titled "Recording the Guitar -  Part 3 Miking the Guitar Amp," I explained the microphone, and the mixer and recorder setup. If you missed that article, click here to read it before proceeding with this article on recording and EQing for distorted guitar tracks. Dialing In The Guitar Sound for Distortion Guitar Again, refer to Part 3 Miking the Guitar Amp for mixer/recorder/micropho....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com In the third installment of this column, the article titled "Recording the Guitar -  Part 3 Miking the Guitar Amp," I explained the microphone, and the mixer and recorder setup. If you missed that article, click here to read it before proceeding with this article on recording and EQing for distorted guitar tracks. For those of you who are not familiar with the term "crunch sound," it is the sound between clean and major disto....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com Compressing the Guitar Signal on the Mixer Around 90 percent of the time, we want to compress the guitar, and for a few reasons. We typically use the compressor to kind of “even up” note or chord levels, and to add “punch.” “Punch” in this case has nothing to do with “punching in” on the recorder. Instead, it is energy applied to the attack of a signal to create excitement. For those of you who do ....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com In the last article, I forgot to mention a few other possible modes, which are hard knee/soft knee and response. After running those down, we will get into the side chain and stereo mode stuff. Hard Knee/Soft Knee Some compressors offer a switch-able hard knee/soft knee mode. If there is no such option on your compressor, the compressor will incorporate the hard knee circuit. The hard knee/soft knee option controls how the amplitude curve res....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This is a trick I use if I want major compression “punch” without “smalling“ up the sound. This application can be used with almost any instrument as well, not just guitar. The concept is to split off the guitar signal from one master module to two other mixer modules. One mixer module runs through a compressor and gets compressed big time causing a very small sound. The other mixer module does not use compression and is....

By Jay Graydon - http://www.jaygraydon.com The following applies to all analog outboard gear and digital outboard gear that allow analog routing. Even if using a digital mixer or a mixer/hard disk recorder, the odds are good there will be analog inserts for outboard gear. There are two basic gain structures used for recording gear. Inexpensive to mid-line gear usually incorporates a –10 dB gain structure. Some mid-line through pro gear incorporates a +4 dB gain structure. Some units have....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com Get ready for interesting experimentation! There are so many possibilities when using more than one microphone, such as close miking with two mics on one speaker, close miking with two mics on two speakers, close miking with three mics on three speakers, close miking the front and back of an "open back" speaker cabinet using two mics, using room mics, etc. When using more than one mic in a close mic amp miking situation, the key is t....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com Important! For all of the following, do not use any effects that alter pitch and tone, meaning pitch shifters, wah-wah, etc. If you will use such effects when recording your track, plug them in after reading the next article in this series, on comb filtering. Before you attempt to digest this info on comb filtering, you will probably want to open the previous article, “Part 14 Using Two or More Mics for the Guitar Amp Speaker(s),” fo....

By Jay Graydon – www.jaygraydon.com This article is on using two or more mics on one or more speakers miking in front of the speaker(s). I suggest reviewing the archived article “Part 3 Miking the Guitar Amp” since so much important physical set up information will not be covered here. You may also want to review “Part 1 Microphones Explained,” which describes mic choices per application When using more than one mic in a close mic proximity amp miking situation, t....

