My god someone please help me, what on earth am I missing, why can't I get my guitars to sound like they do on a proper record, and not like boxy fizzy nothingness? I've been trying to do this for about 5 years now, and I've got nowhere.
I've been through it all, high watt amps, low watt amps, different mic positioning, different mics, pairing two mics, different cables, pedal distortion, amp distortion, recording at stupidly low gain, knocking the amp down and mic preamp up and vice versa, different guitars, different pickups, they all seem to give me a different shade of rubbish. I always have to do intense EQing in the mixing process to get rid of what sounds like pink noise in my guitar signal that seems to make the recording sound so distant and awful, and WHATEVER I do it always seems to be there. The only thing I can imagine that could make it sound better is a nice tube analog preamp? I'm currently recording with a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 with SM57 and E906....
Any help would be appreciated, Thankyou.
Is there any way you can post a clip of 1) a mix with your guitars, and 2) a solo'd single guitar track from that mix?
Couple quick thoughts...
1) are you auditioning a guitar tone listening to the amp in the room, in normal playing position? If you are, try listening to your amp from right in front of the speaker, in more or less the same position as the mic will be placed. I dialed in my amp WAY too bright before I thought to start doing this, and because of that I always thought my tone was awesome, but the SM57 was a peice of crap because it always made my guitar sound edgy and fizzy. As it turns out, they were, I was just listening from a position I couldn't hear tha.
2) I think this is less true than it used to be, because you've heard it so much on the 'net for years now... But, in general, heavy guitar sounds have less gain, more midrange, and less bass than you expect, and oftentimes you can get a clearer, thicker guitar sound by turning down the gain and double-tracking.
3) the SM57 is very position sensitive, and your ear, left to its own devices, has a tendency to prefer "brighter" sounds to duller ones. This can lead you to select a brighter mic position than might be ideal while tracking. Try spending some time testing, with a bass and drum track, and recording a series of double tracked riffs, starting with the position you think is "right," but also recording one or two brighter positions and a couple progressively darker ones, as well, and take notes somewhere where the mic is positioned for each of them. Then, walk away for an hour, come back, and listen to the tracks you've recorded, and see if any of them sound clearly better than your usual approach. If so, you've got a better idea of where you want to place your mic.
4) I'm a believer in multi-mic setups for recording distorted guitar... But, for the time being, try using just the SM57. The first time I tried using two mics together, probably more than a decade ago, it sounded like crap. I stuck to one mic for years after that, and gradually got better at dialing in an amp sound, positioning a mic, etc, until I was getting pretty good results with a SM57 alone. Then, when I already had a good handle on how to position a SM57 to get a sound I'd like in a mix, and when I had a better understanding of phase issues and how to work with them, when I started adding a second mic to suppliment the first (and that's an important reason to really nail down how to get a good tone out of a SM57 - I'm using a MD421 as well, but the SM57 is still the core of my tone and the 421 is supporting it - this is fairly typical), it sounded
awesome.
So, tl;dr - make sure you're dialing your amp in for where your mic will "hear" it, make sure you're not over-saturating your guitar and scooping out all the mids, spend some time experimenting with mic position in a methodical manner, and for the time being don't worry about a second mic until you can get consistently good results out of a single mic.
Your Focusrite and mics should be good enough to give you great results - don't worry about fancy preamps until your guitar tone is 95-99% of the way there (and I say that as a guy who also likes fancy preamps).