editing tips for guitar?

[Thrench]

I mainly recrord a three piece band, drums guitar and bass. the drums and bass are not that hard to getting to sound good, easly adjusting eq 4 and a compresser works fine....but when i get to the guitar i just cant get it to sound that good

any editing devices or eq freq's that can give me that good rich guitar sound? i thought of maybe layering the guitar too just going over it twice three times to get it thicker..

maybe some guitar amp micing techniques too? Thanks alot

[spiderprod]

when i record guitar i use 3/4 mics per parts ,
one in front of the amp ,one behind for the depht & one room mic wich i usualy set up at ear level & 1 meter from the oposite wall ,you can add a directionnal mic facing a wall to pick up the reverb.
double tracking all your takes make it sound much better if you pan both takes .
i usualy end up with 6/8 audio track per intru parts .
it's a bit heavy for simple recording but if you want a good sound you have to use those techniques .
an other technique is to use a different amp for each take , this is the technique used on smell like teen spirit , if you listen carefully you can distinguish the amps on the track .

for acoustic guitar a simple 2/3 mic technique touble tracked does the job .

[quandry]

depends on the sound you want. Surely others will disagree, but recording the guitar direct and using effects or things like amplitude can be a decent way of circumventing all the cost and issues of trying to mic a guitar amp live in the same room as the drums and bass. Without proper isolation using multilple rooms or at least baffles, a soundcard with lots of tracks, a computer to handle lots of tracks at once, the mics and stands, etc., it can be hard to get what you are after, and avoiding drum sounds in your guitar mic and guitar sounds in your drum mics can be difficult. I record my bands with guitar and bass going direct, all of us monitoring on headphones with personal mixes so that everyone hears what they want, and mics recording only the drums and percussion, no bleading of instruments into the mics. Bass is pretty commonly recorded just direct, many great albums by awesome producers are done this way. Guitar is a bit less common as guitarists are often picky about their tone. One other option that is common these days is to record the guitar direct with no effects, then send the signal back out ("re-amp") to an amp and record the amp with mics. This allows you to experiment more and avoid bleed, but still use amps.

Ryan

[shapshankly]

biggest tip when recording guitar (this is going to annoy a load of people) is to make sure you only put in as much effort as the quality of instrument.

I am forever having to mic up crap guitars that will never sound good. remember, better micing will only show up more faults with the guitar.

other than that, i would go along with the above tips (remember to watch for phasing issues when micing the back of an amp though).

when recording an acoustic guitar. get the guitarist to play while you move your head around the instrument with your ear facing it. you'll hear all the differences in the sound that you would get when micing up, and you'll hear the best place to put the mics to get the best sound from the instrument.

[cottonrich]

the bottom line here is: it ain't the 1960s!!! line 6 all the way dude. i've used my podxt for countless gigs and recordings and it sounds awesome every time. a vintage guitar and amp and even a great engineer won't disguise a mediocre guitarist with a lacklustre style. if you're so purist, why even use computers?

[mikemc]

Use a cardiod condenser, do not aim it at the center of the cone, aim it between 1/4 and 1/3 in to the center from the edge, less than a foot but not less then 3". You will likely need to pad the mic, and use a low freq rolloff to avoid picking up rumble. Use a little bit of gate to get rid of hiss.

When you are going direct in with guitar, it will sound thin, so play through the monitors as if they were your amp, this sets up the sympathetic vibrations in the guitar that give it the "live" sound. Set up your VST effects the way you might usually set up pedals. Then mic the room to pick up some of what's coming through your monitors, *carefully* controlling the amount of that signal sent back out to the monitors (set the track to sends only, the send is going to master our and run just a little tiny bit to the send/return which is going out to the monitors to avoid big feedback). A stereo pair can be good for picking up that sort of ambience.

Direct in for bass gives good results, doing the same as above but forgoing the ambience micing and compressor is generally thought of as being mandatory.

Your pots need to be clean whenever recording elec guitar/bass, but especially so when going direct.