In this post I want to go into some of the details around how I recorded guitars on the EP. I was really bad about taking notes of exactly what I was doing each time I recorded a track, but since it didn’t really change much from song to song, I have a decent idea of what all was done.

Throughout these detail posts I’m going to mention the different pieces of gear I used, but try not to get hung up on that. I don’t want this to be any sort of “gear porn” post or site. I want to focus more on the overall process and not the features of a specific pedal or whatever. I feel like I wasted so much time when I was hung up on pedals or very specific pieces of gear that I spent more time “chasing tone” than I did on actually being creative.

Guitars & amp:

  • Nash T-52
  • Paul Reed Smith SC245
  • Larrivee D-03 acoustic (used on Protest Songs)
  • Vox AC30 (mostly used the top boost channel)

For the most part, the Nash was my main guitar and I ran it through a Z-Vex Super Duper for a slight boost at times and then into a Fuzzrocious Afterlife if I wanted a little reverb. The PRS was used for “2nd guitar” tracks. I didn’t really use any boost or overdrive with it since it usually sounded dirty enough going straight into the AC30, which I tend to run fairly hot. A Walrus Audio Janus was used on a couple arpreggio-type parts to add a little vibe and have it cut through a bit more (I did that on Prey and Be Here Now). A Walrus Fathom was used on The Approach along with a Sunset Effects “Overdrive for Orlando” when the song gets “bigger” toward the end. For the ambient, background guitar track in The Approach, I did that at mix time using a Bowie Delay (I think it was made by MainAceFx) as a piece of outboard gear and then sending that signal to a new track. Doing it that way let me adjust the delay controls in realtime as the song played to give a more lively feel.

Microphones:
With the exception of the main guitar (left channel) on Be Here Now, the electric guitars were recorded with a MicParts.com modded Cascade FatHead ribbon mic about 10” from the amp, pointed at the center of the speaker cone, and a Blue Baby Bottle as a room mic. I positioned the Baby Bottle about 6 feet away from the amp, ~5.5 feet high, angled slightly down at the amp. I was trying to have the Baby Bottle pick up the sound as it was traveling to my ears since I liked what I heard and wanted to capture that. The main guitar on Be Here Now is an older recording that I kept and was done with a SM57 and Little Blondie mic on the amp (pretty close to the speakers) along with the Baby Bottle in the room. I don’t particularly care for how the SM57 and blondie mics sound on my guitar, but it fit the song well enough… and I didn’t want to record it again. :) The Little Blondie mics (which I also use for drum overheads) sound a bit harsh to me on electric guitar. Which isn’t bad, but didn’t really suit what I wanted to hear. It wasn’t until I got the ribbon mic that I felt like I was able to capture in a recording what I thought my amp sounded like in my room.

Recording:
All of the electric guitar tracks you hear on the EP are comprised of 1 to 3 complete takes. I would record entire guitar part over and over until I had 2 or 3 solid, good takes recorded back to back. Then I’d delete all the other takes and listen through to the few I thought were keepers. One of those would usually make up 90% of what you hear. Sometimes I’d hear things in one of the other takes that I thought was interesting or maybe I did something slightly different on take 1 that wasn’t on take 2 (for example), so I’d use that as part of the overall comp track. Deleting the tracks I didn’t think I’d use was a small, but important part of the process. It kept me from being tempted to sort through them all in an effort to find the “perfect” part. Sometimes “good enough” is perfect if it conveys the idea you’re trying to get across.

The guitars were recorded through my Apollo 8p straight into Logic. I just used the stock preamps in the Apollo with no preamp plugin. On days that I was able to really crank my amp, I used a very light amount of compression on the Baby Bottle to keep things tame, but other than that I used no processing on the way in. Here’s a screenshot of the guitar channels in Logic for Be Here Now. On some of the guitar takes I would turn on my drum overheads (seen as “oh” in the screenshot). I don’t believe I ended up using any of those, but the thought was to try to simulate the bleed that would happen if you were recording guitar and drums in the same room at the same time. I plan to revisit that technique again, but for the EP, I left it out to keep things simple.

For Protest Songs, which is an acoustic song, my setup was oddly more complicated than the others. I have no clue why I did it this way, but it was an idea I had and went with it. I used 4 microphones:

  • Blue Baby Bottle out in front of my acoustic at sound hole level, pointed somewhere between the sound hole and fret board.
  • Shure SM7B at about head height pointed in the general direction of my mouth
  • Little Blondie stereo pair left in place as drum overheads

I turned those mics on and played the song. The Blondie mics are in stereo and turned down lower than the other two. They’re also sent through a bus to a UAD reverb plugin to exaggerate the room a bit more in a parallel track. The SM7B was used primarily to make sure the vocals cut through enough and the Baby Bottle was just there to fill in some space. If you can listen closely, you can hear my snare drum rattling at times.

That’s really it for recording guitars. I’ll cover mixing in another post. You can hit me up at chris at overnighthikes.net or on Instagram if you have any questions!

Cheers