general question?

[reverieman]

Is it fair to say that if you are using only a Digi 002 with out any pres or outboard compression... with fairly good mics you are not going to get a fidelic guitar sound. Is it true that you need a nice microphone pre-amp to get great sounding guitars?

[albee1952]

While I own some good external pre's, I still have to disagree. A great sounding guitar, in the hands of a solid player, with a good mic, in a good sounding room(if you mean acoustic guitar), will still give you a good recording. A crappy guitar with dead strings in a bad sounding room will still sound bad thru a great mic and pre. Consider that your sound is as good as the weakest link in the chain. Besides, I would rather hear a great performance of a great tune over a perfectly recorded bad performance, or a lousy tune(subjective of course). Listen to any of a hundred popular recordings of the last 40 years. In any case, you can make very good recordings with the stock setup. It just requires more skill from the operator and musician. If your skills are great, then better gear can take you to the next level.

[Aussie Scott]

I'm with albee, the mic pres on the 002 are reasonable. Get the source and the mic/mic placement thing happening and the rest will follow

Cheers, Scott

[will the moor]

source (song, player, instrument, instrument setup) = 80%
mic placement, guitar placement, room = 15%
mic, mic pre = who cares, 95% is enough to get the point across.

if you start removing percentage points from the the first part, a better mic/pre can help put a little shine on it.

I am making this up and shouldn't be listened to.


Will

[daeron80]

How stable and clean is your AC power? In my experience, the biggest difference in sound between a pro level studio and most home studios is power. Take an 002 to a place with balanced or well-buffered AC circuits, and it sounds very good. Take the same unit home and plug it in to a circuit where every appliance in the house generates line spikes, and where the factory 3 miles away modulates the line like a buzz saw, and where the voltage sags in the afternoons when everybody gets home from work, and it sounds only somewhat better than a SoundBlaster card.

[reverieman]

We are using a 57 and an AKG C414 on the Guitar. I restring it before we record, I make shure it is intonated correctly... I bought all Monster Cables, and it cleaned up my signal very good. I play very cleanly... It sounds great in the room, but it sounds very muddy, and brittle coming in through the mics. I try to mix the room mic with the close mic, but It just doesnt sound right. If I turn up the bass at all on the amp it sounds more muddy. That is why I was wondering. Does it matter if back of the amp is facing a corner or how far it is from the wall?

[daeron80]

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.