Basic Ways to Record Electric Guitar

[MDV]

For the people that arent want to get into it but arent sure how, or want to explore other options and methods.

First, DONT PANIC.

Its not hard to do. It can be (a very rewarding) challenge to do well, but getting started is very easy. Just be methodical, use whatever resources you have at your disposal for additional information and RTFM.

The deluge of technologies available and the number of ways they can be used can be intimidating at first. It doesn't really help that half the manufactures of recording equipment make out that their piece of gear can do absolutely everything, ever, to the highest standard possible, in a lunch break, while making the coffee. Probably turn water into wine, too. The rest throw an assault of technobabble at you.

But, modern recording technology is indeed incredibly powerful, for very little money. However, the most important thing is how you use it, not the devices themselves, and a recording chain for guitar in particular is very flexible and can be changed to suit your needs.

So, I'm going to write this guide to break it down gradually and lead you into the world of recording guitar and creating tracks to go with the guitar and see what sort of scheme fits how you would like to record, without going into more detailed things, like mic placement, compression, EQing, gain-staging, reamping, frequency slotting, multi-band compression, side-chaining, and so on and so forth.


I have a guitar. What Can I Record it with?

A guitar is basically the only thing that you NEED for every situation. The rest is optional.

I'm going to assume that everyone reading this only plays guitar and will be working alone.

Getting guitar sounds to some storage medium for playback. That's the name of the game, at its simplest, so this section is going to go through some of the ways you can do that. In a partially (hopefully) helpful and partially rancorously opinionated fashion (but hey, what did you expect?).

Your basic bits of kit and technology, which can be combined in various ways.

Standalone multitrack recorder

I'll talk a bit about these in their own section. The 'standalone' part makes it appropriate that the device and the use of them can be explained in one place. All the other things are parts of a chain, and I'll mention them all later, so I'll tell you what they are now.

Audio Interface

A multichannel (usually, to some degree) soundcard, to all intents and purposes, and general Audio Swiss Army Knife. They typically contain mic preamps, AD/DACs (analogue-digital/digital-analogue converters), high impedance inputs and often, but not always, SPDIF, ADAT and phono. They use ASIO drivers for low latency playback of lots of audio simultaneously in a DAW and often include advanced routing capabilities, and sometimes on-board effects.

Examples of people that manufacture these include: EMU, Presonus, Focusrite, Edirol, RME, Digidesign, Alesis, Stienberg, Prism Sound, MOTU, and on and on and on.

Pros:

These are the main route to getting music into and out of a DAW

Cons:

None in a general sense. There is no drawback to owning and using an Audio Interface. Some units are crap though.

DAW

A piece of software that plays back lots of sound files and digitally manipulates the sounds, if needed or desired. The DAW is the cornerstone of modern music production. You can avoid them if you really, really want to but its very strongly recommended that you accept that if you want to record music today, you'll be using a DAW at some point.

They can be a bit of a pain to get your head around at first. The basic capabilities of 'Records sound, plays it back' make themselves apparent pretty easily, but they can do a lot more than that, and its not always obvious how to get them to do what you want.

Examples include; Protools, Cubase, Reaper, Logic, Sonar, Audition.

Pros: The capabilities of a studio that in 1985 would have cost £5,000,000 running on your PC.

Cons: Learning curve.

Modeller

We've all likely encountered these already, so I'm not going to say a tremendous amount about them. We know already that they recreate the tone shaping effects of amplifiers, speakers, cabs, mics and effects. I will mention, though, that they are not special devices; they are computers that only run one kind of software, and have been optimised for it (and are incapable of running anything else). A modeller is a PC that can only run VSTs. I tell you this to help you make choices between modeller and VST; you're getting in for a similar sort of thing with each. They can sound very good, and have been used on 'pro' records, but many people don't like the tones, considering them inferior to a real amp (and many people think those people are idiots, so go figure; you make up your own mind about them). Personally I think of it like this - you can get 80% of the way to a great guitar sound with a modeller with 20% of the effort it takes with a amp, mic and room, and sometimes 80% is enough and sometimes it isn't There are people who get tones that are 100% great with them, though, but they're rarely using them exactly as you find them out of the box (more on that later). Another thing that has to be noted in this context is that because you can save a patch of your own settings on an amp sim, cab, mic, and effects chain you can instantly recall that at any later time. Try setting up an amp, dialling it in, dialling in an effects chain and placing a mic or two and then taking it all down and trying to get the exact same sound back 6 months later.

