Line out Vs. Miking the amp

What do you use to record Guitars and Bass?

  • Line Out

    Votes: 7 15.9%

  • Microphone

    Votes: 37 84.1%
  • Total voters
    44
xcrunner28

xcrunner28

New member
Just a quick poll but for recording guitar and bass how many people take the line out from the amp and how many people actually mic the amp. There's no question that miking sounds a lot better but line out offers much more convenience especially when recording multiple instruments at once.
 
There's lots of convenience in line out, but IMO the better tone comes from microphone. That said, I usually use a microphone BUT if the family is sleeping I will use line out. Clean channel with or without an OverDrive pedal.
 
The only problem I have with miking is that I like to record a whole band at once so that everyone plays better is there anyway I can isolate the drum mics from the guitar mics
 
xcrunner28 said:
The only problem I have with miking is that I like to record a whole band at once so that everyone plays better is there anyway I can isolate the drum mics from the guitar mics
Click to expand...

You could use something like cushions from a couch to help isolate the mic. I wouldn't expect or even want total isolation, I'd welcome a bit of bleed from the drums, a lot of times that stuff makes the overall sound better.

To me the sound of electric guitar is a guitar playing through a tube amp with a speaker and no horn. Every time I've ever gone line it it was horrible.
 
In this case Reamp.

During tracking, isolate the kit from the guitars the best you can, take guitar DI's and then reamp.
 
The Di is to sterile.
The bassist and guitarist have worked countless hours to achieve their tone and that is a combination between the guitar and amplifier (and of course any pedals).
What ultimately comes out of the speaker is what a musician wants to hear in the recording not the tone right after the guitar or bass using a Di box.






:cool:
 
I do both and add a clean DI as well. Most times I record 4-5 guitar tracks simultaneously - mic'ed amp, DI wet signal, DI dry signal, and some sub outs from different parts of my chain.

This gives me a lot to work with when I'm mixing. The clean DI is very useful for editing to see transients and also, I can use it to reamp if necesary. Mixing and blending all the other tracks (or deleting if they are not useful) gives me tons of options.
 
Washburn100 said:
I do both and add a clean DI as well. Most times I record 4-5 guitar tracks simultaneously - mic'ed amp, DI wet signal, DI dry signal, and some sub outs from different parts of my chain.

This gives me a lot to work with when I'm mixing. The clean DI is very useful for editing to see transients and also, I can use it to reamp if necesary. Mixing and blending all the other tracks (or deleting if they are not useful) gives me tons of options.
Click to expand...

Yeah, "both" was missing from the vote or I would've gone with that. For years I've had to DI guitars simply because of the noise factor but I've recently taken steps to deal with that. I will sometimes DI the bass (I used to do it all the time) but I don't use a DI box, I just go straight in off the amp or plug straight into the recorder. But I've been experimenting recently with a variation of what Washburn 100 does - I mic the bass amp, go line out from it and plug straight into the recorder and record three tracks. Then I play "1966 London studio recording engineer maverick" type !
 
every session is different

as rough rule I tend to DI bass and mic the amp

While it is not strictly unusual for me to DI guitar, I find I do that a lot less then bass (for example)

and interestingly enough seldom to never DI (or line out straight to recorder) keyboards, which theoretically should be the simplest

but my take on reading this was a bit different then to say . . . well gtrst tone is so tied up in amp, etc. (after the myriad social issues surrounding drummers and drum 'sound' one of my most difficult problems has to do with guitarists (electric/amplified) having any (or little or no) idea of what 'tone' might work best in an arrangement & recording (and my avocation has been guitar for more then 30 yr.) . . . if I weren't willing to modify a 'tone' to the room & arrangement WTF am I doing running a session . . . that said reason it's a problem as that anything (& everything) has to be approached delicately . . .

but my [first] question was/is if you have already decided that the session 'works' better with individual performers in same room @ same time why do you think you need to isolate the individual tracks? answering that, for ones self gets you closer to resolving DI vs. mic'ng the fckng valve amp miscellany issues
 
moresound said:
The Di is to sterile.
The bassist and guitarist have worked countless hours to achieve their tone and that is a combination between the guitar and amplifier (and of course any pedals).
What ultimately comes out of the speaker is what a musician wants to hear in the recording not the tone right after the guitar or bass using a Di box.
Click to expand...

Well put.


When you're playing an electronic instrument, you're playing a speaker. Taking what a musician has worked on for ages and shit canning it when he comes in the studio has always struck me as wrong. That's part of why I am on this "no more headphones" path as of late. People need to get back to thinking of a guitar and amp as one acoustic instrument.
 
dintymoore said:
Well put.


When you're playing an electronic instrument, you're playing a speaker. Taking what a musician has worked on for ages and shit canning it when he comes in the studio has always struck me as wrong. That's part of why I am on this "no more headphones" path as of late. People need to get back to thinking of a guitar and amp as one acoustic instrument.
Click to expand...

That's the problem I've been having actually, I've been focusing on just getting the job done quickly and efficiently without taking the time to do little things like miking amps, and it causes the quality of my recordings to suffer.
 
When I am recording a band live I use line out just to get the drum tracks down , then I redo the guitar and bass with mics then delete the Line in tracks .....
 
xcrunner28 said:
The only problem I have with miking is that I like to record a whole band at once so that everyone plays better is there anyway I can isolate the drum mics from the guitar mics
Click to expand...

I've been recording in a live studio setting for about six months now in a pretty acoustically bad room. I've figured out some tricks to get only(or mostly only) the sound in a specific mic that I want.

First thing is to make sure the amps are pointing away from any other mic you don't want them in. That goes for anything producing a sound your trying to record.

Second is when miking the drums I make sure my overheads are as close to the cymbals as possible. This causes some problems like the overheads not picking up as much of the rest of the drumset as I would like so I've had to individually mic all the drums. However, with the overheads close to the cymbals you can turn their levels down so they don't pick up the ambience caused by the rest of the band.

I've been recording a very small drum set (4 piece with hihat, ride, crash) so it hasn't been much of a hassle to do this. With bigger drumsets where you can't mic all the drums try moving the drumset further away from the rest of the band.

hope this helps
 
Well, I have a small recording set-up with a little Behringer practice amp I use for either my Squier Tele or Squier 70's Jazz bass. I've not miked it yet so I'll have to try that but the amp has "Line out" RCA jacks. Last night, I recorded using those jacks routed directly into my Fostex, playing my Tele with a Digitech RP50 effects box. The sound quality on playback has a very "live" quality to it, one which I'm quite pleased with. I'll probably stick with this "line out" method since I have two small yappy dogs in the house which makes miking a bit of a challenge sometimes.
 
xcrunner28 said:
That's the problem I've been having actually, I've been focusing on just getting the job done quickly and efficiently without taking the time to do little things like miking amps, and it causes the quality of my recordings to suffer.
Click to expand...

...so, stating the obvious here, if you take a bit more time on getting the raw sounds right and working with mic positioning to get your guitar tones just right, maybe your recordings would be better for it?

Efficient is good. Quick is not.
 
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