This week we aimed to record the Guitars for our project. Originally in Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ there are no guitars, however we wanted to get as much usable material as possible.
We started by setting up a 2 Shure SM57 close to the centre of the speaker and one on the outside of the cone. We also set up an AKG 414 setting it to an omnidirectional polar pattern, 0dB and a roll of at 80Hz, we placed this about a metre and a half away from the amp – we used this microphone so we could get a good representation of what the room sounded like. We also placed the guitarist –Robin – behind a board so the mic’s wouldn’t pick up the sound of him actually playing. We proceeded to set the headphone levels, tried phasing but the mic’s were already in sync with each other, we flipped the phase of the 414 as it sounded a lot more natural, and then panned the SM57’s. For the overall sound of the guitar we went for a bit more gain to give us a more crunchy sound, we also tried to take some of the middle out. We started the recording; and decided it may sound better with the guitar playing the same throughout and not changing to the brass melody, this also acted as double tracking which made the overall sound richer. We then proceeded to record a Ukulele playing the brass melody, which actually sounded quite good.
