AES Journal Forum

Having served as the Applications Engineer for Tascam, Fender Pro Audio and JBL, and taught audio recording at USC and UCLA for fifteen years, I can add that while we academically oriented engineers may wish to analyze and understand the recording art to facilitate a reliable method of doing things that can provide practitioners confidence in their own results, it is largely a waste of time and a misdirection of artistic effort. Musical instruments themselves are often made of wood (including guitar amplifiers and drums), and that fact alone makes tone production a random affair that requires cut-and-try miking to obtain something that sounds good. Consensus of what sounds good also has limited value and grave danger to artistic intent.

The more engineers try to obtain cookie cutter methods for irreducibly complex problems such as musical instrument miking, the more the world ends up with sterile, same-sounding samples and homogenized, boring recordings that fail to give musical art and artists the subtle differentiations of quality and sensibility that make music interesting and give it value. Without value, there is no reason not to steal music.

Famous jazz musician Paul Desmond (saxophonist with the Dave Brubeck Quartet) once joked that "A jazz musician is someone who never plays the same thing once," and in this innocent observation, defined exactly why it is unmusical and antithetical to musical art, to understand and predict it completely.

As a field recordist with Grammy-nominated recordings myself, I use unusually consistent methods of miking pianos, basses and drum kits, but notwithstanding setups that are left in place for a series of performances in the same room, have never obtained (and hope never to) the same sound from instruments, groups, rooms or audiences, and I regard these tonal "inconsistencies" as a positive, not a negative.

I resist the notion that we should spend a minute of our time studying "how to" mike a guitar amp and suggest we spend that time experimenting as the great recording engineers have always done. Experimentation, not method, is the engine that has created our great, and now declining musical heritage.

If you want to know how to mike a guitar amp, do it a thousand times.

Drew Daniels

I think this article more so inspires experimentation in microphone placement, rather than making any effort in teaching the correct way to mic a guitar amp. It's definitely the case that getting the same tone twice is close to impossible, and maybe not worth while trying to chase. As engineers we would much prefer to find the best tone we can, rather than chase something that happened before.

In order to do this, we must understand how the changes in mic placement (angle, distance, relationship to the center of the cone) will effect the overall sound. Having the knowledge of these changes will help us work faster to find our desired tone compared to trial and error style guessing. I think Alex Case does a good job of sharing his knowledge to help us make informed decisions when chasing the ideal guitar tone.

I personally feel the most confident changing things when I know, or can at least predict in an educated way, what will happen. While this knowledge can come from trying things many times, it is great to have the start point that this article provides.

Famous jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker said "Master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that stuff and just play." While this quote seems whimsical, the concept is solid to our profession as well. It's not that a musician can forget the musical concepts and play whatever they want, but rather that once they've mastered the concepts, they become second nature and an inherent part of the musician playing.

For us, we have to have a solid foundation of knowing how microphone placement changes the recorded sound. This is not to repeat tones and have technical way of doing things the same way every time, but rather to make decisions that will help sculpt the resulting piece of art. Since our goal is to create that piece of art, our tools (microphone placement being one of them) have to become an inherent part of what we know and do as engineers

I'd love to hear how other engineers have gone through the process of learning and more so experimenting with these microphone variables.

Interesting article!

I think that the point of doing this type of work (objectively measuring mic/amp behavior) is so that we can make better decisions about where to place a mic to get the sound we hear in our heads. Also from the educator's point of view, I need to be able to teach not just what to do, but also why, and the expected outcomes. I would hope that after I spend 4 years teaching a student, they will only need to mic a guitar amp a couple of dozen times to fully understand it, instead of 1000 times.

I guess (no actual data here of course) that the tried and true mic placement (SM57, close to grill, off center and off axis) has more to do with creating isolation while recording live in one room than with the actual sound quality. Over our history, studios have offered more and more isolation and I think that our idea of what a guitar amp should sound like has a lot to do with these old recordings of guitars. Very rarely does a recorded guitar amp sound like a real amp in a room.

Best,

Hendrik Gideonse

I have found this article to be most useful when teaching my students about guitar cab placement. It can all to often be the case that we recommend a placement and not provide the "whys" as to the choice of placement.

It would be interesting to see how other instrumental recording techniques hold up to this kind of testing. It would also be interesting to see how digital amp modeling holds up to this kind of scrutiny. For example do the mic placement options in Amplitube/Guitar rig yield similar results?

Many Thanks for a great article.

John

I think it's important to remember that the combination of an electric guitar and the amplifier being used constitutes a complete musical instrument that the musician is interacting and making decisions within the context of. In most recording situations, accuracy to what the musician remembers hearing as they played is generally chosen over what the amplifier sounds like to somebody else.

Dear Moderator:

In most online discussions there exist rules and etiquette which govern the type of language that should be used in discussion. A good example of a forum rules and on language etiquette can be found at proaudioshack.com.

My understanding is that the AES is supposed to foster academic discussions about topics related to audio engineering and that the AES website is the venue for the discussion of these topics. I think that calling someone's work a waste of time is actually pretty offensive.

I find Drew Daniels' comments to be rude, dismissive and extremely unhelpful to the actual discussion of micing guitar amplifiers. While all of us recognize that the proverbial art is made in the recording studio, there are other ways than instinct to choose a combination of player, guitar, amplifier, effects and signal chain to obtain the sound that we are trying to capture.

There are reasons why engineers favor one type of microphone over another for certain activities. Mic placement really does matter and does change the timbre of recorded sound. It would be nice if as AES-member engineers we could discuss mic placement techniques without the influence of anti-intellectual heckling.

I am pretty disappointed with the lack of moderation in this forum. I don't really like to think of my career as a producer and educator as a waste of time. I am interested in learning more about my craft and I am wise enough to know I can learn valuable information and techniques by discussing and analyzing actual measured data.

It would be great if the moderator(s) could try to keep the discussion on topic and try to direct the contributors to be collaborative and less antagonistic.

Thanks for your help!

Hendrik

Excellent work, Alex. Good observations, all. We've long taught this, but this will improve the presentation. Bob, I'd wish to add that students would probably do even better in spending more time in the studio / performance space and less time in front of their LE systems.

Just one question, Alex: when did we start getting the fossils at the AES to take studio methodology seriously? Well, done there, too...