EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

[TwilightOdyssey]

I have been wanting to test coincident mic'ing (as it's called) for a very , very long time, and just never got round to it. With good reason: using multiple microphones on a single source is a MAJOR pain in the butt; it's also very time consuming and there's no promise of a payoff. But I have been reading a book that focuses a lot on coincident mic'ing and stereo mic'ing and thought I would give it a whirl.

I took a songwriting demo that has a lot of Strat tracks and reamped them through a Radial Pro RMP > Empress Heavy > EAST Studio 2 into my 197x Hiwatt cab. The cab was sat on an Auralex GRAMMA and The Shelf by Black Diamond Racing in the Flower Shoppe.

I put 3 mic's on the cab: a Cascade Fathead II and SM57 close up on the grille and just off the voice coil, and an sE Magneto 4 feet back and level with the other 2 mic's. I did not use my usual Horus or any compression pedals, or even any compression on the mic's; just set it up quickly, dialed in a serviceable tone, and pressed record. I also did not use any of my outboard microphone preamps, just the ones in my Focusrite 18i20 interface.

After I recorded all of the parts, I did a bit of gain staging, EQ, compression and reverb to get them sounding even.

Here's the end result:

[Phantasmagoria]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

and there's no promise of a payoff.

well...it paid off bigtime

Sounds insanely good ...awesome metal tune too..loved it \m/

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

Thanks! Glad you liked it.
A little taste of what's coming down the pike for the next AF album ...

[El Dunco]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

Good job! As far as it being a PITA, it's not that hard man. We learned that first trimester of production school (or in my case, before then). You just need to check the phase relationship between the close mics and observe the 3 to 1 rule for the distant ones.

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

Good job! As far as it being a PITA, it's not that hard man. We learned that first trimester of production school (or in my case, before then). You just need to check the phase relationship between the close mics and observe the 3 to 1 rule for the distant ones.

Thanks; as a quick-and-dirty test, it solidfied a few things for me. Since the room mic was mono, I kept it that way and I think it helped recreate the sense of depth.
I think the difficulty is commensurate with one's level of experience. I certainly wouldn't recommend coincident mic'ing to a beginner.
There are several tricks for getting the phase locked in on the close mic's, but for this I just used my ears and nudged them until it locked it; hardly the scientific approach and not what I would do for final tracking.
As for the 3:1 rule, even through the room mic was far enough to observe general phase, I still found that nudging it forward or backwards made a big/noticeable difference. Once again, I just used my ears are adjusted to taste.

[El Dunco]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

Every guitar sound on any kind of official release I've done has wound up with at least 2 mics. The old way I used to do it was get my first mic where it sounded best, then sweep around with the second mic in combination with the first one to find the sound I was looking for. Once that was in position, I would run pink noise through the cabinet with the second mic in reverse polarity and change the distance until the pink noise was as close to cancelled out as possible. Then with the polarity put back to normal, both mics would sound a little thin by themselves and then sound more or less "source accurate" in tandem with minimal phase discrepancies.

[DankStar]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

dig it - sounds very full like on operation: mindcrime. wonder if they did something similar. I say it was worth it.

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

Every guitar sound on any kind of official release I've done has wound up with at least 2 mics. The old way I used to do it was get my first mic where it sounded best, then sweep around with the second mic in combination with the first one to find the sound I was looking for. Once that was in position, I would run pink noise through the cabinet with the second mic in reverse polarity and change the distance until the pink noise was as close to cancelled out as possible. Then with the polarity put back to normal, both mics would sound a little thin by themselves and then sound more or less "source accurate" in tandem with minimal phase discrepancies.

Yep, that is the method I learned as well.
This was an experiment to see if the idea was even worth pursuing. If I had a dedicated recording space I would probably do it; but knowing this would require a room rental, car rental, and a couple of days means a lot of consideration and planning have to go into it before I decide.

[LLL]

Re: EXPERIMENT: multi-mic'ing electric guitar

+1,000

Can also try one mic on cap (for treble) and one mic on cone (for bass) and mix 'n' match levels.