Recording - April 2010 - 32

More wisdom on capturing great tone—in this month, we go to the start of the signal chain: the microphone. By Brian Tarquin WITH THE RIGHT MIC G U I TA R T O N E Every guitarist wants to record his sound exactly as he Stanley Clarke: “I used my Alembic basses and F2 preamps, hears it from the amp in the room. This means that the micro- recording them through two SWR amps and cabinets. One phones, as the true translators of guitar tones to recording, cabinet had 2 x 15" speakers and the other cabinet housed 4 should be as accurate as possible. x 10" speakers. I then miked each cabinet separately, taking But what’s accurate to you may not seem a direct signal out of the amps themselves. This gave me the accurate to me. Recording, just like music, flexibility to blend during mixdown.” is more art than science, so there are thouSome favorite microphones sands of interpretations of why certain mics are better than others. AKG D112/Electro-Voice RE20: The I always like speaking to guitarists about Stanley Clarke technique of recording how they get their tone and capture it on a direct and miked signals is a great recipe recording. Some are real basic—place a for a huge bass sound in the mix. I use this Shure SM57 in front of an amp, turn it to method in many bass recordings, using the eleven, and hit Record; others painstakingly Radial J48 Direct Box as a buffer to split the take hours to figure out the mechanics of signal. I plug the amp into the Radial’s Thru where the sound projects best for mic placejack, and plug the bass into the input. I then ment. Larry Carlton once told me that he used take the XLR signal directly to one track, to drive himself nuts by measuring the mic and print the miked signal. placement to the amp speaker, taking hours I use the D112 or the RE20 to mike the to move the mic around until he got the right bass cabinet near the bottom of the speaksound. He followed up by saying he now er, below the cone. This gives me the flexileaves that up to the engineer, sits back and bility to blend the direct signal a little lower plays, obviously with wonderful results. during mixdown, which I find adds full Andy Timmons Below are some tips and tricks to help you body to the bass sound. This is a method I get your tone recorded, and hopefully not used on producing the new Randy Coven drive yourself crazy trying numerous options. album featuring Leslie West. For solo bass Let’s see how some of our guitar (and bass!) tracks it adds a wonderful depth of sound heroes tackle miking and mic techniques. to the bass and gives the engineer flexibilAndy Timmons: “Although many producity when mixing. You can also do a nice ers and engineers develop unique miking stereo pan with the two signals, enabling applications involving a plethora of microyou to eq and effect the signals differently. phones, it’s not always the expensive tube beyerdynamic M 160: The M 160 has to condensers or arcane microphone placebe one of my favorite guitar mics—a very ment that captures the heaviest guitar sounds. simple design, but extremely effective for I used Shure SM57s for recording the guitar; recording guitars. I’ve used it to record all we tried all kinds of different mics and miking types of guitar amps, open backs, closed techniques, but we always came back to the backs, 1 x 12" combos to Marshall halftried-and-true SM57. Once the basic guitar stacks, and the result is always the same— tone was agreed upon, we simply moved the fantastic! During the Leslie West session, I mics until we discovered the position that proused it to close-mike a Legacy cabinet, placduced the perfect sound for whatever we ing the mic halfway between the cone and were going for on a particular track.” the outer edge of the speaker. Leslie West: “I used my custom Dean The mic sounds very clean sounding, with guitar through a Marshall JCM 800 with a a nice punch to the upper mid frequencies. Robert Kelley modified Ibanez Tube Because it is a ribbon mic, it really captures Screamer. We near-miked the cabinet with a Beyer M160, the nuances of the guitar and amp. It’s hard to believe, as the and five feet back we miked it using a Neumann TLM 149. I company states, that its manufacturing process for the M 160 has want to feel the bottom boom of the cabinet, so we left the iso remained fundamentally unchanged since introducing the model booth door open where the cabinet was and let it ring in 1957. Ironically it was originally developed as an alternative through the control room.” to the then-expensive condenser microphone. Nowadays, itRECORDING APRIL 2010

Recording - April 2010

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