Pros:
Lots of variety in a single package
Tweakers paradise
Eliminates room sound, which can be a problem
Can create decent sounds easily
Consistent
Very flexible

Cons
Non-tweakers hell
Can be hard to get very good sounds

Examples made by: Line 6, Boss, Zoom, Fractal Audio.

VST

VST is 'Virtual Studio Technology', and applies to MANY things. But in this case we're talking about amp sims. This is the software that runs on a modeller, but running on your computer. I've basically already been through the sound part so I'll go straight to the pros and cons

Pros:
No additional hardware required (except a decent interface, but even a soundcard and ASIO4ALL will work).

Cons:
Your machine has to run it. The hardware of a modeller is optimised for this, your PC isn't (though it probably can do it).

IR – Impulse Responses

These are not a guitar sound, nor a sound of any sort you would recognise, they are a response spectrum modifier. They aim to emulate the sounds of particular speakers and mics to bring the various inefficiencies and spatial effects of that system, and its various benefits back to a pre-amp type signal.

They are very much borne of a problem; the sound of a preamp isn't all that hard to emulate, but even preamps from high end amps on their own sound horrible. The sound is filtered  and mutated by the speakers, primarily, and guitar speakers are crap, in the nicest way possible. Preamp direct signals are extremely, well, direct sounding, zero space in them at all, and worse still, the sound is cold, harsh, lots of top end, shallow and generally unpleasant. What you hear from your amp has been filtered and mutated by a power amp, speaker/s and room. These have a huge effect in smoothing and fattening a guitar sound. Irs try to do the same thing. By sending a constant volume tone that linearly increases in pitch through a power amp, cab and mic and recording the result, you get the emphases and losses that that system creates, and you can convolve (is the name for it; if you want to know what's actually happening, ask away, but for now pretend its magic or something) it into a power spectra; how strongly the system responded to the input signal at each pitch, and that can then be applied to any preamp type signal to simulate the effect.

One of their main strengths is you can use them with ANY preamp-type source. Amps, modellers, VSTs, dedicated preamps, whatever; if you switch off any on board IRs (like a pods cab and mic sim, for example) then you can use another of your choosing, or as a rule if the source was designed to be fed into a power amp (or can be set to do so) then this will work with it.

Pros:

Can be an effective way to recreate an 'air moving' signal chain.
Works with any 'preamp-type' source to enhance realism

Cons
Is not a true representation of the systems response because the systems response to a single frequency is different to all at once, and it doesn't replicate the dynamic envelope of the system. (but given how easy it is to make huge improvements with good IR choices, this can easily be seen as nitpicking).

Mic Preamp

I'm giving these a mention on their own, because while their function is very basic (mics produce a really low level signal, like guitar pickups, that need to be amplified to line level for anything else to handle or manipulate it), they are often thought of as being as important to a signal chain as the guitar or mic itself. I'm not sure I personally go that far, but different mic preamps certainly sound different, and if you're going to use mics its important to use decent pres as well. Many interfaces are basically as good as their mic preamps, and you can get some good pres on relatively inexpensive interfaces. There's no need to spend thousands on dedicated pres, but you should have decent ones.

