How to record an electric guitar amp - Part 3 (Feat. Bob Clearmountain)

In the third part of our series on recording electric guitar, engineer Bob Clearmountain shows the mic technique he used in the 80's to record artists such as Bryan Adams, Simple Minds and The Pretenders. Using two SM57's, Bob points one mic towards the speaker in the amp cabinet and the other facing the opposite direction in order to capture a very short delay, resulting in a unique comb filtering effect.

See photos and hear the finished track: http://www.apogeedigital.com/blog/rec...
Learn more about Apogee Duet: http://www.apogeedigital.com/products...



Now I want to talk about a little trick I used to do back in the 80’s; and just because it was in the 80’s doesn’t meant that it’s bad, we actually did some pretty cool things back then.

This is using two microphones. The first microphone is an SM57, just like the way I was talking about before, slightly off-axis in front of the amp.

Now the second microphone is also an SM57, could be any other mic that you want, but I’ve always done it with an SM57. Now it’s pointing the opposite direction of the amp and there is this hard surface, we use these little uh, they’re actually speaker stands, to create almost like a little chamber here, and what happens is the sound bounces off of this hard surface over there, that could be a gobo, could be a door, it could be a wall, it could be any kind of a hard surface and the sound bounces off it and into that microphone and it’s not a reverb or a delay or an ambiance of any kind, it really creates a comb filter effect, and it works mainly on distorted guitars it wouldn’t sound very good on a clean guitar, probably, I’ve never used it on a clean guitar but on a heavy distorted we used to use for Bryan Adams quite a bit back in the 80’s and I think Simple Minds and The Pretenders some of the things that I did back then you can get this gnarlier kind of a sound it’s like a very short delay like a few milliseconds but it’s not only a short delay, it adds the character of whatever the wood is that you’re using to bounce off the microphone.

You can alter the sound quite a bit by moving this microphone back and forth, it’s there’s no set distance you can try different sizes I mean this is about what we used to use was a little longer than this actually about eight or ten feet, something like that, and it’s amazing the variety of sounds that you can get just by doing this and you can get a more of an aggressive sound than just one microphone or even two microphones in the front it’s quite interesting it’s something you may want to try.


========================================================
Apogee Electronics:
Official Site: http://www.apogeedigital.com
Facebook:   / apogee.electronics  
Twitter:   / apogeedigital  
Instagram:   / apogeedigital