El Guit is no doubt one of my favorite instruments to record. With a good guitar paired with a decent amplifier and "Yeah I'm in engineer bliss". One of the many cool thing about today modern music business is the technology

and how convenient things have gotten, with a modern amp you can get such clean level, we have a variety of easily adjustable tones, and with most modern amps, an assortment of wonderful flavors like tube saturation, overdrive, and compression. To top off all these great flavor is the,  bandwidth of a typical electric guitar track is perfectly suited to the frequency response of affordable dynamic microphones like the Shure SM57. Now this doesn't mean that using the age old standard of miking a guitar amps by shoving a 57 against the grille is the best way to get El Guit to stand out in the track.

I learned the basics of recording guitars from my mentor Ken Scott at a studio in Burbank, CA named Chateau back in the early 80's by watching and assisting him when we were doing the "Missing Person "EP" and "Spring Session M" projects, and then "Kansas" the "Vinyl Confession" album. This gave me my fundamentals for my years of adventures a Motown Hitsville USA in Los Angeles, CA. At Hitsville I developed the key elements that contributed to the great tones that you have heard on many classic hits.

Let's Record

Let's start with going mono, I have two way of doing mono one is just that one mic a  Shure SM57 or Sennheiser MD421, place off center of the speaker, never place your mic directly pointed at to coil it sound bad, you need the movement of the sound that is found on the edge of the cone. Also I personally do not put the mic on the grill cloth simple because it may cause unwanted noise. Now you are done bring up your fader up to the null point and ajust your preamp to taste. Next is a mono technique for what I call enhanced mono. Do the first step as I just described and add another mic 2 to 3 feet back and depending on the size of the guitar amp you are using 2 to 3 feet off the floor high, take both signals and blend to taste on the same mono track that you have created. This add depth to the mono sound. Now let's go stereo. With this application I like to use the same brand mic for each speaker but you don't have to. Place your mic on the outer edge of the cones hard left and hard right which helps to create the greatest distance between the two mic's that you have placed on a twin-speaker amplifier, preferably one with built-in stereo chorus and vibrato like on a Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus Amp. Two separate amplifiers fed by the same stereo delay or multi-effects unit will also work.

Mic each speaker or amp, pan the two channels apart, and let the effects do there thing. Hard-panning to the extreme left and right produces the most dramatic results, if this is to much, try panning one microphone toward the center, or adjusting the tracks to a more centered position.
You can use similar two-mic techniques, less the effects, on a single amp to capture a variety of larger than life guitar sounds. One trick that I like to us involves miking a twin-speaker amp with two mics that are close in response, but not matched. I used this technique, on the session with guitarist Norman Brown, I used an Electro-Voice RE20 and a Sennheiser 421.

Place one mic on each speaker at the same distance and orientation, and check the pair for phase cancellation by panning them to the same spot and listening in mono. The minute differences between the speakers, mics, and mic positions, combined with double-tracking, creates a tremendous presence when the tracks are hard-panned in the mix, and opens up a world of possibilities for separate EQ and effects processing. If you don't need the guitar to dominate the mix, you also can sum these mono-compatible tracks together to a single pan position for a noticeably bigger sound.

To capture aggressive, distorted guitar sounds, you can use two mics in an XY configuration on a single speaker: a Shure SM57 aimed at the middle of the speaker and a Sennheiser 421 pointed at the edge of the cone. The SM57's signal is sent to a compressor, and the two mic signals are then mixed together and recorded to one track. This technique provides some compression for the harshest high frequencies and strong, midrange volume peaks picked up by the SM57, while simultaneously delivering full highs and lows through the 421.

Another variation on the two-mic technique involves miking the front and back of an open-backed cabinet. For this application, be sure to place the mics at an equal distance from the speaker itself and reverse the phase of the rear mic. If you have any question about Guitar recording, I all ways like to receive email and talk about recording, mixing, mastering, and music production.