DI Box or Hi-Z input

For a guitar signal to be of any use and retain clarity it has to go into a high impedance input. 1 mega-ohm is the nominally accepted standard. Many perfectly good DI boxes and 'Hi Z' (Z is the symbol for impedance in electronics and electrical engineering) are lower than this but you don't want to push it too far. All amps have a high-z input, line level inputs or line-ins are not high-z. Anything that was designed to have a guitar plugged into it will have a Hi-Z input, and anything you intend to plug your guitar into should have a Hi Z input. Dedicated DI boxes will often play a part in more sophisticated recording methods and high quality DIs can be used to enhance the sound of guitars processed by VSTs.


Recording Chains

How you can cobble this stuff together to get various recording methods, complete with stereotypical/cartoonish representation of person they might fit.  Some bias on my part may well become evident, but don't let it sway you, I just cant really help it; the purpose of this is to help you put together a recording setup that fits you.

The actual chains will be numbered, but just for reference, they aren't in any particular order.


"Configure inputs..mono source..what? Where did the, ah, no, there it is, no, the one that its plugged into, yeah, number 2, that's the, wait, why isn't it making any sound? Oh, arm that track and, what, no I don't know if I want to 'automate punch out', why have those lit up as well, how do you, oh screw this"
- Technophobe after  his first and only attempt at getting a DAW to work #657148, 2008.

Standalone Recorder


Does what it says it is. Great for someone that wants to hit record and not have to deal with a hundred menus and loading times for this and that every time you want to lay an idea down. These have built in mic/s, storage space (used to be tapes, now its hard and flash drives) and AD/DACs. You arm a track, you hit record, you play, you play it back. They're glorified multichannel dictaphones (I don't say that as a bad thing, it just means they're a simple thing, which can be great). They are capable of overdubbing, lining out tracks selectively for playback, recording line ins from other devices and its quite possible to make a convincing full track on one, with some additional gear (like a drum machine). You can move your recordings later to a computer running a DAW for more sophisticated manipulation, too. They do come with more sophisticated options, however (like the ability to use external mics of your choice, some effects and signal processing features) and how complex you want the device to be is very much a question of to what extent you're going to rely on it. If its your main thing, get the most capable unit you can, if you're just using it to jot down ideas or rudimentary sounds for later treatment, you don't have to worry too much about it.

So, the nice easy route

1.Whatever you normally play through → Standalone recorder

This is easily embellished upon and arguably improved with mics, but that's the basic thing. Dead easy.



"Resistance is Futile!!11!!!001011!!!01010101011110001!"
- Metal geek audio-engineer IT-guy hybrid, invented by the internet in 2002, spoken on being released from the test tube he was grown in.

Modellers and VSTs

So we know that you can make amp-type sounds with modellers and VSTs. Do you need anything else? Yes and no. You can get a USB interfacing modeller and run it into your computer like (indeed, as) a soundcard and make do with something like a POD

2.USB-Capable modeller → DAW

Done. Works well too. What works better, however, is using a lineout from the modeller into a decent interface:

3.Any Modeller → Interface line in → DAW


In this way you can use the sound that are on the modeller and control the tone from there.

You can also use the modeller without its onboard IRs (unless they cant be disabled) and take advantage of the almost certainly more flexible and probably better sounding IRs that are readily, and often freely available on the net.

4.Any Modeller, IRs off → Interface line in → DAW + IRs.

If you want to use VST amp sims, you need two things: A computer. I know you have one of those already. An interface. The hi-z input on most interfaces is perfectly adequate to receive a guitars signal and not brutalise it too much, and your recording chain is simply

5.Interface Hi-Z → DAW + VST

The VST itself may be used for IRs, but they can usually be disabled and different ones chosen, as with the modellers.

And if you have a nice DI box then you can also use that:

6.DI box → Interface Mic Preamp → DAW + VST


"Back in my day, we 'ad these things called 'guitar amplifiers', and by 'eck they were loud, 'ear 'em for bloody miles, ya could, and in a coupla days ya 'ad a sound that was alreet, eh, if ya could still 'ear out at all!"
- Old School Audio Engineer, Line 6 product release show, drunk, in the corner, talking to his beer, 2005.

