The Royer R121 is the most talked about mic for electric guitar this decade? Is a person lost in their quest for electric guitar sounds without it? Find out!

We compare the Shure SM57, Royer R121, Sennheiser MD421, Cascade Fathead II, and Shure SM7b on metal guitars. Download It!

Red Flag #1: Just The Guitar Track
For those of you who EVER post a clip of just one solo'd instrument, you are in desperate need of the Killer Home Recording series. You are missing the boat in about 250 areas and concepts and you are gonna waste about four years of your life chasing your own tail when you could avoid the whole mess.

The short version. The solo'd track is irrelevant. It's like posting a picture of your transmission and asking why your car won't start. A car is a sum of all it's parts...a system. A mix, too, is a sum of all its parts. To put it bluntly, the guitars by themselves don't mean a damn thing.

Red Flag #2: The Awesome Kick Problem
I remember when I had ordered my recording gear for the first time. I was listening to Skid Row's Slave To The Grind. I said to myself, “This kick needs more beater attack. When I record I'm ALWAYS gonna have an awesome kick drum sound!”.

When I hopped into audio mixing, I quickly realized that the kick drum was the least of my problems. In fact, no single element was important because the whole thing sounded like a dead man's balls. The mix, as a whole, was infinitely flawed. So all the sudden the notion of me nitpicking about Slave To The Grind (which is an excellent sounding hard rock record for the era) is ridiculous because the mix (and SONGS) of that record, as a whole, are quite badass.

So this over emphasis on the “awesome” nature of a single instrument is a huge problem. You've lost the forest for a single tree and therefor you'll never really achieve what you are after.

Red Flag #3: Crappy Music Problem
When people post their solo'd metal guitars rarely are these guitars doing anything interesting. (It's not that people are posting bad metal. It's more of an issue of people looking for “tone” help usually post musically deficient crap!) Just palm muting on a low E and then hitting an F power chord every once in a while isn't going to excite anyone. It's a sound we've heard a zillion times since the first guy did it in the 50s or whatever. (Maybe not the 1950s, but you get my point.)

I'm a HUGE believer in the idea that music and engineering are ENTIRELY interdependent. They are inseparable. The best engineering in the world won't work in a vacuum. The goosebump factor is a combination of robo music and robo presentation/aesthetic (engineering).

So going back to our stereotypical metal riff. If we were to fire up some mega drum pounding behind it and add a sick ass bass under it with the band playing tight as hell, we may start to find some excitement in there. (The thing you are REALLY looking for!) We just may find that the original guitar track sounds pretty damn good after all! Now switch your all-star drum/bass lineup to the local kids sound. (We'll say 14 year old kids just to make it obvious.) Just by taking the tight ass playing out of the equation, but keeping the sonics exactly the same, we've transformed our robo production into unlistenable garbage. (This concept is also well covered in Killer Home Recording.)

The Great Recording Compromise
There is something to not stopping until you find “the sound”. It's not a bad idea to do the best you can on a recording. In fact, that is great! However, you've got to set a deadline. Let's say you've got a month to get your guitars done because the band wanted this recording out last month. In that time, you probably aren't going to be blowing away or even matching the robo metal guys with 30 years of experience recording the best bands and the best rooms on the planet. That's a given. I doubt you will dispute this.

So do your absolute very best in the time you've got. Finish it. Move on. Because your skill is not what it will be in a decade, don't get too wound up about it.

I've never met one good engineer who was ever satisfied with his work. I'm talking about guys with Grammy Awards and Platinum records on the wall. They hear their songs on the radio and they hide to contain their embarrassment over their production. Of course, the zillion people who love the song think it's the best thing ever. So get used to being unhappy with this elusive side. Once you get past the Objective Flaw Barrier, it's all a damn lie anyway.

Objective Flaw Barrier
When guys post a clip on Bash This Recording or whatever, they are looking for help to improve. Some of the mixes are a little rough and need help. The things that make one mix obviously suck are what I call “objective flaws” that we all more or less agree on. There aren't many of these types of flaws because there is a HUGE window of acceptable production on any given recording.

So if a posted guitar track has an exceptional amount of fizz and mud I may say something. If the track is out of tune I'll DEFINITELY say something. If the tone is boxy, boring, comb filtered, or just plain crappy I'll say something. However, once we survive through all of these checks, if I'm to critique the guitars past this point, it's more about serving my ego than serving the music.

