Nov 29, 2011

Tips For Properly Mic’ing a Guitar Amp

When I started to delve deeper into the world of recording my own demos at home, I began asking my friend that owns a studio a ton of questions. Most of these questions had to do with microphone placement and any tips he could give me on the things I should or shouldn’t be doing. I actually asked him to check out the way I had things set up and tell me what I was doing wrong. This was extremely helpful…. even if I had just learned one tip, such as not directly pointing the mic into the center of the cone, then it was worth it.

I felt that this was a very important lesson for me and I wanted to share an article I recently read all about mic’ing cabs, single speakers, setting the signal path, etc. Like I said, I want this site to be a well-rounded resource for all of us. So, if you are looking for tips on properly mic’ing an amp, please do enjoy…..

Mic’ing the Guitar Amp

by Jay Graydon for Guitar.com

 

Positioning The Mic

We will be mic’ing the speaker from the front. If you have an open back cabinet, you could mic from the rear, but we’ll get to that later.

 Front view of the speaker. The circle in the center is the speaker cone (or dust cover over the cone). The small circle to the left of the center cone is the mic. The mic distance is about one inch from the left edge of the cone (or dust cover)  Note that the mic (small circle) needs to be pointed at a 20 degree angle towards the cone center while remaining about an inch from the cone (or dust cover).

We will use a guitar amp speaker cabinet with one speaker to start. If the speaker bottom has grill cloth and you can’t see the center of the speaker clearly, use a flashlight. Look at the speaker and notice the dust cover in the center. Point the mic at the exact center and then move the mic left without changing the height of the plane until you are about an inch left from the edge of the center dust cover. Now place the mic about once inch back from the grill cloth. If you have no grill cloth, imagine where the grill cloth would be in front of the speaker. Now position the mic capsule at a 20-degree angle pointing towards the center of the speaker.

We used the positioning to the left side but you could use the right side, or below or above the center point using the same positioning logic. For some reason, the left position seems to work best in most cases.

If the amp is a combo amp, the amp electronics may create an electronic field the mic may hear. This will be obvious when monitoring the mic over the studio monitors as you will hear a strange hum. In this case, you might need to mic on the low side of the speaker – closer to the floor – instead of to the left, right or above the center of the speaker.

There are a few good reasons to mic in such close proximity to the speaker. The main reason is this gives a “punchy” sound, since the speaker air is not diffused by distance, and the air movement is blasted into the mic diaphragm. There are other reasons that will be covered when we get into recording details.

THIS IS JUST AN EXCERPT… TO READ JAY’S FULL ARTICLE, WHICH INCLUDES TIPS FOR MIC’ING MULTIPLE SPEAKER CABS, SIGNAL PATH TIPS, ETC…. PLEASE CLICK HERE.

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