Recording Guitars....., Tips and Tricks......and a Question Options

[slowintrepid]

Hows it going, I had a couple questions about recording guitars on my Mac. Basically my I obviously wanna get the best sound I can from my setup so here it is:

1 Bright Sounding Acoustic Gutiar w/ built in fishman pre amp
2.Epiphone SG electric guitar
3. Marshall MG-80 solid state guitar amp

ok so I have my electric going into my amp then the line out of my am into the built in sound card of my PowerMac G5 and it doesn't sound very good.

However I have my acoustic guitar going straight into my computer via the built in pre amp and that sounds just like I was playing it live.

so 1. I wanna know how can I get out the clangy jangley sound from my acoustic (new strings lower gauge) and how can I get my electric to sound better and should I use amp distortion (mines so so) or should I use something like Amplitube

also I feel that this is a fairly elusive subject for s

[rickenbacker]

So… are you happy with the acoustic sound or not? I can't tell. You say it sounds just like you were playing it live. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

As for the electric, the best way to record a guitar amp is to stick a decent mic in front of it. Get the best sound you can out of it, then close mic it with something like a Shure Beta57a, roughly an inch away from the speaker, usually just at the edge of the speaker radius (ie not pointing right at the centre). If you've got a nice condenser mic, back that off a couple of feet so you don't blow it.

Steve Albini's trick for finding an electric amp's sweet spot is to turn the amp up full (with nothing plugged in, of course), arm a track for recording on your multitrack, put headphones on, then move the mic around in front of the speaker until you hear the strongest signal (hiss). That's probably a good place to point your mic to get the best signal to noise ratio.

Other points to consider: the built-in sound card of your Mac isn't the greatest quality in the world and going in direct from the amp won't give you a natural recorded sound. Also, no offence meant here, but does your Marshall amp have a great sound? If you're happy with that, you should be able to capture it. If you're unhappy with its sound, that's a problem you can't resolve with software.

As for Amplitube, personally I don't like the whole "amp sim" thing. If you can get a decent sound out of a real-life amp and mic it up well, it'll sound better and more real than any simulation/emulation.