Mic up an Amp


Move some air. The more the better The way that most professional sounds are still made, an easy one to get started with but the hardest to master:

7.Amp → Speaker → Mic → Mic pre amp → DAW.


Its all very familiar and self explanatory really. We all know that fantastic tones are achievable this way, and we all know, or can guess, how easy it is to piss off the neighbours doing it. However, this is probably the hardest way to get something good (but in my not so humble opinion the only way to get something REALLY good). There are many variables and lots of things you need to keep under control. If you can get a good result by throwing an SM57 in front of your cab or combo wherever it happens to sit, and using your normal tone get a great sounding guitar track, then you are a lucky, lucky bastard (or not particularly discriminating, might be the nicest way I can phrase the alternative ).

The unmentioned participants in that signal chain are at least as important as any other, and harder to control:
The room
The location of the amp/cab in the room
The location of the mic/s

So if you've ever been after a, say, good modern metal rhythm sound and thrown an SM57 in front of a V30 in a Mesa Oversized cab driven by a 5150, sent the 57 to a decent preamp in a decent interface (say an EMU or Focusrite), played crisply and cleanly with accuracy to rival james hetfield in 1990 and listened back and it sounds  like crap, one of those is probably why. Maybe all three.

Now, I don't want to scare people away from this method, I just want to encourage people that want to use it to ignore some of the hype about gear and go about it intelligently and knowing what they're dealing with in advance: getting a good sound out of a miced amp is a skill in and of itself. You will learn, you will get better, it will get easier, and all that will happen a lot faster if you know this. If it sounds crap but your gears decent, you probably don't new amps, new mics, new guitars and new pickups. It might be that you do, but the chances are you don't Its understanding room modes and reflections, acoustics control, dialling in an amp for a mic and a mix, not for your ears in the room, and learning how to use mic placement that are the most important things. Know these and you'd be surprised what you can get a good sound from!

All of the above applies wherever you're moving air in an enclosed space, so it goes for the standalone recorder as well or any situation where you're lining a modeller into an amp and recording that.


"I like amps, but I don't like the police at the door or the wife at my throat"
- Most people all the time, in all fairness.

Line outs, Loads and IRs


I'm going to assume you're using a valve amp. If not then this is even simpler.

These are the chains that you should be looking at:

8.Preamp (either dedicated line out or the FX-send) → Interface Line In → DAW + IRs


The IRs bit is really important or its just going to sound unbelievably horrible.

With your cab attached as normal or you might kill your amp, obviously.

A variant of this that's commonly used is a dedicated guitar preamp. The chain is the same, so I wont bother  repeating it.

The second one is this:

9.Power amp out (as in the speaker sends that normally go to the cab) → load box → Interface Line in – DAW + IRs


The IRs are Optional if the load box has a speaker sim, if its just a dumb load box then you'll still need IRs. The load box needs to have a line level output. Just a basic, no output, load can be used in place of a cab in the preamp-out scenario

That way you get to include some power amp distortion and you can crank your amp to what would be ear splitting volume. Radial make a suitable bit of kit for this, as do palmer (which includes a speaker sim)


"You forgot one!"
- Inevitable reply to this

So that's 9 basic routes of guitar → storage and playback of guitar + realistic amp sounds, and there are more variations, and they can be combined.

I don't use any of the above there, for example, I use

DI Box → Mic preamp → DAW
DI Box Through → Amp → Mic → Mic preamp → DAW

Simultaneously. This is so can track with an amp sound that I quite like and have a DI of the playing that I can reamp later if I decide I hate the sound.

Have a look at what's there; this is far from a complete guide on even the basic mission statement 'record a guitar', and see if there are ways it can be recombined and mixed up that better suit you. Want to play a VST into a power amp into a mic? You can do that. Want to combine Preamps and VSTs? You can do that too – you think of some more.

