To record electric guitar I was worried that the amplifiers the university supplied wouldn’t give me the tone I wanted in the song as I’ve never been fond Marshall Amps distortion sounds since they released the MG series. Because of this I brought in my Boss ME-50 multi-effects guitar unit to get a wider array of sounds to play about with. The guitar I chose to record with is my DiPinto Galaxie which has 4 single coil pick ups. The amplifier is a Marshall Haze40 and below are the settings on both the amplifier and effects pedal.
Marshall Haz40 with SM57 microphone 5cm above speaker cone.
Boss ME-50 multi-effects unit
We found straight away that the SM57 choice was a good one as it sounded very similar in playback to what I heard live whilst playing. The DPA microphone placement was trickier however so we experimented with 3 different placements.
The first place we tried was on the reverse of the amp directed towards the middle. See below
first attempt using DPA and SM57
The SM57 sounded great but the DPA was mostly receiving room ambience and hiss due to its poor placement. So after a take we tried again. We then lowered the microphone pointing it more towards the floor expecting a clean sound from the sound absorption in the carpet, thus…
Second attempt, SM57 in same place
Third time lucky we tried pointing the DPA at the skirting board opposite the speakers of the amp, feeling the DPA could be used to capture sound reflection better.
Finally decided mic placement
To get the sound to come through to the ISA and then into ProTools, I patched 2 xlr cables from inputs 1 and 2 from Chill Room 1 to 1 and 2 into the ISA282-1 board. I then set up 2 new mono audio tracks and made sure the inputs in the mixer window were A1 and A2. To get headphone signal I patched from HeadLite output ch1 to Chill Room ch3 and set up an aux channel. The default input for the headphones in the ISA282 units is B8 so I then changed the input in the aux track in ProTools to it.
I recorded various takes with different amp and pedal settings so I could choose which takes to use afterward in the studio room. I ended up improvising a lot of parts which worked well separately so in the mix I lowered the volume using automation to drop out parts which didn’t.
Here’s a selection of the takes I ended up using.
and here’s the second take using the same mic placement.
and finally the third recording, replete with fuzz.
and there you have it.
