Recording Electric Guitar - Start Here

June 14, 2023 Julian Rodgers

Brief Summary

Recording an electric guitar is usually simple to do but the variety of potential tones, questions of taste, and preference can make something which should be simple get more complicated. Luckily there has never been a better time to record electric guitars.

Going Deeper

Electric guitar is not only central to many styles of music, but the sound of electric guitars is also probably one of the most divisive areas of music production when it comes to taste and personal preference. For that reason, when talking about recording an electric guitar, it’s important to keep in mind that there are going to be many right answers.

Unlike bass guitar, where using a virtual instrument plug-in to generate a realistic bass part that would be convincing in the context of a mix is finally possible, I’m a bass player and a well constructed part created in Toontrack’s EZ Bass is alarmingly good, we’re not quite there yet with electric guitars. In spite of brave efforts, a virtual guitarist that would hold up to scrutiny from a listener doesn’t yet exist. Therefore, when talking about creating electric guitar parts, it can probably be taken as read that we’re talking about an actual electric guitar, but beyond that, there are many ways in which the recording process can go.

Do You Really Need An Amplifier?

The first question is probably whether or not you are using an amplifier and recording the resulting sound using a microphone in the time-served manner. In an ideal world this is probably still most people's preferred method. However, practicalities and the extremely impressive results offered by emulations and plug-ins mean that it’s certainly no longer as straightforward as “amplifier good, simulation bad.”

Almost everybody will have access to the necessary input to record an electric guitar on their audio interface. Unlike line-level signals such as the outputs from hardware keyboards and the like, the output from an electric guitar has a relatively high impedance, and this needs to be used in conjunction with a suitable Instrument input. This is often indicated on the front panel as ‘hi-z’ - a hi-z input presents an appropriate impedance to the guitar's pickup to capture the correct balance of frequencies, and while using an input with the wrong impedance will work, the results will sound different to how they should. We don’t need to go into how impedance works here, but being aware that it can affect the results when recording guitars is important. If you want to know more about the effect impedance has on capturing guitar tones check out Luke’s excellent article "Not All Audio Interfaces Are Made Equal For Guitarists" .

Recording the output from a guitar is as simple as plugging it into a suitable instrument input, setting the gain, and hitting record. This does however assume that the guitar is in tune, suitably set up, and in good condition - which is rather beyond the intended scope of this article. However, there is a great deal of information available online about guitar setup and maintenance. The most important piece of advice is that, before recording a guitar, check tuning and intonation, people won’t care whether you used a 57 or a 421 on the cab, but they will care if your B string is flat throughout!

Guitar Amplifier Emulation Plug-ins

All DAWs provide at least some form of amplifier emulation. For example, Pro Tools has Eleven II and Logic Pro X has Amp Designer. Third-party solutions are also available, and the best of these are truly excellent. For example, IK Multimedia’s Amplitube paid version is a fantastic solution, sounding excellent and offering a bewildering choice of amplifiers, stompboxes, and miking options.

If you’re looking for release-quality guitars, then from a sonic point of view, there isn’t any practical reason to use anything other than software. However the feeling of playing a real amplifier and feeling air moving in a room is different, and many would say better than listening to an emulation through headphones.

Kemper Profiling Amp

Hardware Digital Emulations

It would be a mistake to only think of software plug-ins when thinking about using amplifier emulations. Some of the best available exist in hardware. One piece of hardware which has attracted praise from the team is the Kemper Profiling Amplifier. This hardware offers not only an extensive library of amplifiers but also the possibility to profile your own amplifiers.

Whether you use software or hardware for amp modelling, the results can be truly excellent, so don’t think of this route as being in any way a poor relation to using a real amplifier.

Digital/Analogue Hybrid Approaches

The choice between analogue and digital doesn’t preclude the use of both, and in the same way as many guitarists favour the ‘pedal platform’ approach to choosing an amplifier, meaning that they choose an amplifier for it’s suitability for shaping their specific sound using a variety of pedals, the same approach can be taken using an emulation of an amplifier and cabinet in combination with some analogue pedals. It was a widely held opinion that modelled amps do clean and distorted sounds well but sometimes struggled with the ‘in-between’ sounds on the edge of breakup. The current generation of digital emulations have these tones covered but using an analogue overdrive before a clean amp model can be a useful way to add some analogue touch to your digital experience

Real Amplifiers

If you decide to go down the real amplifier route, does it have to be a valve amplifier? Many would say yes, and a real Fender Bassman or Vox AC30 (or Marshall JCM800 or whatever your preference might be) on full tilt is a wonderful thing. However just because an amplifier has valves in it doesn’t mean it is necessarily superior and just because an amplifier is digital doesn’t necessarily mean it is inferior. The Boss Katana is all digital and sounds far better than the all-valve Traynor the guitarist in my band insists on using…

And valve amps are heavy, and potentially dangerous due to the high voltages inside, and to get them sounding good, even small valve amps have to be run loud. An AC30 or Fender Twin at the sweetspot is unfeasibly, ruinously loud. And those Marshall stacks? Don’t even think about it in a home studio unless you have very understanding (or distant) neighbours!

That being said, while the sound of a good amp in the room can be wonderful, it’s the sound you capture which matters, and what an SM57 hears from an inch off the cabinet is very different to what you hear from 20 feet away. Recording an electric guitar is simple but requires you to maintain your objectivity as there is no ‘correct’ sound. Tones vary wildly and context is everything.

One Mic

However tempting it might be to add complexity, there is nothing wrong with using one mic to record an electric guitar. A dynamic is most people’s first choice, as is placing it very close on the cabinet. The sound is at its brightest in the centre of the driver. Use a torch to locate it if you can’t feel where the driver is, it’s not necessarily in the middle! Moving towards the edge of the driver the sound becomes progressively darker. This is a very useful way to shape the sound at source.