With any luck this has been of some use to those of you that are a bit green, and might, just might (but I very much doubt it) have given some ideas to those that aren't

[Tony W]

This had to come close to the character count limit of a single post! Good read, and thanks for taking the time. There's a lot of useful information in here to at least me, so I appreciate it.

[MDV]

Quite welcome.

Glad its helping someone

Thought I might throw it up in here because it seems theres a heavy reliance on standalone multitrack devices on this forum. I find that an oddity. There are many, many very powerfull and convenient ways to record a guitar, so I thought I may put this up here to gently encourage some experimentation; people willing to climb the learning curves and try a few things here out may find themselves very pleasantly surprised.

I'd like to add; using any of these isnt a marraige or anything, you dont have to stick with one. You can cheat on a recording method, or bit of gear! Use whatevers right for a sound/song/circumstance. I mean I said 'I use, etc etc' and most of the time, thats true, I use what I said I use, but I also use line outs from my solid state and modelling amps with IRs loaded as well.

[Tony W]

Perspective is a funny thing. I can understand how you find it an oddity, but 10 years behind a computer for 8 hours per day, 5 days a week tends to drain ones desire to spend any time at all with DAW.

From what I can tell there are quite a few musicians here who have gigged, and eventually moved into the home recording arena. I can only assume that the utter talent that this group of people know their instruments so well, that they are enjoying the challenge of making quality recordings. Take Ferryman, he is the foremost authority on cutting an MP3 using a Micro BR exclusively. He must love the challenge.

Then you have the guys like me, I'm just getting comfortable as a musician, and I have years to go before I develop into the artist that I want to become. As you know there are 2 sided of a final product, performing and capturing that performance. Learning both sides is a daunting task. Terminology with no practical experience alone takes hours of research, and even in the end, there is so much gray area to sort.

Knowing my position a standalone recorder is a necessity at this point in time. In a couple of years, I'll be well ahead of the learning curve when it comes to producing quality music due largely to the amount of great tips and advice that is so freely given here on songcrafters.

If I were to put an estimate on the amount of material that you covered in the first post, I would assume you saved me 6 hours of google time.

[Ferryman_1957]

Lots of useful advice there MDV, must've taken a long time to put together, so thanks for that. FYI, this community grew out of a community focused on the Boss standalone recorders, especially the MBR. So a lot of us on here use standalone recorders as our primary recording source. I much prefer them to DAWs because for me they are easier to use and give you much higher quality for a lower price IMO.

Cheers,

Nigel 

[henwrench]

Thought I might throw it up in here because it seems theres a heavy reliance on standalone multitrack devices on this forum. I find that an oddity. There are many, many very powerfull and convenient ways to record a guitar

   I have stood on clifftops to record my guitar onto my MBR. I have stood in friends houses to record vocals. I have stood in every room of my house searching for the right acoustics in accordance to what I'm recording. I've stood in the streets of various towns and cities recording 'ambience' onto my MBR. I've stood on beaches recording waves with horses gallpoing past through the wet sand. And this thing slips into my overcoat pocket and runs on batteries. I can't think of anything more convenient than standing in the shitter and singing my little heart out...


                                                      henwrench

[Bluesberry]

For my money, this song represents just how far you can push such a low end recorder like the Boss microBR.  Just listen to this song...completely recorded on a microBR...and sorry to anyone else out there who is very proud of their mBR recordings, I have to pick this one...This is the one that kills me...bloody brilliant recording...on a microBRhttps://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=2835.msg25460#msg25460

[MDV]

 

I really didnt expect this much defensiveness over a bit of kit. Youre really focussing on one tiny thing here, and taking it the wrong way (or it looks a lot like it from here).

I didnt post this to try and convert anyone to anything, or to malign standalone recorders, and I didnt say that decent sounding tracks cant be recorded on them. No amount of posting links to any songs tracked on a BR, or anything else, will prove anything I've said wrong or tell me anything I didnt know can be done with a standalone, largely because I never said anything to the effect of 'they're bad' or 'you cant record good sounding songs on them'. They arent and you can. I find them crippling, and could go on at length as to why, but I didnt before and I'm not now because thats entirely beside the point: having a go at how anyone else works or has worked to date wasnt what I set out to do.

