Metal guitar recording methods used by majority are far from optimal?

I get where you're coming from. I'm focused on trying to capture the in-the-room experience/sound on a recording as some of the rigs I've set up have very cool spatial effects that I haven't found committed to tape yet. So, I've been going down the rabbit hole of trying to find a mic that will (near) exactly capture how things sound in the room. So far I've been trying PZMs, and they seem promising (plus fairly cheap to find second hand). Set up right, I seem to get more natural recordings than with a 57, though I don't have the method nailed down and repeatable yet.

For traditional-ish metal sounds, the problem then becomes, as others mentioned, that your recording environment matters more. E.g., PZMs are omni SDCs so I get bleed from my strings plinking and other ambient noise at low amp volumes. A 57 is easier to record with at 2am. Also if your cabinet room placement doesn't sound too great there's no papering over it like you can kinda do with a 57. The payoff is getting recorded tones very close to what you're hearing in the room, if that's what you want. I just started playing with a stereo pair of PZMs, and that seems to help ameliorate some of the difficulties in using them for "traditional" metal style recordings (i.e. close-mic-ish), with some trade-offs like your stereo image being mostly set at record time.

One thing that seems to work a lot with a single PZM is just plopping it down on the floor (or a large piece of plywood or other hard surface if you have carpet) a little in front of the amp cabinet and then sliding it around a little until things sound right. That's how I've gotten the best matches between recording and room experience, and it's dead simple. There are still some edges cases where it doesn't seem to work though that I'm ironing out. When it does work though it's fantastic. I helped track some stuff for a friend, and neither of us had experience using a 57. To avoid having to deal with the learning curve during our session, we first tried plopping the PZM down an arbitrary foot or two in front of the cab. Playback was near-identical to what we were hearing in the room, so we didn't spend anymore time messing with mics and just started tracking. Over in my 4104 NAD thread I'm sorta journaling my progress with things so far, with comparison clips, if you want to hear how things are going.
 
I'm willing to listen to example recordings if you provide them.

However, something I've found that happens as you use smaller speakers is that generally speaking the resonances change, shifting upward. This tends to shift the center "body" of the tone upward so instead of big smooth even balanced tone, you often get an overall more fizzy sound with mids that don't punch nearly as hard and aren't as thick, and much less low end wallop.

Now, for something like a mostly loud and clean Super Reverb tone with just a bit of grit in there? Yeah I'll take the 4x10 cab all day long. But for huge high gain tones I'd rather take the 4x12 any day.
 
Most of us would rather focus on playing & writing, instead of focusing on some alternate method that just makes the job harder.
 
There’s a reason everyone uses this combination and method, and it’s not from lack of experimentation. If 10” speakers were the best for this, that would be the “V30” that everyone uses, but the fact is they simply aren’t.
 
Close mic'ing guitar is the same as close mic'ing drums. Sure, you can get a bigger "in the room" feel with just overheads and kick, but that doesn't always fit the bill. The reason we close mic everything in metal is because we look to capture the attack. Metal is fast, so we look for articulation in the notes/hits instead of big "in the room" sounds. Room mics just turn to mud, and the slightest bit of reverb will kill the recording. Same goes for guitar. Close mic'ing captures the attack of the speaker better.
 
dead-pan said:
It's not just about putting a mic in front of the speaker.

Different parts of the speaker sound different.

There isn't a single imperfect overused suboptimal method.

It is an art.

Multiple mics catch more of the speaker. And mixing the mics and speaker position cancels some and captures more of the frequencies.
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That is my exact point, but it should not be an art or based on luck. It should be craft and/or science to be easily able to capture the exact sound you actually hear and are after:

Different parts of the speaker sound very different when close miked. That's the exact reason why you cannot know what the recording will sound like, if you listen to the cabinet in the room. You really have to record it first before you have any kind of idea what the end result will sound like. The cure is what I described: Pull the mic a tad bit further away from the speaker. This way a neutral sounding cardioid pattern mic should be able to capture the total sound character of the speaker, which should be close to what you're actually hearing in the room. That should make the process much more quick and easy and takes a lot of guessing and testing out of the equation.
 
