What is your favorite method of recording rock/metal guitars?

[RaceU4her]

I feel completely on my own lol

for all the shitty youtubes there are plenty of good ones, a lot of them dont have big subscriber numbers or a ton of views and you just gotta kind of sift through them, experiment and find what works for you. its a long road trying to get the sound in your head onto a recording.

 

[rottingcorpse]

Face down,ass up.

Wait,what were we talking about again?

 

[WhiteShadow]

Learning things the hard way sucks

 

[DanTravis62]

Yea it sounds like they are picking their favorite speaker from each cab, and going from there. This is something that again, the internet idiots don’t ever talk about: at the end of the day, speakers are a lottery. They really are. Most of us all know that 4 speakers in the same cab are all going to sound different, sometimes vastly so. And this is a great standard practice everyone should adopt before recording anything: dead center mic each speaker in your cab with a single 57, and see which one’s timber/tonality you like the best for a specific song, mix, record, whatever. I know for instance, that the bottom right speaker in my Mesa traditional rips HARD, especially compared to the other 3 V30s. I know that the older Marshall celestion vintage speakers from 1992 I just bought are much more forgiving with micing than the newer ones, and again all 4 sound VERY different. This is kind of my new rabbit hole I’m going down, constantly buying and flipping speakers, all V30s/Marshall vintage mostly, and picking the ones I like the best. Because it’s really a crapshoot. 9 times out of 10 when people compare company A’s IR of. Mesa or Marshall cab vs company B’s Mesa and Marshall cab IR’s, they are generally hearing that they like one speaker better than the other: not necessarily that the capture or mic position was wrong. So yes, there are tons of Mesa IR’s out there, as well as Marshall IR’s: but the speakers are all vastly different, always. Trying different IR’s of the same cab/speaker from different company’s is akin to what I’m doing, just in the digital world. My point is, while it costs money, I would try out as many IR’s as you can ( if you are an IR guy) even of the same cab, because they will be totally different just by the nature of speakers being a lottery in the first place.

It's so weird to me that youtuber types (like fricker or rhett shill or whoever) NEVER seem to bring this up - when I was interning and learning the ropes, its one of the first things I learned about micing guitar cabinets. Like literally the very first thing the engineer made me do was break out 3 v30 4x12s (a mesa, marshall, and a bogner) and put a separate 57 centered on every individual speaker, and record them in separate tracks with the same pres and settings. Then he watched my "wtf" face as we soloed the tracks and went back and forth between them.

The top left speaker (early 90s uk v30) of my redplate cabinet is significantly less honky (its literally like a 1db 1.5khz cut) than the other three. The vented 75s in my 1960b sound comically different from one another - the bottom right sounds like a blackback, and another sounds like a slightly less scooped modern t75.

Its wild how so few of these "experts" ever talk about the most basic shit on youtube, but jump right into multiband compression on everything, etc.

 

[BeZo]

Learning things the hard way sucks

Learning things the hard way is the best way. You really get at why things don't work and why to do it a certain way instead of blindly following advice. Really, learn enough to get in the ballpark and refine with experience.

 

[HarryCooter]

Learning things the hard way sucks

It's really the only way to actually get good at all this. It's kind of like learning to play by tabs vs learning theory and scales. Sure, you can mimic what you see someone else doing fairly quick, but you won't understand why it worked or how to replicate the results. Everything worth doing is a grind. Here's my advice, focus on being the best musician you can be and learn the rest as it comes. A great artist is far more valuable than a great engineer. Great artists make great recordings. Great recordings don't make great artists.

 

[VESmedic]

Learning things the hard way is the best way. You really get at why things don't work and why to do it a certain way instead of blindly following advice. Really, learn enough to get in the ballpark and refine with experience.

Absolutely 100 percent… there isn’t a real engineer in the world that learned what they know from YouTube… trial by fire. Learning from experiences. Learning from mistakes. This is the only way. A life of pure self loathing helps too…. Haha..


This is why everyone that wants to mix should be required to be an excellent engineer first. When you learn HOW to create tones, whether it’s drum, guitars, bass whatever, then you actually learn what works and what doesn’t work and why. THEN when you have finessed “your sound” or way of doing things, think of how much easier it will be to mix tones YOU created? It’s literally your inputs/source tones that fit into what you like and what you feel is right. Mix engineers who mix other peoples engineered productions are incredibly skilled at doing their OWN engineering and tone shaping, which is why they have the knowledge and skill to mix other peoples work. It’s a big full circle.


Learn how to engineer first: worry about everything else second.



And furthermore just to add something: anyone that has produced a band ( which I have not, so take it for what it’s worth) will tell you that the REAL magic is getting the absolute BEST takes/performance out of your artist. THAT is where the magic is. And if you think engineering or mixing is grueling, good lord. Try figuring out how to get the best take out of someone with the most energy that really captivates you and clearly says what the artist is trying to say through their music. Engineering and mixing gets all the glory because it’s sexier, but it ain’t what makes great records, it’s capturing the take and the moment.

 

[DanTravis62]

And furthermore just to add something: anyone that has produced a band ( which I have not, so take it for what it’s worth) will tell you that the REAL magic is getting the absolute BEST takes/performance out of your artist. THAT is where the magic is. And if you think engineering or mixing is grueling, good lord. Try figuring out how to get the best take out of someone with the most energy that really captivates you and clearly says what the artist is trying to say through their music. Engineering and mixing gets all the glory because it’s sexier, but it ain’t what makes great records, it’s capturing the take and the moment.

This. There's an art to getting great performances from artists.

 

[WhiteShadow]

With YouTube tutorials, videos, etc... it's like we have everything, yet nothing. There's so much there, yet I feel like I watch hours of content and learn very little.

 

[GJgo]

With YouTube tutorials, videos, etc... it's like we have everything, yet nothing. There's so much there, yet I feel like I watch hours of content and learn very little.

Here's how I look at the YT tutorials, or reading forums for that matter. I'm starting with "I know nothing, and there are a thousand options & rabbit holes". I have to start somewhere, so I do some "research" to narrow down the possibilities. Then, I can dive in & buy / try things for myself in order to get where I want to be more efficiently.