?I repeat over and over and over again that the most important difference between a great home recording a lousy home recording is the source instruments. Most up and coming engineers making records at home simply do not have great sounding instruments to start with. Typical home recording equipment such as the Line 6 Pod, various direct recording methods, etc just leave guitar tones suffering.

Well, when I want a tone that sounds like a real amp, I do not use a direct guitar. I use a real amp with a real microphone. I must admit that sometimes it takes work to get an amp sounding great, especially if it is new to me and I don't know it's sweet spots.

On top of that, sometimes some guitars just work differently with different amplifiers. For example, I've been using my Rivera Knucklehead with mainly Gibson Les Paul guitars for a while now. Recently I had a quick guitar session using a bolt on, humbucker, and Floyd rose equipped guitar. The guitar tone coming out of the Rivera Knucklehead was extremely different from the session I had done the night before even though none of the settings had changed. It was crazy!!

While in this case, a different guitar worked out extremely well, there seams to be many more cases where the guitar doesn't match as well as it could. In this case, an EQ is needed in between the guitar and the amplifier.

After a little research, (actually I just emailed Guitar Guru, the guitar expert hear at recordingreview.com) and he highly recommended vintage MXR 10 band eqs. Immediately, I ordered 2 of them. They came in today. Luckily, we were just beginning overdriven guitars for a project I'm producing. The timing couldn't have been better. We were using a Fender Stratocaster and my 1971 Marshall Superlead but I wasn't totally happy with the tone. It was good, but I was looking for something a little different.

Normally, when you crank up an old Marshall that does not have any preamp gain you are sort of at the mercy of the equipment. There is not a whole lot you can do to fix tonal weirdness in most cases (except for actually switching out different guitars, pedals, etc). Well, the Vintage MXR guitar EQ pedals worked out perfectly!! I was able to quickly take out just a tad bit of 3k going into the amp and greatly boost 1k (one of the most important frequencies to cram into an overdriven amplifier even if you take it out later). It's important to note that how you EQ a guitar before the amplifier sounds 100% different than if you EQ recorded tracks. Applying EQ to recorded guitar tracks is nearly useless in my experience. However, applying EQ before the amp is a gift from God!

I can honestly say that I don't remember a time when a single piece of gear made this big of impact on my guitar tones. I remember when I first bought my Vintech 1272 preamp. I struggled with guitar tones for years. As a beginner it didn't do much for me. Now, I know it's strengths and it certainly doesn't hurt, but it doesn't make a mind blowing improvement either. I remember when I first bought my Royer R121 ribbon microphone. Everyone said it was a amazing. I must admit that I was slow to fall in love with my Royer. In fact, it took about a year before I “got it”. Now, the Royer is always my first choice on electric guitar. I love what it does in the midrange. Having said that, it did take me an entire year before I grew into the subtle nature of what the Royer R121 did to my guitars. (Imagine a 57 with less fizz and more “stuff” in the 2K area).

However, spending $70 a piece on guitar EQ pedals has made an immediate and noticeable impact on the tone of my recorded guitars that greatly exceed the impact of a higher end preamp or fancy microphone. Of course, you don't see me selling off my 1272 preamp or R121 ribbon microphone either. If you are starting out with electric guitar recording, I HIGHLY recommend getting a guitar eq pedal. You'll be glad you did. Then you can work your way up to the fancy mics and mic preamps.

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