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BeZo said:
The 10" speaker is used in bass cabs not because of its ability to reproduce low frequencies. It is used in bass cabs because you can fit more on them in a smaller box. Low end is produced by the surface area of the speakers. Do some math and use the pi button on your calculator. An 8x10 cab has more speaker surface area that a 2x18 cab, let alone a 2x15. Same is true with pizza. You get more pizza by getting more smaller pizzas than you do with one big one. That's why you record a 4x12. Even if each individual speaker is not producing the low end, the total of all the speakers will, and the mics will pick it up (low end is rather omnidirectional).
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That's not exactly how it goes. Each speaker in the 4x12 cabinet will produce the exact same frequencies (more or less), so if you have X amount of bass and Y amount of high frequencies, you'll get 4 x (X+Y) frequencies with a 4x12 cabinet. This does not take into account two big issues that are very evident with 4x12s:

1. With closed back cabinet the speakers sound seems to suffocate as they try to pump the air inside the cabinet. With 2x12 cabinets this doesn't happen much.
2. The frequency cancellation due to phase between the speakers is quite big when you listen to the 4x12 in the room. This isn't nearly as evident with the smaller cabs.
 
BeZo said:
Close mic'ing guitar is the same as close mic'ing drums. Sure, you can get a bigger "in the room" feel with just overheads and kick, but that doesn't always fit the bill. The reason we close mic everything in metal is because we look to capture the attack. Metal is fast, so we look for articulation in the notes/hits instead of big "in the room" sounds. Room mics just turn to mud, and the slightest bit of reverb will kill the recording. Same goes for guitar. Close mic'ing captures the attack of the speaker better.
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I was specifically talking about close miked sounds, from the distance of about 15-20 cm. That's about 6-8 inches. So that's not a room mic yet.
 
7704A said:
Over in my 4104 NAD thread I'm sorta journaling my progress with things so far, with comparison clips, if you want to hear how things are going.
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This topic requires the listener to hear the cabinet output in the room and then what was captured through the mic. So it's impossible to say how well the process worked from audio clips alone.
 
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what I am after here. By mentioning "in the room" sound, I don't mean that I want the room ambience into the sound. I mean the frequency spectrum itself. If you close mic the speaker from an inch away, you'll hear very different type of sound than in the room, because different parts of the speaker sound different. In the room you'll hear the whole speaker area, how it sounds as a whole. That is what I meant by saying "it is possible to actually hear that sound in the room".
 
The cool thing these days is that for about the price of one full day in a real studio, you can get a set of monitors, a two channel interface, a dynamic and condenser mic and experiment with mic positions till you’re blue in the face capturing whatever it is you’re looking to capture.
 
TheGreatGreen said:
However, something I've found that happens as you use smaller speakers is that generally speaking the resonances change, shifting upward. This tends to shift the center "body" of the tone upward so instead of big smooth even balanced tone, you often get an overall more fizzy sound with mids that don't punch nearly as hard and aren't as thick, and much less low end wallop.
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That's again the problem I'm talking about:

The metal guys record only tiny parts of the speaker, all of which sound very different to each other. I.e. none of them sound like the speaker itself as a whole. So you'll already get a very skewed results by not capturing the whole speaker, but tiny faction of it. On top of that people use highly colored mics to capture those already skewed frequency spectrums, making the end result even more different. That approach basically ignores the original speaker sound completely and tries to create something completely different. If it sounds anything like the cabinet in the room, it's by pure luck, instead of using any logic in the recording process.

So what I'm proposing in my original post, is to pull the mic just a little bit further away from the speaker to be able to capture it's whole physical surface area, i.e. the speakers real sound, instead of tiny different sounding part of it. If a neutral sounding mic is used for this, then that also won't skew the frequency spectrum, but you should be able to record what the speaker actually sounds like. That's the same frequency spectrum you'll hear in the room with your own ears.
 
crankyrayhanky said:
as close as you can
sometimes I take the grille off so I can get closer
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There shouldn't be any room ambience in the recording if you pull the mic away about 15-20 cm or so. The difference in the sound is because you actually capture the actual sound of the speakers whole surface. If the recording doesn't sound biting enough, then change the speaker to a more biting sounding one.

Note when say "speaker", I don't mean the whole cabinet, but just one speaker/driver inside the cabinet.
 
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Kraku said:
That's not exactly how it goes. Each speaker in the 4x12 cabinet will produce the exact same frequencies (more or less), so if you have X amount of bass and Y amount of high frequencies, you'll get 4 x (X+Y) frequencies with a 4x12 cabinet. This does not take into account two big issues that are very evident with 4x12s:

1. With closed back cabinet the speakers sound seems to suffocate as they try to pump the air inside the cabinet. With 2x12 cabinets this doesn't happen much.
2. The frequency cancellation due to phase between the speakers is quite big when you listen to the 4x12 in the room. This isn't nearly as evident with the smaller cabs.
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There is an old saying that " The whole is greater than the sum of its parts". When it comes to bass response and reproducing low frequencies, surface area matters. That's why we bassists rock 8x10 cabs.

1) Hermetically sealed cabs do not "suffocate" their speakers. The drop in pressure from the speakers jumping forward quickens the return and causes the cab to sound "snappier" and more responsive. There is some math involved to ensure the volume of the cab is correct, and it depends on the speaker, but most are designed around a standard cab size. Alternatively, porting or opening the back will allow the speakers to move more, making them boomier and looser. Either way, hearing the sum of the speakers in the room is always greater than the sample taken from any microphone.

2) Phase cancelation doesn't happen from multiple speakers, but from the speakers themselves reflecting off the back of the cab. You can fix this with different backs or baffling, sometimes it helps, sometimes it's better with the reflection. It's entirely subjective on if you want the frequencies that are canceled.
 
Kraku said:
I was specifically talking about close miked sounds, from the distance of about 15-20 cm. That's about 6-8 inches. So that's not a room mic yet.
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You're speaking of the proximity effect of the microphone. Every mic has a different polar pattern, and proximity changes the way the mic responds. There are sweet spots for everything.
 
BeZo said:
There is an old saying that " The whole is greater than the sum of its parts". When it comes to bass response and reproducing low frequencies, surface area matters. That's why we bassists rock 8x10 cabs.

1) Hermetically sealed cabs do not "suffocate" their speakers. The drop in pressure from the speakers jumping forward quickens the return and causes the cab to sound "snappier" and more responsive. There is some math involved to ensure the volume of the cab is correct, and it depends on the speaker, but most are designed around a standard cab size. Alternatively, porting or opening the back will allow the speakers to move more, making them boomier and looser. Either way, hearing the sum of the speakers in the room is always greater than the sample taken from any microphone.

2) Phase cancelation doesn't happen from multiple speakers, but from the speakers themselves reflecting off the back of the cab. You can fix this with different backs or baffling, sometimes it helps, sometimes it's better with the reflection. It's entirely subjective on if you want the frequencies that are canceled.
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I chose my words wrong by saying phase cancellation. Mutual coupling was the word I should have used. Here is a video about what I mean, how more speakers affect the sound:

 
Kraku said:
That's again the problem I'm talking about:

The metal guys record only tiny parts of the speaker, all of which sound very different to each other. I.e. none of them sound like the speaker itself as a whole. So you'll already get a very skewed results by not capturing the whole speaker, but tiny faction of it. On top of that people use highly colored mics to capture those already skewed frequency spectrums, making the end result even more different. That approach basically ignores the original speaker sound completely and tries to create something completely different. If it sounds anything like the cabinet in the room, it's by pure luck, instead of using any logic in the recording process.

