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Day #4 Electric Guitar Recording at the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop

By  Brandon Drury | Published  03/4/2006 | Recording Engineers
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Recording Electric Guitars At The Wagener Recording Workshop

Recording Clean Electric Guitars

Actually, before we get you too excited about recording full blow distorted electric guitars, we went ahead and did clean guitars first. We were all setup from the night before and jumped in with a clear head the next day. (This in itself is tremendous lesson learned). We wanted a clean sound that was modern, but more interesting that just an amp.


We ended up using one of the Randall modules. I want to say we went with the Marshall Plexi module with the gain turned down, but I goofed and forgot to right down which amp we used specifically for the clean tone. It doesn't matter all that much. I find that clean tones are not all that difficult to capture most of the time.


The lesson here is not be afraid of layering. Wagener got out his Roland VG-8. I remember when these things were big right about the time I started playing guitar (about 10 years ago). They use midi inputs only and have all kinds of silly sounds. The tone of this thing reminds me of the tone of the score for What About Bob? Or Captain Ron.


I must admit that I was thinking ?What in the hell is Wagener doing??. Is he an idiot? The answer is yes. (har har) However, there was a method to his madness. We had already tracked the clean tone but we wanted to do something extra to it. Wagner went with the mega sparkly 12 string sounding thing. By itself it sounded really really stupid. In fact, when mixed too loudly, it sounded really really stupid. However, there was a magic point where turning it down to just the right level made the clean tone erupt into something truly awesome.


Clean Tone Conclusion

The moral of the story is to make stupid crap in with your normal signal. This concept is used by every producer I've met on all sorts of instruments. For example, mixing whispers in with your background (or even lead vocal) will give them a lush hifi quality. Recording a layer of mega distorted guitars with 6 unwound strings (so that the low E actually uses a G string) will give this thing crappy sound that you can blend under your main tone. And as described in this article, mixing silly midi guitars underneath your real tone can give you a mega tone.

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Article Series
This article is part 5 of a 7 part series. Other articles in this series are shown below:
  1. Day #1 Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
  2. Day #2 Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
  3. Day #3 Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
  4. Day #4 Vocal Recording at the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
  5. Day #4 Electric Guitar Recording at the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
  6. Day #5 Tracking at the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
  7. Day #6 Nasvhille Studio Field Trip Day at the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop
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Comments
  • Comment #1 (Posted by noGearslut)
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    very very interesting
    thanx brandon!!
     
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