Gorgeous and Gratifying Guitar Sounds (Part 1)

By David Franz

Welcome to the first column in a new DigiZine series called Groundwork! This column is dedicated to home and project studio folks who want to make their Pro Tools recordings sound better and more professional. Every month I'll cover numerous real world recording, mixing, and mastering techniques that you can put to use immediately in your Pro Tools productions.

Who Is This Guy?
I'm David Franz, author of Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools and owner of Underground Sun Studio. Besides being a producer/engineer/songwriter, I play in a touring rock band (Lipfloater) and I teach online Pro Tools courses through Berklee College of Music. (Contact info for all of these endeavors is listed at the end of the column.) OK… enough about me… let's get right to it.

Here we go
What's more satisfying than making your guitar sound amazing in Pro Tools? Well, I guess I can think of a few things… but still, listening back to pristine acoustic performances, perfectly raw and gritty blues riffs, or massive distorted chaos can be extremely rewarding… even for non-guitarists! For my first couple of columns here in DigiZine, I'm going to tackle techniques for recording your guitars and talk about a bunch of ways to maximize the impact of your recorded guitar tracks in Pro Tools.

The Checklist
Well before you hit Record, the first step towards recording gorgeous guitar sounds is making sure your guitar itself is in top shape. Follow this checklist — each may seem obvious but is nonetheless important for capturing an amazing guitar sound.

Restring your axe — New strings provide extra clarity in your input signal.

Recharge your pickups — Always replace the batteries in active pickups before a recording session to avoid unwanted noise.

Tune — Check your tuning regularly; nothing's worse than recording a killer take only to find out your guitar is out of tune.

Check intonation — After tuning the open strings of the guitar, test the 12th-fret tuning of each string. If the 12th-fret sounds are in tune, you're usually all set. If not, visit your favorite guitar repair person.

Level your pickups — While hanging with your guitar guru, ask him/her to adjust your pickups so that they pick up each string equally. Or heck, pull out a screwdriver and do it yourself. Just be sure to level the pickups so that no string is unnecessarily louder than another while recording.

Where's the Signal Going?
After optimizing your axe, consider the signal flow and gain structure from your guitar into Pro Tools. The flow may be simple, such as one cable from your guitar into the instrument input of an Mbox that directly feeds Pro Tools, or you may have a very complex setup involving amplifiers, microphones, mic preamps, direct boxes, effects, EQs, and compressors that all come before your signal even reaches Pro Tools. Regardless of your setup, understanding how your guitar signal is affected by the gain stages along its signal path is trés important.

Hey, wait a minute, what's a gain stage? A gain stage is any amplifier (or attenuator) that boosts (or cuts) the level of an audio signal. Examples include mic preamp gain pots, guitar volume knobs, and channel faders on a mixer. Often, you'll want to set the level at any gain stage to as close to "unity" as you can get it. "Unity" is the level where what goes in is what comes out, such as when a fader in the Pro Tools mix window is set to 0.0 dB. Most musical gear is optimized for the best headroom and signal-to-noise ratio at unity gain.

Overloading a gain stage can cause unwanted distortion, and "underloading" a gain stage can introduce unwanted noise into the signal. Thus, your goal is to tweak your gain stages to achieve the "best" settings for each stage and ultimately get a strong signal into Pro Tools.

You, the player, are also a gain stage… if you play with dynamics. Your guitar technique will affect the gain. When I engineer a session, I usually set the gain stages to accommodate the player's loudest level for a particular part — and then some. Most folks tend to play harder while recording than while "getting levels."

Look at all the gain stages in the diagram below. If one gain stage is under- or overloaded, the negative sonic effects can multiply in the signal path and ultimately ruin your guitar tone before it reaches Pro Tools.

VIEW DIAGRAM

What's That Hum?
With a complex setup like the one shown above you may run into unwanted hum in your input signal… even if you optimize your gain structure. What else can you do?

