electric strings

.aa – week three.

With my recording project in mind, I aimed to assimilate a modern metal sound in my electric strings recording for the week. The guitar I recorded from EMU space, I would also like to record guitar from the dead room, but it was being used at the time. Manning the axe is Dave, who began playing with his very nice Ibanez, with distortion. To begin with I placed a Beta 52 on axis of the speaker, as well as a Beta 57 off axis, all around the same height (horizontal to the middle of the speaker). Also I walked around the EMU space as Dave played, and much as we had done in class, I found an area of the room where I liked the sound. There I put a Neumann U87. However this setup did not work at all:


bad guitar sound

Realising the need to completely change the sound I was getting, I started by getting Dave to use my Epiphone Les-Paul. I have heavier gauged strings, so straight away that gave me a thicker tone. Next I reviewed EQ settings on the cabinet, setting it to: Bass -2, Mid -2 and Treble +2. The Gain was set to +8 and the volume to around 4.

To actually capture this sound, I also needed to make some changes to the microphone positioning. After fiddling around a bit, I eventually came to the conclusion that the Beta 52 (a kick drum / bass guitar mic) found the best low end grunt from being placed closer to the ground. The final positioning:



modern metal sound

After this I experimented with moving around the room mic (U87), finding out which places around EMU gave the distortion guitar a nice natural reverb sound. In this recording you can hear Dave playing more of a lead guitar / solo part, I think the recorded audio quality matches it nicely.


solo lead

Next I recorded the bass guitar from the dead room, with the help of Nathan. Eventually we worked out how to route the bass so that he could sit next to me in studio one but play to the amp placed in the dead room. For this recording I again used the SM57 and beta 52. This first recording was made with the cabinet set up in a corner of the dead room.


bass guitar

Because the dead room was so far away from studio one (and after already running around, figuring out how to record the bass from the control room) I did not get much of a chance to play engineer, and run back and forth fiddling with the microphone positions. However to change the sound, I moved the bass cabinet into the middle of the room. Due to our routing, I figured we would turn up Nathan’s amplifier to as loud as it would go prior to losing some sound quality, which unfortunately was not all that loud. In this next recording you can feel the bass sound as being much ‘boomier’ and fuller, as the amplifier is much louder, however I think you loose some of the sharpness of the attack of the bass sound (as compared to the previous recording).


loud bass

I only had a brief opportunity to experiment with a DI recording from the bass cabinet. Admittedly, I know very little about DI, but the sound of the next recording does not seem to have the low-end balls that the microphone recordings offer. The obvious benefits of a DI recording are in a group situation, as nothing will bleed from other instruments into the DI recording. Doing audio processing onto that DI recording would be ideal, as it will not effect the sound of any other instrument. So perhaps this DI recording is in need of some compression, EQing and other effects, even if it is only done digitally?


DI bass

.sources.

Grice, David 13.03.07. “Electric Strings.” Tutorial presented in the EMU space, 5th floor, Schulz Building, University of Adelaide.

Crisp, Pete 2004. “Recording nu-metal guitar tracks.” Music Tech Magazine, viewed 12.01.07.
http://www.musictechmag.co.uk/mtm/download/recording-nu-metal-tracks