If you've got a track that survives the Objective Flaw Barrier, you are on your own. You've got to use your own creativity and ingenuity to push your tracks to the “next level” (as all the rappers say...ha ha). We can give tricks to try, but YOU must come up with that magic little something if you think the song really needs it. Any advice past this point gets into this “every-recording-should-sound-identical” mess where a guy thinks your Master of Puppets guitars should instead be Killswitch guitars. That kind of thing is up to you and the band. I'd never tell a guy he shouldn't be unique!

The Damn Lie
Do you know what happens when you get the band to play outstandingly tight on great songs in great rooms where the engineer passes the Objective Flaw Barrier on every track? It's called a major label production. It's called a bad ass recording, too.

As you are well aware of, you probably have 2,000 mp3s on your Ipod. Maybe 20-50 tunes stand out as having extreme production that just blows your minds. So what about the other 1,950 songs? Why are they are on your Ipod? Forget that. Do they sound bad? If your recording could match the engineering level of those 1,950 songs, would you be happy? I bet you would.

So The Damn Lie is this magic spell the recording world has placed (particularly on metal music) that there is some sort of PhD in engineering where everything you record is bad ass sounding. There isn't. Once you get passed the “don't suck” phase, the engineering aspect means NOTHING. The music entirely takes over.

Let me explain.

I believe that engineering NEVER adds to the music. Ever! It's never happened! It never will happen. I believe that engineering can only apply a penalty. A recording never matches the real thing. You love the Lamb of God guitar tone? If you were stand in front of the real amp, your eyes would light up like you just saw a mushroom cloud. It would be jaw dropping. The recording is good, but there is nothing like the real thing. That's like comparing your right hand and your girlfriend. A recording is an “emulation” of real life at best.

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Note: I was called out on this on the forum because I was probably a little vague here. So just to clarify let me explain. I mean that if you have 100% decided that the amp can not be touched and is absolutely perfect, tossing a mic in front of that amp and playing it through your studio monitors, boom box, or Ipod is never going to have that huge 3D realism of the amp in the room. The same would apply if you had the London Symphony performing just for you. Taking a pair of super high end SDCs and placing them in X/Y stereo to capture that Symphony will never sound as bad ass and exciting as what you hear in the room.

I did not mean to imply that all records should be done live and natural. (I have way too many Nine Inch Nails and Def Leppard records for that.) I didn't mean that the craft of producing can't create ruckus that goes beyond what is possible in the live environment. (I always believe in "maxing out" the studio recording and dealing with the live stuff later.) My point is worshiping the sound in the room and hoping an SM57 or U47 is gonna get that pretty much always ends up in disappointment.

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So, the only goal of engineering is to get out of the way. Maybe the best engineer in the world has found a way to let 99% of the music through. Maybe a beginning engineer assesses a great penalty to the noise. Maybe he only lets 40% of the music through. Your goal as an engineer should be to do the least damage possible to the music that's buried in some kind of hidden dimension. When you can get out of the way enough, you are officially in major label big boy land.

The only problem is this suddenly puts a HUGE emphasis on the crap that really matters. (The musician, the song, the room, the instruments).

Good luck!

Brandon Drury

Using my Radial X-Amp, I've ran a line out from my Presonus Firestudio to the Radial X-Amp. That ran into either a Rivera Knucklehead or a Peavey 5150. I tossed my Royer R121 in front of my 1x12 cabinet with a brand new Hellatone 30 (I blew my Celestion G12H30) into my Vintech 1272 into a Distressor EL-8x and into a Mytek AD96. I guess I pulled out all the big guns for this one. (Of course, the Recording Gear Quiz tested just how big these guns really are).

I had some drums I threw together quickly that triggered the Steven Slate Drum samples and I used Quantum Leap XP Hardcore Bass for the bass guitar.

From there it was off to the races playing with the amps.

Previous Multiple Amp Issues
In the past I've never been too found of recording more than one amp at the same time. The biggest reason for this is my facility is not set up for it properly. I don't have that much isolation from my control room and my live room. My guitar fort does help, but I can't hold two amps. Without being able to hear what is really going on with each individual amp it's hard to make decisions on what amp should do what. On top of that the extra volume is just gonna push my luck with the neighbors a wee bit further.

I never know if I'm better off setting both amps to sound their best, setting one amp to be thin and the other to be thick, or setting one with too much gain or not enough gain. It is always a tricky mess and I just never know where to start.

