There is a song called The Park on the new Predator Dub Assassins album On Any Sunday which gives a pretty good example of some of the little tweaks my recordings will go through on their way to completion. In this case the lead guitar track and guitar solo were completely changed to fit the vibe of the song. It’s also a good opportunity to show one of the rudimentary but effective guitar miking techniques I used on this project.
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I used two mics on the guitar cabinet for this lead guitar track. This is a great way to expand your tonal options during mixdown and to enhance frequencies which may have otherwise been missed but using only a single microphone. It is important however, to be aware of phase issues that can occur when using two mics together. Phase issues can occur when the sound waves hit the two mics at different times canceling each other out and causing the summed result to sound dramatically thinner than it should. To combat this I set the mic diaphragms up visually as close as possible before recording a pass of guitar to hear the sound. If there are any phase issues present I will open an EQ plug-in on one of the mic tracks (usually Waves VQ3) that has a polarity switch on it and engage the switch to flip the polarity of the mic on that track. This usually clears up any issues if there are any.
Diagram showing the red and blue sound waves being “out of phase”
For this lead track I used a my 1999 Fender Stratocaster into a Marshall 1974x set to clean. I cannot rave enough about this point-to-point hand wired Marshall. It’s a reissue of a combo made from 1965-1967. It has one aged Celestion greenback 12″ speaker and I love it’s clean sound just as much as the iconic Marshall-y crunch. It has two knobs per channel : volume and tone. That’s it. I miked up the cabinet with an AKG C414 XL II into an Apogee Ensemble and a Shure SM57 into a Presonus ADL 600. I recorded everything into Pro Tools. Between guitar and amp I tried a series of different and pedals in the quest to find an appropriate sound. I started with two overdrive units, the ubiquitous and legendary Ibanez TS808 Tube Screamer and a cool recent unit by Earthquaker Devices called White Light. While both sounded great, for some reason I felt I had to up the extreme factor and switched in a Red Witch FuzzGod II, a really fun and interesting fuzz and recorded the guitar solo with it.
It was a day or so later upon relistening to the song that I decided to change up the vibe on the lead guitar track. The song is a more intimate, quiet type of tune so I don’t know why I thought a fuzzed out psychedelic guitar track would be suitable for it. Again I pulled out the Strat, but this time I plugged it into a Fulltone Deja Vibe and then into the same Marshall 1974x. I played with a clean setting and the Deja Vibe lent a watery kind of sound to the Fender. I replaced the fuzzed out solo with a funky rhythm type of thing that I was happy with and which I thought fit the intent of the song much better. Let me know what you think, I’ve included clips from rough mixes of the song in progress for you to check out as well as the finished song. I hope this little demo has been insightful or helpful. Your support of the new project when it drops for Spotify Predownload and Apple presale on March 16th means the world to me and I thank you! The full album will be released on 4/20/2019. See you soon!
Fuzz guitar solo
Guitar #1
Guitar #2
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