By Jay Graydon - jaygraydon.com Important! For all of the following, do not use any effects that alter pitch and tone, meaning pitch shifters, wah-wah, etc. If you will use such effects, plug them in after completing the comb filtering tests. You should open the previous article for important details as both articles directly relate. Comb filtering got its name because the waveform looks like a hair comb. This is caused by one sound source and two (or more) mics picking up the sound when the ....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This article is on using three or more mics on three separate speakers miking in front of the speaker(s). We will also cover using two mics on two amps in a stereo set up. In this era, guitarists such my very good friend Steve Lukather, uses three separate amps and three separate speaker bottoms. One amp and speaker bottom for the non-effected sound and the other two amps and speaker bottoms for stereo effects. The non-effected speaker bottom i....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com You should open the previous article for important details as both articles directly relate. Here is the deal. This is based upon a three amp, three mic set up. The odds are good a comb filtering problem will not be in play if you’re using only one mic on each of the three speaker bottoms. The reason being is that the middle amp is the dry non effected signal and the other two amps are used for effects such as reverb, pitch shifting, dela....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This article is on using two amps and speaker bottoms with a twist — the 2nd amp and speaker bottom is a sub woofer system. To keep things simple, we will use two mics, one on the typical guitar amp speaker and another on the sub woofer speaker. If you want to use more amps and/or more mics, refer to previous articles for details. So why use a sub woofer? In this era, many rock bands tune town to “Eb,” “D,” or lower....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This article is on using a close mic on the guitar amp and one or more room mics. You may wish to use more than one close-mic on the guitar amp in addition to a room mic or two, so simply adapt as needed. As with this multiple mic series, I suggest reviewing the archived article on “Miking The Guitar Amp” (Part 3) since so much important physical set up information will not be covered here. Before we get into detail, there is one mo....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This article is the second installment on using a mic on the guitar amp (close-miked as usual) and one or more room mics. It’s most important to review article #21 for miking details, etc. We will now dial in the sound on the mixer. Signal Path For Two Mics to Two Recorder Tracks This is different from the routing we have been using in previous articles. If you are using more than one close mic, refer to Parts 14 through 20. Set your lev....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com The Advantage: When monitoring over control room speakers, the distance from the speakers to the guitarist’s ears is typically at least five feet. Let’s use five feet for the example. As mentioned in other articles, sound travels at approximately a millisecond per foot, so when recording guitar in the control room the delay from the monitor speakers to the guitarist is approximately five milliseconds. That’s five milliseconds b....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com The direct box recording method was common in the ’60s and ‘70s for recording the guitar direct Also, the guitar amp may be miked as well. No matter what kind of electric guitar will be used, the set up and options are basically the same. At some point in time (I guess somewhere around the early ‘60s), “direct guitar” became an option instead of miking the amp. Some engineers recorded the direct signal as well as r....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com OK, in the last article we had plugged the guitar into the direct box and the direct box output into the mixer. Note that if the direct box is mic level output (typical), it plugs into a mixer module mic input. If it’s line-level output, it plugs into a mixer module line input. On some mixers, that may be the same input using the mixer module trim pot to set the gain.          If you are using a “channe....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This article is on EQ for melodies and solos regarding the guitar direct. Refer to the previous article, Part 25 Recording the Guitar Direct (Part 2) for routing details, etc. When we were dealing with rhythm guitar EQ, for the most part, we wanted the sound to be transparent not wanting upper lows and lower mids to fog out the sound. When dealing with solos and melody lines, we want the sound to have body. Single notes leave more sonic room th....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com OK, we now add in the guitar amp into the equation, meaning we will record both the direct signal and the amp signal. So why do this? Why not! OK, that was a silly statement but always remember that experimenting is important to find different sounds.          The typical reason for recording the miked amp and direct signal in this era is to get a nice big clean sound for solos and melody lines. OK, consider this:....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com In the previous edition of this column, Part 27, we left off with, “Now unmute modules #7 and #9 to get a basic blend.” Note that if you hear major frequency cancellation when the signal levels are the same, an inverted phase problem is in play. Here we go with my standard rap – but note that this is slightly different than in past articles on the subject of the inverted phase fix, since we are dealing with a direct box in the ....

By: Jay Graydon -  http://www.jaygraydon.com If the direct box and mic sound are totally different, meaning the direct box signal is very dark sounding and the amp is very bright sounding, you may not notice a comb filtering effect in the upper frequencies because the two signals would produce waveforms that are not very similar. In any case, there would still be some comb filtering happening in the upper frequencies, so it’s always best to fix it. In other comb filtering fixes usi....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com In the last article, we covered the comb filtering fix before recording the direct box and guitar amp. OK, we could delay the direct box path as in the last article but even better would be to put it in the future to keep the performance feel in tact. If you’re using a hard disk recorder format, or any digital recorder format that allows timing offsets, we can deal with the comb filtering after recording. Here we go. The Comb Filtering F....

By Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com In this era, amp modeling is a way to get many amp sounds in one box. Amp modeling is a process in which the manufacturer dissects guitar amps, analyzing (and then modeling) waveforms from the beginning of the input chain and through all stages of amplification. It’s a long story but the concept is very good, especially if you need to quickly dial up a great or specific amp sound. OK, in most cases, a great sounding guitar amp “mike....

By: Jay Graydon – http://www.jaygraydon.com This article will not use any analog routing — just digital routing. As mentioned in the previous article, before we get into routing, etc., I’ve got to say a word on using/chaining digital gear. Let’s say you are using a digital effect in front or after the amp modeler. Digital gear causes a delay. If routing analog, add approximately another 2 milliseconds of delay. Add another digital unit in the path and you’ll have ....