When I did try multiple amps, I always had problems getting the amps / mics in phase. Maybe I'm a bit militant about phase but I don't think it's possible to go through the Michael Wagener Workshop without becoming robo anal about the phase relationship between multiple sources.

Because setting up such a rig takes quite a bit of time while the guitar player was waiting on me, I decided it was best to keep it simple stupid. Now that I have the freedom to go into hardcore engineer mode with no regard for the performance, I feel like I can be more creative, try more daring ideas, and come out with better tones. Before, the exact opposite was true.

So, there were some hurdles that made it really tough to ever benefit from using multiple amps simultaneously.

Radial X-Amp and Multiple Amps
Now that I have the ability to run the same performance (recorded with DI) back through an amp, I can mic up one amp at a time and record a track with each amp. This is about as close as it gets to recording multiple amps.. I can use the same mic and mic placement so this guarantees that my side of the fence will be in phase. An amp can still be out of phase. In fact, it appears that my 5150 and Rivera Knucklehead have opposite polarity which is easily fixed by pressing the phase/polarity button either on the X-amp or in my recording software.

Does It Work?
So does using multiple amps “simultaneously” really make metal guitar tracks sound huge?

Find out here in the Member's Only section of Recording Review.

If you aren't a member, Join Now.

Well, this week TDM2684 thought it would be funny to cost me hours and hours of writing in my upcoming home recording book when he informed me about “impulses”. I'm familiar with impulses for reverbs and even in the modeling of plugins found in the Focusrite Liquid Mix. However, I must admit that I don't read the Guitar section of the New York Times anymore. Now that I've heard enough guitar impulses, it appears I'll be setting noggin to revise mode yet again. (NEVER write a book!)

I was amazed to see that guitar impulses provide dramatic improvement in the sound of direct electric guitars. I'm not really up on how they work, but I have to say that the technology has taken a quantum leap with this impulse business. The lifeless, sterile sound is gone. The fizzy sound is gone. Not bad!

How Good Are These Impulses?
I always took pride in my ability to immediately recognize direct guitars when evaluating mixes on Recording Reviews. I've been stumped a few times over the years, but it's usually a big deal when I am. I always end up asking the person what they used to record these guitars.

The new impulses show none of the obvious signs of direct guitar. I won't be able to boast, “I don't like the direct guitars” anymore in blind tests. This is a big deal!

The mixes I've heard that used direct guitar and impulses weren't perfect. They sounded like good electric guitar tracks. Of course, good electric guitar tracks are.....well, Good! However, they are not great guitars. Of course, this brings up the question: How many GREAT sounding guitar tracks do we hear? Not many! The average beginner micing up a typical amp at home does not come up with tones like I've heard with the impulses. So for the guy using EZ Drummer for drums, who doesn't own the amp of the century (1969 50 watt Marshall Plexi) or his version of the amp of the century, the impulses are a nice alternative.

It needs to be said that I come from the rock guitar side of the fence. In pop music, electric guitars typically don't require the same locomotive power that rock guitars do. In pop music, I'd say that the guitar impulses are ready for the big time.

Direct Guitar Impulses Vs The Real Thing
So are direct guitar impulses going to replace the real thing for electric guitar recording in rock music? The answer to that depends. For the guy just trying to record some cool tunes in his basement and doesn't feel like it's cheating to use drum samples or direct guitar, I think creative and tonal possibilities have improved immensely. The ability to plugin and immediately make music without any regard for audio engineering is worth quite a bit.

For the guy that hasn't pissed years of his adult life away honing his audio engineering chops, these impulses get you up to “good” sounding guitars instantly without losing your hair, wallet, or wives.

So here comes the real question. Am I going to switch to electric guitar impulses? (My hair and wallet are already gone!) I thought about this morning. I pondered life without my Rivera Knucklehead or my piece of junk wedge monitor with a G12H30 Celestion. Then I listened to a mix I had done yesterday. My real electric guitars (which happen to be among the best I've recorded) still sound bigger and meaner than the impulses (at least the impulses I've heard so far).

Then again, I often have to work REALLY hard to get the electric guitar tones happening. Sometimes I screw it up. I may screw up the next session. It wouldn't be the 12th time! So it seems to me that these direct guitar with impulses may be a new possibility for me....I'm just not quite ready. Are you?

Brandon