Today we recorded our guitar tracks. We had a lot to get through. To record our guitar we used a Vox modelling amplifier, which has a smaller speaker, giving it more of a sort of intense sound. It was set to “UK Metal” distortion with no bass, some treble and middle, and a high gain.

Shure SM57s

My job (along with Sam) this week was to set up the microphones to record the guitar. Sam and I set up two Shure SM57s to capture the full sound of the amplifier. We put one in the middle of the amplifier, and one toward the edge of the speaker inside the amplifier. Both microphones were very close to the grate of the amplifier. We also set up an sE2200a II (a large diaphragm condenser microphone) to use as a room microphone, and set the polar pattern to omni-directional.

After setting the microphones up, we got our guitarist (Danny) to play along to the track in order to roughly place the guitars at the correct level in the mix. One thing that I noticed immediately was that the guitar sound had a lot of bass to it which I didn’t like, and in order to rectify this I will probably put a High Pass Filter on the guitars to get rid of at least a bit of the bass.

On the desk we used EQ to cut out any low frequencies below 50Hz. We then recorded our first guitar part which went well enough with only a few minor mistakes. Because the rhythm guitar is so repetitive, it is possible to copy a part from another section of the song and paste it into the part which was played wrong. We then panned the part that we had recorded hard-left, and set up a new track for the double-tracked guitar that we were going to record next. We panned this to the right and then recorded it. Finally we recorded a separate guitar part which comes in and out throughout the song, and placed it in the middle of the mix. In order to be able to differentiate between the rhythm guitar and overdubbed guitar, I will probably EQ the overdubbed guitar quite a bit, otherwise it just sounds like one big mess.