1. Use balanced cables. They are designed to cancel out noise.
2. Use a DI box in your signal path and flip its "ground" switch. (Your amp might have a ground switch, too.)
3. Turn off all dimmer switches. Although the low light from a halogen lamp sets a nice mood, it can ruin your guitar track.
4. Step away from the computer screen. Even with LCD screens, guitars can pick up unwanted hum from your fancy flat screen monitor.

This Mic, That Mic, or the Other One?
Miking guitars and amps is an art. It can be as simple as drawing a stick figure or as complex as creating the shaded happy little trees in a Bob Ross painting. Some engineers simply like to shove a Shure SM57 in front of a speaker and capture the raw sound of an amp. They utilize the mic's sonic characteristics as well as the angle and position at which the mic addresses the speaker cone as their sonic palette. For example, placing a mic at the center of the speaker cone slightly turned off axis may yield the perfect edgy tone for a song.

Other engineers like to capture an amp's sonic detail by using multiple mics to record specific frequencies present in complex waveforms. Sometimes using multiple microphones to record one sound source may yield a better overall recording because the frequency response curves of each individual mic combine in a sonically pleasing way. Although you could try to predict which mics might sound good together by evaluating their frequency response curves, what fun is that? The true test is how they sound together.

Open the Pro Tools session "Multiplemics Gtr" and listen to the sounds of several mics on the first electric guitar amp. Listen to each track individually and in combination with any or all of the other mics. Check out the Comments section for each track to see how the track was recorded and critically evaluate the sounds. Which sounds do you like best? Which combinations sound best? Do you like any of them?

Download the session
PC | Mac

This Amp, That Amp, or the Other One?
Personally I don't like any of the sounds from the first amp in the Multiplemics Gtr session, but it's not the fault of the microphones. I just don't like the sound of the amp! Although not impossible to fix, bad amp sounds are a pain to work with and can ultimately bring your entire recording down. Unmute the second amp tracks in the Mulitplemics Gtr session by selecting them and pressing Command/Ctrl + M. Listen to the comparison between the first amp (Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier head / Marshall half stack) versus the second amp (Marshall JCM800 head / same Marshall cabinet). A simple gear switch can make all the difference in finding the right sound for a song. Regardless of what amp you choose, it's usually good practice to turn the amp up as loud as possible when recording (without overloading the microphone or mic preamp) to get better tone from the amp.

What's Your Sound?
Oh, so you can't just switch out different mics and amplifiers in your home studio? No problem. Enter AmpliTube! AmpliTube is a plug-in from IK Multimedia that emulates guitar and bass amps and effects. Just plug your guitar straight into your Digi 002, Digi 001, or Mbox, insert AmpliTube as a plug-in in your input track, and voila! You've got access to over a thousand amp configurations and effects. Download a demo from www.amplitube.com.

Look in AmpliTube and you'll see presets for some of the most famous guitarists. As cool as it is to sound like Jimi or Carlos, why not try to sound like yourself? Take a setting that you like and tweak it… add different effects and EQ, then compress the hell out of it… add a ring modulator… anything to make an original or even (dare I say) a "signature sound." More on this next month…

Wrap-up
There's a lot to think about when recording guitars, but the main point is to use your ears to optimize the sound of your input signal and your imagination to create new sounds. Once you get a good signal into Pro Tools, then the real fun begins. Next month I'll continue with the guitar theme and cover production and mixing techniques. See you soon. Peace.

Got some feedback? Feel free to drop me an email at groundwork@davidfranz.com.

Like what you see in this column? Check out my book, Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools (2nd Edition). You can buy it online right here through Digidesign's website, or visit www.protoolsbook.com. Interested in personal instruction on Pro Tools from yours truly? Visit www.berkleemusic.com and learn about several amazing Pro Tools learning experiences available online though Berklee College of Music. Interested in hearing my band? Visit www.lipfloater.com. Wanna see my studio and hear some samples of my work? Visit www.undergroundsun.com and/or www.davidfranz.com.

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