Mic for electric guitar cabinet/room

[Zamdrang]

Hi all, I started recording my Bogner Uberschall and Uberkab with a Zoom H4n, and a SM57. I put the 57 on the grill cloth in front of one of speaker cones and blended it with capsule mics about 6ft back on a tripod, lines the sound I was getting. So I got hooked and upgraded to a Motu M4 and currently
learning Reaper. I have the 57 into the M4 and briefly tried the headphone out of the H4 into the line in of the M4 with a splitter cable to try and capture the internal mics, I didn't have high hopes and it doesn't great, level is very low and the blend is nowhere near what it sounded like with just the H4N, not even close, it's distant hollow, thin, and if you crank the headphone volume it's noisy and overall it just doesn't sound right.... I'm guessing because the headphone out is not a real line out... so I've abandoned that idea. But I miss the sound of the two mics blended. What kind of mics, brand, specs etc should I be looking for to get near what I was getting with the H4n capsule mics? Not looking to duplicate the stereo pair, mono even sounded decent. Appreciate any thoughts, no idea where to start. Budget would be a $200 or so.

 

[rob aylestone]

I suspect it's not the mics, just the slight delay from the close to a bit distant, and the Zoom mics are really bog standard small diaphragm electrets - so almost any will be an EQ tweak from the Zoom. You've just added a bit of room sound, a tiny bit of delay and captured clarity with the condenser and the 'body' with the 57. If you have any condensers available try them - or maybe borrow one. Not necessarily and expensive one to start with to make sure you can capture what you want.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I have the 57 into the M4 and briefly tried the headphone out of the H4 into the line in of the M4 with a splitter cable to try and capture the internal mics, I didn't have high hopes and it doesn't great, level is very low and the blend is nowhere near what it sounded like with just the H4N, not even close, it's distant hollow, thin, and if you crank the headphone volume it's noisy and overall it just doesn't sound right....

I think Rob has the right of it, this sounds like a phasing issue more than it does a mic quality one.

Try the SM57 alone - do you get less of that "distant, hollow, thin" sound?

My personal thoughts here are while using two mics in conjunction CAN offer upside, if you cant get at least a "pretty good" tone out of a single SM57 positioned well, there's something else wrong in your signal chain that's going to cause bigger problems that a second mic won't help.

 

[TalismanRich]

I don't know if the line out of the H4n would be the way I would go.

Here's a thought. Record your H4n to the SD card, the SM57 to the Motu, and then dump the H4n audio into Reaper. I would make a clap or something to make sure you can line things up. Can you now get the same sound as you got before? It shouldn't sound the same if you line them up exactly.

Remember, if your Zoom is 6ft away, you need just under 6mS of delay to reproduce that distance. At 68F, when sound travels 1 meter, it takes about 2.9 milliseconds.

A lot of people like to combine a ribbon as a second mic.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I don't know if the line out of the H4n would be the way I would go.

Here's a thought. Record your H4n to the SD card, the SM57 to the Motu, and then dump the H4n audio into Reaper. I would make a clap or something to make sure you can line things up. Can you now get the same sound as you got before? It shouldn't sound the same if you line them up exactly.

Remember, if your Zoom is 6ft away, you need just under 6mS of delay to reproduce that distance. At 68F, when sound travels 1 meter, it takes about 2.9 milliseconds.

A lot of people like to combine a ribbon as a second mic.

It also may be easiest to line this up by hand, rather than trying to do it programatically with a few milliseconds of delay - take whatever your more distant mic track is, zoom WAY in on a transient on that and on the close mic, turn off any form of "snap to grid," and carefully slide the second file to algin with the first until the transients match perfectly.

IMO this ismore trouble than its worth and you're better off just spending more time on mic positioning up front to make sure they're phase coherent (it really helps to flip phase on your second mic, move it around to make it sound as BAD as possible, and flip phase again when you're done at which point they should sound good together). But, before you go down that rabbit hole, I'd spend more time with the SM57 because especially in a full mix, if a single 57 isn't cutting it at at least a "this sounds pretty good" level, no amount of multi-mic magic is going to get you a good tone by adding a second mic to that first.