Wagener showed a trick that has been documented in various forums throughout the web using pink noise or white noise. (Whichever one sounds like a TV with no reception). As mentioned before, Wagener loves his Royer R121 ribbon mics and I must admit that they've grown on my quite a bit. I've learned that fizz is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to guitar tone and the Royers have a way of ignoring the fizz. Just keep in mind that you do want some high end in there. Wagener did not use grills on any of his amps. He said the grills make them sound too dull.

Tone On The Guitar Amp
Actually, I remember reading in a book where Wagener mentioned that the key to great guitar sounds is balance. You want a balanced low end and high end. If you go too crazy with lows or highs you get something dull or something fizzy. Now Wagener comes from the hard rock genre and his tones are aggressive. So if you imagine a very balanced tone, it will be semi creamy and semi bitey. In this case, the Royers had a tendency to add a little more ?cream? to the mix, so the amps were set to be a tad more aggressive. When I stuck my head in the room, the tone was a tad bitey, but just a tad.

Listen To Your Monitors, Not Your Guitar Cabinet
I made the mistake in my younger recording days of setting my amps to be too brittle, bright, and fizzy. Spend a lot of time on the amp. But don't listen to it through the guitar cabinet. What good will that do? Listen to the guitar through your monitors and then make changes to the tone.

Electric Guitar Mic Placement
As mentioned above, Wagener showed the white noise / pink noise trick. If you are not familiar with this one, I can post it later. The idea is you run all frequencies to an amp. It ends up sounding very similar to high gain amp with the gain maxed, actually. From there, you move the mic around until you find the the most full sounding spot. You are looking for the best balance of lows and highs. We used mega isolation headphones for this and it was easy to block out the amps noise and listen through the headphones.

It was a little unnatural listening to hiss through headphones, but it teaches extremely valuable lessons about how speakers sound.

Mic Placement Wasn't What I Thought It Would Be
While this wasn't said at the workshop, it was sort of implied to me. The concept was there is basically one great spot to mic a speaker. Every speaker is different but once you find the spot, there is no reason that you ever have to move the mic again, throughout the entire album.

In the past, I used to move the mic to get brighter or darker. Well, after the workshop, I find a place where I like the tone and I leave the mic there. If I need to make changes I'll do it on the amp.

So basically, the idea is to record ?accurately?. We are looking for a balanced, full tone of the source. Guitar amps are no different than drums sets are anything else. We are looking for accuracy with our micing. From my point of view, no trickery was used with the mics. They were simply set to capture a good, clean, fundamental tone. From there, we could set the amps however we wanted.

So Where Did The Mic End Up?
In this case, the Royer ended up being maybe 1/2?-1? off center (in other words, very very close to the center of the speaker). In terms of distances, the placement was closer than a grill would have allowed, but not by much. I bet we were 1/4? closer to the speaker than the grill typically is.

Based on what I know about mic placement..... The center of the speaker is where all the high end crap is, being very close to the speaker where the low ened is (the closer to the source, the stronger the proximity effect). We balanced the high end of the speaker with the low end from the proximity effect, basically.

Mic Placement Wasn't As Big Of Deal As I Expected
Don't get me wrong. Where you put the mic is very critical. However, it wasn't something that you needed to spend hours and hours on. In fact, once you know a speaker, you could probably get very very close just by eyeballing it. As with any instrument, if your mic accurately records the source, all the weight falls on the source. It's up to you to tweak the amp, guitar, pick, and (most importantly) the player to get what you want. I must say that there was no magic secret position that I tried to memorize. Wagener did not show us any mega secret mic placement tricks. There are none. Just put the mic where it sounds good.

I watched Wagener's fingers on the console quite a bit. He adjusted the two Dis, two Royers, and one Sennheiser tracks to give him what he wanted. There were times when the tones had a lot more DI than you would think. In fact, I'd venture to say that your time will be better spent adding the DI's than spending that time on extra fiddling with the mic (assuming you found the spot).

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