(I have also read that sometimes you'll want to turn your gain/distortion down further than you normally have it so that it will record better, but I've also read to crank the amp and get it to a point where the cab begins to really vibrate in order to get the amps true sound. These seem to be two very different view points, so is there a middle ground?)

I'm going to take a totally different take on this than you may be thinking. I could tell you that you should take X Marshall or Mesa Boogie head and run it through X cabinet with Celestian speakers and then use X microphone, X preamp, and X AD converter and you will have a great sound. Well, guess what. That's NOT going to happen.

Date Analogy

Let's say you are out on the first date with a chick (assuming you are dude. If you are a chick, then flip the situation, I guess) and you take your date out to a nice restaurant. Do you order her food for her? If so, what do you order? (“Where the hell is this going, Brandon?”, you may be asking yourself.) Well hear me out before flying off the handle.

Let's think about this a tad. “Do you order her food for her?”. This is an issue of personality and personal taste. Personally, I wouldn't order food for a woman unless she had lost the ability to speak. So my personal taste is my date can order her own damn food. This isn't the 50s and I'm too busy deciding what I want to eat!

Assuming you do order your date's food, what does she like? Well, I can tell you right now that you are not going to find the answer on a recording website! There is only way you will know what you date likes. Ask her, and then listen. She'll tell you what she likes. She will probably also tell you if she likes it when a man orders her food or not.

Back To Recording Guitars

Okay, so we are tracking some distorted guitar tracks. How do we decide how much gain, distortion, or volume to use. Do we need to crank the amp? Do we need to back the gain down? Well, this is all an issue of PERSONAL TASTE. You, as the recording engineer, need to make yourself and the band happy with this tone. With that, anything goes. Just make sure you do the song justice.

So how do you know what you like? How do you decide if you like the sound of an amp cranked or not? How do you decide how much gain you like? Just like our date analogy, LISTEN! Ask your studio monitoring system how your guitars sound and she will tell you.

I can't emphasize this enough! Just about every engineering decision you make will be based almost entirely on what your studio monitors tell you. If you don't trust your studio monitors at least a little bit, you need to either improve your monitoring situation or spend more time on the monitors.

If you don't know how your guitars will sit in the mix, there is only one way to find out. Just go for it! Go with your gut and see what happens. If your guitars are too dull, you know that you need to add some bite to them or take out some low end next time. You'll figure it out pretty quickly.

As long as you REALLY like your tone going down to tape/hard drive, then you will probably be okay. Even if you have second thoughts (I do all the time) you'll be close enough to make it through the mix alive so you can do a better job next time.