There is more out there though. The music and doing the best you can to make it as good as you can is all that matters, and there are a million and one ways to do that. Lots of tools at your disposal, why not experiement?

So, to summarise:

If you think that I've typed this up to tell people not to use their standalones, and/or youre perfectly happy with recording on your standalone then great, nothing to see here, carry on.

(You would be wrong in a very general sense, actually, since I typed it up for a new recording forum that will inevitably have very green people on it, and copied it here with a couple of adjustments that pertained to what I would write in future guides, since I thought that people here might benefit from a quick 'this is some of whats out there, the possibilities are near endless' guide)

If you want to do whatever it is it takes to best service your music and have no current equipment bias, then I've given a few options, which are intended as a prompt for experimentation, through which you may find something that greatly improves the quality of your music. What that may be, I have no idea. You dont have to stop using your microBR to find out though!

Peace
MDV

Edit - and thanks for the historical perspective, Ferryman. That does add up, but it doesnt stop people experimenting.

[Bluesberry]

I find them crippling

With all due respect here MDV, of all the things you have said here (and some really fantastic tips about recording guitars in this post), this one statement of yours summarizes why a few of us got all defensive and started defending our love of "stand-alone" recorders, "I find them crippling".  It is clear that you think we are limiting ourselves (in a major crippling way) for not getting on board with the whole computer/DAW/plug-ins/bla-bla-bla.  That is a crippling idea If I may say.  I don't feel crippled by using my stand-alone, in-fact the opposite, it is liberating, it is fast and easy to go from inspiration to idea to fully realized great sounding demo in no time, a mere evening or weekend in a lot of cases.  I am not focused on recording engineering and making the absolute pro sounding song possible, I am focused on writing original songs, writing original engaging lyrics, playing my instruments as well as I can and singing as well as I can.  Next I am focused on getting a reasonably good recording of my original song.  Going all ape-shit on recording technique can and does rob one of the creative spark at times, a lot of us are songwriters first, recording engineers second.  By you first implying, and then stating outright that our "stand-alone" machines "are crippling"  is insulting to all of the damn fine original music that has been created by us on our stand-alone machines.  A lot of us have some DAW experience, DAW gear, but still choose to record on our puny little limiting stand-alone machines, and are creating some pretty damn fine original songs in the process.  So if it seems like we are defensive, you are damn right we are, these little, puny, limited, crippling machines have unlocked our creativity in ways that would not have happened if we got all crazy with full professional DAW home studio set-ups.  I come down on the side of the Lo-Fi brilliant song over the piece of shit song recorded in pristine  high quality $20,000 home-studio DAW brilliance.   Thats why a few of us went all defensive when we perceived that you were implying than nothing good could ever come from a stand-alone, because that is just not right at all.  Portability, ease of recording, getting the flash of inspiration recorded quick before it is gone, that is the reason I love my little, puny, crippling stand-alone recording machine.

Just saying,
Peace,
Dave.

[Oldrottenhead]

i love my little silver box, i also use daws and have done so for about a decade, but when inspiration strikes i go for my little silver box, its up and ready to roll in seconds. it has it's limitations but then combining that with a daw you can get the best of both worlds.
but recently i had a wonderful experience with three of my songcrafter colleagues all plugged straight into a br800. to get the results we got from that little standalone box from a daw and the various interfaces required to get our seperate contributions onto individual tracks on a pc would be beyond my ken and my wallet.

may i also add that i am not blinkered to looking into different ways of doing things i am open to all avenues of getting my ideas down but i want instant gratification i am a bit impatient that way, my little box  gives me that, without having to reconfigure it every time i choose to use it.

and i second everything bb said.

examples of my br800 experiences

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhGklQRwI-k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYbcvfKXids