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

[311boogieman]

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".

Can I assume you have listened to live guitar playing with good headphones into an interface while you or someone moves the mic around the speaker at close, 1", and further and you have found better positions for metal? Or am not following?

 

[7704A]

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.

You misunderstand, I meant you can hear how things stack up against a standard 57 on the edge of a dustcap, which is what I'm comparing to. Naturally the only person who knows how close the amp sounds to the recording in that thread would be me, so you can't compare that yourself. Best you'll get is my subjective opinions on how close it sounds to me when I listen back, which may or may not be useful to you.

 

[TheGreatGreen]

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".

Ah ok I think I see a misunderstanding here.

No, you won't hear the "whole speaker area" in the room.

Stand in the room and listen to a cab. After that, move your head a foot in any direction and listen again. Notice how the tone is completely different now. So where exactly in the room is the "true" sound of the speaker? The answer is that there isn't one, because there is no "one true whole sound" of a speaker. A cab puts out an entire spectrum of different EQ+phase signatures depending on where you stand in the room relative to the cab, and will sound different depending on the characteristics of the room is as well. All a mic does is capture a specific one of these EQ+phase signatures in space, out of an entire spectrum of tones. In the room, your ears just capture two of these EQ+phase signatures from said spectrum, and your brain mixes them in stereo. You can do the same thing with two mics. Either way a mic setup close to the cab hears no more or less of the "whole speaker sound" than your ears.

Also, think about how much farther away from the speaker your head typically is than a mic. You're hearing a LOT more room reflections than you think. If the cab would sound different in an anechoeic chamber, then your ears are hearing a whole lot of the room mixed in with the speaker. Plus, your ears can't both face the cab at the same time, as they're on opposite sides of your head. In a room, you might hear some small amount of vibrations directly caused by the speaker, but usually only in one ear at a time, and you hear just as much if not more room reflections bounced from objects or walls. And even if your head is on axis with the speaker, the speaker is likely way off axis from your ears, so does that mean your ears aren't perceiving the sound as truly as possible then?

There is no singular "in the room" tone. "In the room" tone is a myth. Instead there is an entire spectrum of sound any given guitar cab will produce throughout a given room, and where you put your head at any given moment dictates what you will hear, but that is by no means representative of the "true" tone of the whole speaker any more than what a mic would hear.

 

[BeZo]

Also, it seems like some of you haven't used the sE Electronics Voodoo series ribbon mics yet. I feel like this is a lot of the solution to just a SM57, as my VR1 sounds flat and natural. I put it on the edge of the dust cap, and being a ribbon mic, it covers more of the cone of the speaker. Even close up, it sounds very neutral on everything I've put it on, and the top end is sweet. It's not dark like other ribbon mics (R121), and it has a lot of range. Bright ribbon mics might be the future of recording guitar.

 

[frthib]

i was curious a while ago about 10" speaker.. i bought a celestion creamback and a v30 and made a closed back mesa recto 1x10 clone with high quality leftover wood from other projects..

it's surprising.. its has its own tone but this thing can cut through any mix.. its quite middy but there is a surprising amount of.bass (the cab is deep).. if micced and recorded, you can eq it to make it sound like a pseudo 4x12 if you know what you're doing with eqs..

i consider it as a usefull specialized tool..

 

[crankyrayhanky]

OP has a ton of theoretical tone philosophy but 0 sound samples trying to persuade us out of close mic-ing a v30 with a 57 for metal. Are we going to present evidence for these alternative ideas or just wonder out loud "is everybody wrong"?

 

[NinjaRaf]

This just isn't really how speaker cabs work in real life. Each speaker does not put out the same frequencies. Each one will sound slightly different. On top of that, you will ALWAYS have some room resonance happening. You can close mic a 412 in different rooms and hear this. You can mic 15-20CM back and hear this. Different size cabs will resonate differently. Different number of speakers in a cab will resonate and sound different. Every little piece adds up to contribute to what you are hearing. Having different speakers in the same 412 will change how each speaker sounds.

But like has been mentioned countless times in this thread...audio engineers have been optimizing metal guitar recordings for decades. It's simply wrong to say that the way things are done after all this time and experimentation is sub-optimal. We have to work within the parameters that sound and physics gives us, so there will never be a "perfect" solution. It's all art, there is no perfect. Science and the art of music and sound don't really translate in ways that make sense to each other.

 

[RaceU4her]

heres the mic placement for the Metallica clip i did, dead center on the cone and leaning against the grill lol

 

[Kraku]

We're still talking about different things, so I try to answer all the comments so far in this single post.

My point is not about capturing "that very specific metal tone". That's missing the whole point. My point is about capturing well any sound you manage to conjure out of your guitar cab, and not just getting one specific tone.

And this is not about the room modes either and how frequencies change when you walk around the room while listening to what comes out of the speaker. I'm fully aware of that phenomenon from placing studio monitors and evaluating where the sweetspot for listening is.

To use an analogy about the problem and how large it is IMHO, I'll describe what it would look like if you recorded a singer using the same methods as metal guitars are usually recorded. It would go something like this:

Bob is a bad sounding singer, but you've heard that if you mic him up just right he sounds awesome. Studio engineers have spent decades trying to figure out how to make Bob sound cool and now they have just the right process to make it happen. Nice! All you need to do is follow the instructions to the letter and not divert from them at all. This way you can get only one cool tone out of Bob and stick with it for all of your songs for the rest of your life. Who cares if everyone uses the exact same tone and Bob for their art! The recipe to make Bob sound awesome is that you first choose two highly colored microphones to hide Bobs true voice character. Then you place one of the mics deep down Bobs throat to capture the vocal cords directly. The other mic goes inside Bobs mouth between the side teeth and the cheek. Now neither of the mics capture even remotely any of the Bobs true voice but only microscopic specific areas before the sound even turns into its final form. Then you balance and EQ the captured mic recordings separately and voilà! Now you have recorded something that remotely resembles a human being and maybe even the singer you heard in the room. Guarantees are not guaranteed!

IMO a much easier and much more flexible way would be to actually choose a good sounding singer and just put a good microphone infront of him and then hit record and be done with it. I.e. capture the actual sound source instead of surgical tiny parts of it. (i.e. the whole speaker/driver surface area vs. couple of tiny surgical bits of it)

So my grief about the current "metal method" is that it's a rote, a recipe, something which works only for one very specific special case and that's it. You can't even guess what the end results might sound like before you actually record and listen back to that captured guitar tone. That's a massive disadvantage and hinderance for the sound design process. No wonder metal guys stick to that one rote and never entertain the idea of changing their sound, as their process is completely unflexible and doesn't leave any proper room for creative artistic expression/experimentation. For a process to be usable and flexible, you must be able to hear the end result fairly accurately even before you record it. This allows you to tweak the gear knobs to your liking and then hit record only after you've decided you like the sound/tone. That should always be the goal in studio work IMHO.

Regarding the issue of room ambience / reflections ending up into the recording if you pull the microphone back a tad bit away from the speaker:
I recorded a singer with a cardioid mic, while a PA system was playing the song fairly loudly about 1-1.5 meters (about 3-4 feet) away from the singer and her mic. The PA was behind the microphone and the mic was about 15-20 cm away from the singers mouth. The recorded signal had almost none of the sound coming in from the PA, neither directly nor from room reflections. When the singer was not singing, you had to listen REALLY carefully to even notice any of the song bleeding into the microphone. For all intents and purposes the recording was clean from the room ambience. That means that you won't get any room reflections if you mic up the guitar cab from about 15 cm away. Only if there are direct reflections from close by surfaces, you can get audible reflections. So simply lift up the cabinet off the floor to remove such reflections and maybe even pull the cab away from the wall about 1.5 meters or so, just to be sure. No room ambience should end up in the guitar recording that way if you use a proper cardioid pattern mic. In other words: if it worked for vocals, then it must work for guitar cabinets also. Otherwise the laws of physics change depending on what you're recording, and that is highly unlikely to be the case.

Regarding 4x12 vs 2x12 vs 1x12 cabs:
The more speakers your cab has, the more the frequencies have the potential to boost/cancel each other when the sound coming from those multiple speakers mixes together in the air. This is why 4x12 cabinet has the potential to sound much more different than 1x12 cab when close miked vs. what you hear with your ears. (Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not talking about room modes nor other room reflections here.) Hence it's a better idea to have a 1x12 cabinet for studio work to get rid of that problem of frequencies blending together in nasty ways, which would prevent you from hearing well what the mic is going to capture closer to the speaker. If you want the cabinet to have more bass oomph, get a cabinet which has a larger volume instead of a smaller one, so it's physically possible to produce such lower frequencies if the speaker can handle it. For example Zilla seems to manufacture such large single speaker cabinets.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[Greazygeo]

Also, it seems like some of you haven't used the sE Electronics Voodoo series ribbon mics yet. I feel like this is a lot of the solution to just a SM57, as my VR1 sounds flat and natural. I put it on the edge of the dust cap, and being a ribbon mic, it covers more of the cone of the speaker. Even close up, it sounds very neutral on everything I've put it on, and the top end is sweet. It's not dark like other ribbon mics (R121), and it has a lot of range. Bright ribbon mics might be the future of recording guitar.

I have been using one along with a 57 in thier isolater deal. Like this setup alot.

 

[BeZo]

I have been using one along with a 57 in thier isolater deal. Like this setup alot.

I need to get that. I tried setting up with my generic vocal screen and I found myself wishing it had a hole in it. I almost ordered it, but I wanted to try to make due with what I got first. I think I need one.

 

[RaceU4her]

So my grief about the current "metal method" is that it's a rote, a recipe, something which works only for one very specific special case and that's it. You can't even guess what the end results might sound like before you actually record and listen back to that captured guitar tone. That's a massive disadvantage and hinderance for the sound design process. No wonder metal guys stick to that one rote and never entertain the idea of changing their sound, as their process is completely unflexible and doesn't leave any proper room for creative artistic expression/experimentation. For a process to be usable and flexible, you must be able to hear the end result fairly accurately even before you record it. This allows you to tweak the gear knobs to your liking and then hit record only after you've decided you like the sound/tone. That should always be the goal in studio work IMHO.

not sure what you are talking about.. i have my cabs isolated in a closet and i have my amps sitting right here next to me in my control room, the same way any real studio has, so i can tweak my sounds exactly as they are gonna be recorded through my monitors. i can set up multiple amps/cabs/mics if i want and switch between, or mix together, or whatever i want to do on the fly. i built my place around making everything quick, easy and flexible

 

[Kraku]

not sure what you are talking about.. i have my cabs isolated in a closet and i have my amps sitting right here next to me in my control room, the same way any real studio has, so i can tweak my sounds exactly as they are gonna be recorded through my monitors. i can set up multiple amps/cabs/mics if i want and switch between, or mix together, or whatever i want to do on the fly. i built my place around making everything quick, easy and flexible

Exactly: with current method you need to build a whole room around the cab and mics (including remote controlled robots) to make it a viable process to monitor what you'll get on tape.

 

[RaceU4her]

Exactly: with current method you need to build a whole room around the cab and mics (including remote controlled robots) to make it a viable process to monitor what you'll get on tape.

Ok.. and metal bands have been recording in proper studios for 55 years now, and are still using the same methods you are saying don’t work, so I’m confused

 

[7704A]

Ok.. and metal bands have been recording in proper studios for 55 years now, and are still using the same methods you are saying don’t work, so I’m confused

If I understand OP correctly, he's not saying the methods don't work for getting good tones. He's saying they don't work for accurately capturing the way an amp sounds to him live and in-person.

 

[Greazygeo]

I need to get that. I tried setting up with my generic vocal screen and I found myself wishing it had a hole in it. I almost ordered it, but I wanted to try to make due with what I got first. I think I need one.

It made a big difference in my recordings. My room is small and getting alot of comb filtering. All gone now.

 

[Kraku]

If I understand OP correctly, he's not saying the methods don't work for getting good tones. He's saying they don't work for accurately capturing the way an amp sounds to him live and in-person.

Exactly.

 

[Smash]

There have been a lot of rabbitholes lately. I have been recording tones a little different lately, and i think it sounds cool. But if I still had my sm7b, i would just be close micing, because it gives the best representation