If you are using a speaker cabinet with more than one driver, take the time to listen to all of them. They will all sound different and probably more than you were expecting. Choose your favourite. This might well change from recording to recording.

Many people’s default choice in this role is the ubiquitous Shure SM57. It’s particularly useful in this role because it captures the upper midrange ‘bite’ of a guitar so well. Many dynamic mics are excellent in this role and all dynamics share a relative slowness in their transient response compared to other mic types, which can be useful.

Condensers are different but equally suitable if you like their speed and extended high frequency response. Ribbon mics are very popular for their perceived lack of harshness compared to either dynamics or condensers. They are often paired with a dynamic mic, with the dynamic supplying the bite and the ribbon supplying the body. A very common example of this is the pairing of an SM57 dynamic with a Royer R121 ribbon, though this is just a popular example, there is no ‘right choice’.

More Than One Mic

When using more than one mic on a guitar amp, if the two mics are at different distances from the amp, it can cause comb-filtering effects which can result in a characteristic ‘phaseyness’, often adding a hollowness to the sound. It is possible to precisely align microphones manually but there are excellent software tools which can do this automatically these days such as Soundradix Auto Align 2 and Nugen’s Aligner. When mics are properly aligned they will have more punch and low end, but don’t see phaseyness as ‘wrong’. Some very famous guitar sounds have used it very deliberately in the past. If it sounds good, it is good.

Recording A DI

Even if you are recording a beautiful sounding amp in a great sounding room, I’d always recommend recording a DI signal straight from the guitar as well. This DI take can be very useful for a couple of reasons:

The first is quickly adding width. For example if I need to change things up in the chorus, I’ll often run the DI track through an amp modelling plugin and pan the two tracks for instant width. Taking this further, if you have the facility to re-amp, you can send the DI signal from your DAW out to a real amp and record that. If you have an alternative amp to try you can do it after the musicians have left.

To Re-amp correctly you need a re-amp box or a similar facility on your interface. To sound the same as plugging a guitar straight into the amp input, the signal from the DAW needs to present a similarly high impedance. Re-amp boxes are made by companies such as Radial, and Avid’s MBOX Studio is particularly well appointed for guitar recording as it has a built in hi-Z re-amp output and hi-Z outputs on the back for using guitar pedals on the effects loop.

The second reason is a tip Mike Exeter shared where he uses a DI track for editing in his DAW, using grouping he can use the clear waveform of the undistorted DI track to guide his edits and have them mirrored on the distorted track. Nice!

Recording Doubles

Adding a duplicate guitar track with a different amplifier is a quick way to get useful added width but one of the best ways to build impressive guitar tracks is to double your parts. By this I mean record it a second time. The small differences between the performances add a very impressive dimension to the track. The danger with this technique is that if the second part isn’t very close to the first, the doubling works against the track, adding mess. This can quickly ruin a track. The best way to avoid this is to take care while tracking and to re-record anything which falls short. Manual edits can help and tools like Synchro Arts’ Vocalign Ultra can do an excellent job of tightening doubles.

The Question Of Tone

Recording an electric guitar isn’t difficult. But one of the biggest challenges about using electric guitars in your productions is the sheer variety of tones the instrument can produce. Years ago we didn’t have 20 different amplifiers to choose from when we were making our first steps into recording. Nowadays novices are presented with a bewildering choice. However guitar sounds are all variations of a few core sounds. Amplifier choice has a huge effect on the results and having a clear understanding of what people mean when they talk about British vs American tones or what the famous Vox ‘chime’ sounds like can really help a producer or engineer create sounds. To illustrate this our resident guitar wizard Mark M Thompson has created some examples. Over to Mark:

The sheer quality of the tools available to us these days mean we no longer need to lug any heavy amps to sessions or deafen our neighbours in the search for “the” tone. It can all be done in-the-box and remotely without waiting for any valves to warm up or having an engineer spending an hour moving mics around in front of your cones (which you can do yourself virtually with sims such as Amplitube and Helix Native).

The game changer for me was impulse responses. Pairing impeccably recorded speaker and cabinet IRs with high end digital and modelling amps has made it practically indistinguishable, to my ears at least, between real amps and their software counterparts. But you can’t just plug your guitar straight into your interface, select the “Jimi Fuzz” preset and expect wonders. You have to engineer your virtual amp as you would a real one. Guitar choice, pickup choice, playing and dynamic approach, what amp are you choosing, is there a preamp involved, what volume the amp is, the type of room its in, how much of that room ambience is blended into the sound, what mic or mics are used, where those mics are placed virtually…there’s a dizzying array of options available (some may say too many, and that endless tweaking kills creativity) so it might be best to dip your toe in with emulations of the three standard workhorse amps, and ones you will find in virtually* every single amp modelling suite: a Fender Twin, a Vox AC30 and a Marshall J45.

*pun intended

Audio Demos

Americana: The music that welcomes any guitar amp! These three examples demonstrate just what a difference amplifier choice makes. There’s not much point in playing completely different things for each amp demo, so I thought it’d be nice to use the same parts for each. Than makes it easier to AB, too.

Each example is given in context with a miniscule amount of dynamic delay and reverb after the amp and cab combo and then again with just the dry guitar tracks. In terms of the setup there’s nothing remotely flash going on here: Fingers > Strat > SSL 2 USB interface > Pro Tools > Helix Native > Waves’ CLA76. Both rhythm and lead guitars are going through identical settings for each amp, the difference in tone being affected by volume knob control and pickup choice.