So what I'm proposing in my original post, is to pull the mic just a little bit further away from the speaker to be able to capture it's whole physical surface area, i.e. the speakers real sound, instead of tiny different sounding part of it. If a neutral sounding mic is used for this, then that also won't skew the frequency spectrum, but you should be able to record what the speaker actually sounds like. That's the same frequency spectrum you'll hear in the room with your own ears.
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I mean, it's not just metal guys. Anybody who records guitar cabs with mics only captures a tiny window of the entire spectrum of sound emitted by a speaker over a large area.

However, I'm not even sure capturing "the entire speaker's sound" is technically possible, because as soon as you capture the tone from point A in space, then you can't capture it from point B in space which is also a representation of the speaker's tone, isn't it? But that aside, I don't think the goal is to capture "the entire speaker's" sound though, the goal is to capture "good" sound. I'm not even sure capturing "the entire speaker's tone" even if that was possible, would necessarily sound good, or at least better than how things are currently done. Also, part of the reason mics are positioned close to the speaker is to take advantage of something called the Proximity Effect, where the closer you place a mic to the source, the stronger the low end becomes relative to other frequencies. But sure if you want to back the mic from the speaker, you're more than welcome to do that, and it can sound good that way, yeah. But I thought we were talking about 4x10 cabs for metal, not just mic placement.

Regarding mics and their coloration, you're also free to use something like an Earthworks reference mic, which measures completely flat, at whatever distance from any speaker size you like. But again, the goal for guitar tone isn't necessarily to represent perfect accuracy of the equipment, it's to get a good sound. And you certainly don't have to limit yourself to a 10 inch speaker to do that. But again, why are you convinced a flat sounding mic is a good thing? Personally I'm not a huge fan of reference quality flat mics on guitar amps, but then again I've never tried one on a closed back 4x10 cab so I can't say anything about that for sure.

Something else I'll say about the pursuit of capturing a "pure, complete" signal from a cab is that the entire concept of a guitar cab itself, to quote somebody smarter than me, is already "a hilarious parade of acoustic design errors that just so happens to provide the perfect filter for high gain guitar amps." On top of that, by the time the guitar tone even gets to the speaker, it's been shaped, distorted, re-shaped, and re-distorted to such an insane degree that the sound you get is barely a shadow of its original source anyway. Amps also sound awful when listened to raw. Ever plugged an amp into a load box and listened to the direct signal? Terrible. A speaker cab already represents a huge amount of further manipulation and filtering of that original signal, so there is no "signal purity" to be chased at that point, really, nor does the speaker cab itself represent the final culmination of the guitar tone, instead it's just one step in a long chain of signal manipulations to arrive at an ultimate conclusion of whatever hits the mixing board.

Guitar players get hung up here because a speaker cab (real or virtual) is the last element necessary in a "minimum viable" guitar rig, meaning a guitar rig with the least possible parts needed to produce sound. At minimum, gotta have a guitar, an amp, and a cab to make physical noise, which is fine, but when it comes to recording or going through a PA, the cab is still just one ingredient in the stew, and it's perfectly fine to drive a cab hard just to use a tiny little mic to capture the air movement at one tiny little point in space in front of it while the rest of the sound "goes to waste" by not being captured. Again the point is not to "harvest" a large part of the sound the speaker produces, it's just to produce something that can be made to sound good to a mic.

To bring the conversation back down to earth, I'll say that I have tried 4x10 cabs I thought sounded cool. Good, even. But I've never played one or mic'd one I thought sounded better than my favorite 4x12's for high gain metal stuff.

Again, if you want to make a few recordings and post some clips, by all means please do and I'll be happy to listen, and I'll be the first to admit your idea is better if it turns out to sound better.
 
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You're saying that the recording methods that producers have spent years or even decades optimizing are far from optimal?

We're gonna need to hear proof
 
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