Who said this wasn’t gonna be a blog?! Anyway, I’ll continue with the recording of the Stinging Nettles first full length record. Sunday afternoon as the drums were finished we decided to set up to do the first round of guitars. We had Monday evening booked as well to finish up.
Our idea for this first electric guitar (there will be two) was to split the signal from the guitar 3 ways. Using a DI box, we split 1) to the console 2) Amp #1 – a Vox VR30 through a 2X12″ speaker cabinet and 3) An Epiphone Electar Tube 10 through another 2X12″ speaker cabinet.
Both of these amps are tube amplifiers and have a great, creamy sound when you get the input/output balance right. On both amps we laid off of any overdrive/drive circuits and went for really pushing the amp LOUD to get the tones we wanted. The guitar was an Epiphone semi-hollow body. (I’m not sure of the model) For microphones we went with an SM57 pointed to the center of the cone on the Epiphone Amp through a Purple Biz preamp to ProTools. For the Vox amp we had an MD421 positioned slightly off-axis to the speaker cone through an API preamp to PT. We also had the Fathead Ribbon mic in the room pointing to a metal sign on the wall to capture reflections of the room and blend in if needed.
That’s 4 guitar tracks… and we still have to do the second guitar. The bottom line is we may or may not use all the signals for every track, or I’ll most likely sum certain amounts of each to one fader on the console and treat it as a mono track. The direct signal is more so for back up in case we need to re-amp the signal for a different tone.
We managed to get all 11 tracks done between Sunday and Monday night. It’s been a long weekend and we’ll be set to come back next weekend for the second guitar. We took pictures of this set up too with John’s camera. I hope to post some pics soon.
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