That one guitar sound

[Soulthief]

Hi all,

I have taken several attemps to record my guitar with mic's. But I just cannot record that ground shaking sound! You know, that if you palm mute you just feel it in your chest and the whole floor feels like it's shaking.
My I own a randall T2 and when I play through it, it has that sound.
I record it with a SM57 and a e906. Record everything twice so in the end i've got 4 tracks.
But when i'm mixing it doesn't have that sound ground shaking sound in it.
I know that the ground shakes because of the air that is being moved when playing loud but I dunno how to explain it different.

I thought that maybe i'm doing something wrong when EQing my guitars in the mix so any help wil be much appreciated!

 

[Leuchty]

Maybe have a play with compressors.

 

[Soulthief]

Yeah I have been screwing around with multiband compressort but I pretty don't know what i'm doing. I'm able to control a basic compression now. but a multiband compression.. hell I need some tips for that

 

[Quitty]

You're picking up on a big subject. Very big, actually.

I recommend you google 'slipperman's recording distorted guitars' for some good laughs and lots of proper studio procedure, then head over to RecordingReview which has a lot of good info for starters.

As a rule of thumb, make sure you don't have phase cancellation between your mics - if you don't know what i'm talking about, do some home-schooling and come back -
and try and pull the mics a little ways away from the cone and maybe a tad off-axis to let the lower frequencies develop.

And good luck!

 

[Dankslanger]

Recording and listening to a cabinet live are completely different things. Your live settings should differ from your recording settings because you aren't dealing with the acoustics of the room. Recording = Less gain and less ground shaking bass. Honestly you should get used to not having that ground shaking bass because that's what the bass player is for. Too much bass in the guitars drowns out the bass player.

 

[Splinterhead]

Recording and listening to a cabinet live are completely different things. Your live settings should differ from your recording settings because you aren't dealing with the acoustics of the room. Recording = Less gain and less ground shaking bass. Honestly you should get used to not having that ground shaking bass because that's what the bass player is for. Too much bass in the guitars drowns out the bass player.

^^^^this.

When you're recording and mixing each instrument is a piece of a sonic puzzle. You really want to try to keep everybody to their own basic frequency range. That means a lot of shelving the eq for the different instruments. The groundshaking does come from the bass guitar. If there is too much low freq in the guitars the mix turns to mud and a lot of the articulation is lost. Recording and mixing ERG's is somewhat challenging especially when you double/quadruple rhythm tracks. Just like Dankslanger said keep the gain and low freq down in the mix and your stuff will shine.

 

[Soulthief]

Right, while, the mic placment is good. Gives me good tones and no phasing. So basicly what i have to do is set everything at noon record, messing with eq on my amp, record a new sample, and so on until I hit that sweet spot?

Also makes sence now why i don't hear the bass in the mix.....................

I'll also take a look at the stuff Quitty said!

 

[Oxidation_Shed]

Honestly, the most important part of a good guitar tone is a good bass tone. And making sure the guitars don't down it out. Guitars: mids, mids, mids, mids.

The guitar might very well sound like shit on it's own, but in a mix they will sound so much better when you cut the lows and just concentrate on the mids. If the guitar is playing alone for a riff you can always just have a different tone that sounds good on its own.

A basic run through of the main players:
Bass - Earthshaking boom
Guitars - Mid punch
Vocals - High/Mid presence
Cymbals - High end sparkle

All of those elements alone will sound better with frequencies from other areas boosted, but in a mix you just want to concentrate on these.