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Old 03-12-2006, 10:01 PM
daeron80 daeron80 is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Orlando, Florida, USA
Posts: 4,106
Default Re: general question?

Oh, that kind of guitar. Dang straight, it matters. An acoustics textbook will inform you about the hazards of room modes. Even if it sounds good in the room to a binaural listener standing a few feet away, it still might sound muddy to a mic just in front of the amp if the high point of a 100 Hz standing wave happens to lie there. Listen to the amp in the room with one ear closed as much as possible -- binaural always sounds better than what a single mic will pick up.

Move the amp around the room, turn it different angles, close to a wall, out in the middle, up on a chair or something a couple feet from the ground (that often seems to help mine), on bare hardwood compared to on a throw rug, whatever. It might sound good where you are until you compare it with what it sounds like somewhere else.

The most helpful thing I ever learned about miking guitar amps was from a MIX magazine article in the early 1990s. With the amp on, but with the guitar not plugged in (so the player doesn't blow your head off), put your ear right next to the grill and move it around. Listen to the hiss pattern. You'll find that the sound of the hiss often varies dramatically from place to place, even over an inch or less. Most speakers have a "sweet spot" or two. With practice, you'll learn to associate the sound of the hiss with what the mic will hear. Even if you miss on the first placement, you'll have a very good educated guess about where to try next, or at least which direction to move it.

Mixing a room mic with a close mic is extremely difficult unless you have a room large enough to get the room mic a good 15-20 feet away from the amp and at least 6-10 feet away from any walls. Bare minimum, a 20' X 30' studio. But you can sometimes get a good room mic sound out in the hall with the door open, if feasible. You can sometimes place it closer and then add a delay plug-in on the room track with enough time to make up the difference in distance (1 ms/ft, roughly). But that doesn't usually sound very natural except in a very small, dead room because the other wall reflections will throw you.

Have you tried plugging the guitar straight into the 002 and using the Amplitube plug-in? I know it feels like cheating but it can sound amazingly good.
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