My Metal Guitar Micing Technique

[paintballnsk]

I record with a Roadster a lot, and it's taken me a lot of time to get my "standard" technique for getting a good metal tone out of it. I also use this technique with a Mark IV, DC5, a Peavey 6505+, and a Diezel Herbert.
I have 4 different cabs with V30s, black shadows, and K100s, and this technique seems to work just fine with all of them. I use an SM57, but I've tried the e906, e609, and the nady rsm4. The SM57 will mix very well and is very easy to use.

With any mesa, I recommend a TS808 or similar overdrive pedal. This will tighten the amp a lot and remove some of the natural mesa darkness. If you're going for the saggy "big" sound, you can get away with skipping it.

Try these amp settings on your lead channel: bass 5, mid 4, treb 5-6.5, gain 6-8 (depending on your boost pedal if you're using one), presence 5 or 6, pre-amp volume 9:00. Adjust the volume so the master is ABOVE the pre-amp, and turn the amp up loud enough to get the speakers moving, but not too loud to get sloppy.

SM57 goes a little to the right of where the dustcap meets the speaker, at 15 degrees angled away from the cap. You can move it around from there, but that's my default starting point. If it's too fizzy back the mic straight back up to 3" away from the grille, if it's still too fizzy move the mic towards the edge of speaker a little bit. Every cab and speaker has several sweet spots. That's pretty close to where all of my V30 loaded cabs seem to shine the most. You can go for a speaker edge sound for a really mid-scooped sound, but you'll have to play around with the post processing to get it to cut through the mix.

Room conditioning is also very important. Lift the cab off the floor, pad the crap out of it with sound proofing foam (basically "tent" the sm57 around the cab). It's very easy to have everything else right, but get that "far away" sound because of poor sound dampening. You really want the ONLY thing going into that mic to be the speaker cab, not the crap off the floor, ceiling, and walls. Cheap foam won't do you justice, get auralex or equivalent, or make your own blockers out of fiberglass insulation. You can also cheat and use a soft mattress if you're creative and can get it to work for you. Avoid concrete floors.

Record the guitar track twice, and keep the playing TIGHT as you can, right down to the pick technique. Pan the two tracks between 75% and 100% left and right, depending on your taste. High cut the tracks at about 8000hz -10db and bring it down from there as needed to remove any fizz. Boost the highs at 6500hz about 2db, low shelf the bass at 120hz about -2db. Add a 4:1 compression at -15db with 50ms attack, and about 200ms release. If you want to play with the post mix mids, that's on you. If you're having trouble, leave them alone. If you know how you want them to sit in the mix, you can play with lowering the 250hz, 500hz, or 700hz ranges. And you really only want to do small eq carves no more than 2 or 3 db, or you'll kill your tone. And similarly for lead tones you can consider boosting the 700 to 1200hz ranges. If you're post mixing your eq more than that, fix the amp and mic positions instead.

That's the basic technique I used for recording this and many other tracks. It's not mastered, but I get great comments on the guitar tones:
http://soundclick.com/share?songid=9324801

It's a LOT of heartache, and I really wish I had someone just show me all of this so I didn't spend months and months figuring it out on my own and reading "duh" recording books that are useless.

Thanks,
Zed

 

[EtherealWidow]

**** dude. Pretty solid technique you got there. At first I was thinking, "Yeah whatever. This guy's going off like he knows what he's talking about. I don't gotta lift it or insulate it." But I guess the results speak for themselves don't they? Got my attention for sure. I'll have to try it out. Can I ask what mic pre you're using?

 

[paintballnsk]

Thanks

I'm using a Presonus Firestudio Tube

The most important part of that whole rant is the sound conditioning. You can have good or bad mic placement, but no ammount of post processing is going to fix bad room reflections.

The blockers I'm using are 4 1 foot squares of auralex foam stuck to a 2 1/2 foot square piece of 3" thick foam, like the stiff stuff you find in some packing boxes. That doesn't really matter, you could use a sheet of plywood or a hard sheet of cardboard, doesn't matter. The auralex is what does all the work.

I have a third blocker I made out of an empty 6x1" frame that is 3' by 4'. I stuffed it with fiberglass insulation and wrapped it with an old bedsheet. So I put that directly behind the mic, and the other two blockers around the sides of the cab. It changed everything with my recordings. Makes it so much clearer.

I also always record the guitar in the room where the cab is. It can easily get steril if the guitar doesn't have a little high gain feedback and maintains the feel of the amp. You can completely isolate it if you want, but I prefer a little of that natural amp feedback.

 

[EtherealWidow]

Yeah. I've yet to record the tracks for the amp. I re amp everything though. So first I lay down the guitar tracks with the guitar going directly into the computer, but I still have the interface going into the amp just so I can get feedback and all that. When I re amp it I'm going to do it in both class a and class ab. I would double the tracks, but things can get way too messy with black metal.

 

[kiff]

I also always record the guitar in the room where the cab is. It can easily get steril if the guitar doesn't have a little high gain feedback and maintains the feel of the amp. You can completely isolate it if you want, but I prefer a little of that natural amp feedback.

you know, that's been what I've been starting to realize recently. It's just so different when you're not in the same room. I thought I was just hearing things differently, but I honestly think there's a difference in tone and responsiveness, even when it's not a blatant feedback.

 

[EtherealWidow]

Haha. Kiff I'm glad you think that way because I'm exactly the same. I can be REALLY neurotic with all my little things about recording. Even though I'm re amping, I refuse to record the tracks unless I can really crank the amp because I sit so close to it that I figure the speaker will still be hitting the body of the guitar and making it resonate slightly different than if I were to just record silently or at a low volume. Even if it's a little nuance that I, myself, might not even notice in an A/B test, I still can't live with a track that I know has not been done my "proper" way.

 

[elpingua]

Would you mind posting some pictures of what the setup looks like? Lifted cab and the isolating of cab?

Thanks!