The David Samuel Project

Here are a few tips or tricks when recording guitar tracks at home.  

The living room – Isolation booths can be very expensive especially the portable ones.  So try floating your guitar amp by setting it on your couch to help reduce the noise transmitted through the floor.  Turn your living room table on its side placing it in front of the amp and try some different diffusion techniques.  For example try draping different blankets or comforters over the table to create a booth.  For a more in your face sound create a dead room effect by placing a foam pad around the amp.  I bought one at G.I. Joes for $12.00 in their camping section.  It was nearly the same one Auralex sold for $40.00.

Bathroom – Hopefully you have the bathtub shower combo for this session.  Place your amp facing towards the shower while using a standard 57 to close mic.  Have a large diaphragm mic to record the ambiance of the bathroom.  Placing this mic in the bathtub you can use the multi polar pattern option to shape your reverb variations.  You will get various results in your recording by having the shower curtain pulled half way, quarter way or by adjusting the bathroom doors being closed or shut.  Try putting a cheap radio shack mic in the toilet just for fun.  Put a plastic bag with a rubber band around it and do not let it go in the water!

The closet - We all know that a Marshall Plexi Head sounds best at 11 while playing live.  However when we are in the recording process we don’t always have the luxury of turning up to 11.  Most likely a man in a blue suit will be showing up at our door.  And I am not talking about our beloved Jehovah witness friends.  You can get huge guitar tracks from a 15 watt tube amp shoved in a closet full of winter jackets and sweaters.  You will be surprised at the results.  You may be surprised at some big name guitar records that were recorded this way?

The ugly duckling - Do you have a no name ugly looking guitar that you picked up at a pawn shop or garage sale?  Tune that bad boy up and double and triple track that guitar part.  You may just get a big interesting guitar sound.  If it works use it.  We are called recording artist.  We create new and exciting sounds!

The long hall way – I had the pleasure of living in a downtown loft for 3 ½ years.  It was built in the early 1900’s and rumor has it that it was a brothel back in the day.  There was an 80 foot hall way in there and it was fun.  Put a close mic in front of your amp and a large diaphragm 5ft, 10ft, 20ft, 80 as far as you can go.  Of course you will be time shifting the track to align it but the results are very cool.

Now that we mentioned a few odd and different ways for recording guitar let us have a few practical pointers as well.  

1.    The more overdrive and distortion you use, the thinner the guitar tone will be.  Too much saturation will rob you of your guitar tone.  The guitar sounds bigger and meaner when it is cleaner with slight overdrive.  This is why tube distortion is what we covet as a guitarist.  Allow the amp and guitar to give tone, and push the speakers to break slightly.  This is the secret to big guitar tones. Use the distortion pedal to give a little extra boost for your solo or to sprout wings on that note that needs to sustain for ever.

2.    Remember guitars don’t have to be loud to sound good in the studio.

3.    Add your delay to the recording during the mix down.  You can dial in the desired effect to match your recording at the end of the tracking.  With todays plug ins you can have sweet sounding delay and have it tweaked into perfect timing with the entire mix.

4.    The last goes without saying, you really need to make sure your guitars intonation is set up properly so that it is in tune no matter where you play on the neck.  

5.    Less is more.  If all else fails stick a 57 off axis and call it good!

You can listen to all my recordings on my album at www.thedavidsamuelproject.com to reference my guitar tone.  Thanks for your time and hope you have as much fun as I do recording guitar tracks.