Third Take

I’ve been recording scratch tracks by dangling an SM-57 over the top of the amp. I know with a little tweaking I can do better, but dang, this sounds pretty good.

Of course, my guitar rig sounds good. Really good. So capturing it isn’t that hard. The best recordings start at the source.

• ‘T’ is the keyboard shortcut for the normal tool. ‘C’ is the keyboard shortcut for the scissors. ‘Q’ mutes the selected clip.
• When working with track layers, it’s safe to “Remove Empty Layers” after deleting some clips. It won’t rearrange your clips like “Rebuild Layers” does.
• Remember to turn off the air conditioner before recording vocals. Remember to turn it back on before going to bed.
• Don’t tell a vocalist to “sing it more like Eddie Vedder.”

I downloaded the free Orca softsynth a while back, but never did anything with it. I don’t do a lot with MIDI or softsynths, but last night we were looking for a weird sound to add texture to a song and I remembered Orca.

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I previously mentioned the trick of getting a guitar amp off the floor to minimize the early reflections the microphone “hears” and tighten up the bottom end. As I said in that article, it’s something to try but not a hard and fast rule.

I recently did two recordings of the same amp, same guitar, and same player with the same microphone and preamp. The only difference was whether the amp was on a stand or not. I managed to get good sounds out of both positions, but with the amp on the floor I got that sound much faster with less tweaking of amp settings and microphone placement.

On the stand, I spent considerable time trying to get more bottom and fighting the high end. When the amp was on the floor, it was almost as easy as sticking a microphone in front of it and pressing record.

Looking back at all the electric guitar sounds I’ve recorded in the last year, all of the really great ones were amps on the floor. I think that will be my default position from now on, and I’ll only move it on to a stand if I can’t get the floor to work.

I recently purchased a pair of sound isolating earbuds for live use. At one of my guitar gigs, we have an in-ear monitor system and I wanted a nice pair of earbuds that would block out stage noise and let me hear the monitor system clearly. Then I had a brainstorm: why not use them when recording vocals in my home studio? Read more