Micing Guitar Amps?

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Young Squire

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Does anyone have any advice for micing amps? I have some SM57s and a couple of low end condenser mics. I am mostly looking for a good method for micing distortion. Which mic? How loud? One mic? Two? Front? Back? Any advice?
 
Avoid multi-mic techniques until you get a feel for how to place a single.

57s (or any other cardioid dynamic) are picky SOB's. You can get a great tone or you can get garbage, and the difference may only be a few MM.

Experiment, experiment, experiment!

My go-to placement for CD mics on my sealed cabs for heavy rythym tones is the edge of the cone. I work from there to find what I want, but I usually don't have to go too far.

Cardioid condensors are a whole 'nother animal. To my ears they sound better for solo work when placed at a greater distance. The mics vary so much it's hard to give a base placement, but generally you'll want to be a bit farther back with a condensor. This is especially important with large diaphram mics as placing one close to a sealed cabinet at high volume could damage the mic.

Then we have omnis. IMHO they sound better than any equivalent cardioid at close range, but they pick up everything. Sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes not. Depends a lot on your room. Gobos can help with mid/high early relfections.

Once you get a feel for how the different mics react then you can move on to using things that are normally considered "bad" (like proximity effect, comb filtering, and phase cancellation) as advantages. This is where the multi-mic technique comes in.

You have to know what these things sound like before you can conjure 'em up at will.

Again experimentation is the key, but you need to understand what's causing the difference between what your ears hear in front of the amp, and what's coming through the monitors.
 
M.Brane said:
Again experimentation is the key, but you need to understand what's causing the difference between what your ears hear in front of the amp, and what's coming through the monitors.

Do you use isolation headphones in experimenting placement, or record and playback?
 
I've said it before ..and now again...Sennheiser e609 is what i use... It's $99 and it works like a charm :)
 
Thorguitarist said:
I've said it before ..and now again...Sennheiser e609 is what i use... It's $99 and it works like a charm :)
good call...
 
mic

the 609 is great, i have two of them. but if you allready have a 57, just throw it on the cone, off center, tilted towards how the cone is shaped.
 
Assuming the player/guitar/amp sounds good in the room -- pick a nice-sounding cone... throw up a 57..... run it through a good pre (my personal faves either a Great River or a Phoenix)...... boom, you're done........
 
who makes those pre-amps. I had the Bellari single tube preamp and it got in the way and collected dust. I barely used it and when i did i would have to have the gain at almost 0 and the volume at maybe 40% plus my bass player already goes into our BR-532 (4-track digital recorder) XLR in froma direct box so i would have to go into the mixer and do a double gain which i heard is bad
 
If your live sound is good then it's pretty easy to capture it with a single mic. I use an SM58 pointing somewhere near the centre of the speaker cone and then add and extreme amount of 40-80hz boost on the mixer for that added "air". Sometimes I use the normal amp reverb with a short stereo delay on the desk, other times record it dry and add stereo reverb.
I used to spend ages trying artificially alter the sound with shit loads of eq until I realised the problem was the sound coming out of the amp!
 
shockingcandy said:
If your live sound is good then it's pretty easy to capture it with a single mic. I use an SM58 pointing somewhere near the centre of the speaker cone and then add and extreme amount of 40-80hz boost on the mixer for that added "air".
Since when is adding a shitload of low-end "adding air"???????
 
I was wondering the same thing. And assuming you know you aren't going to get "air" by boosting the lows, why would you want to boost 40-80HZ on a guitar?
 
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