One mic or two? Mono or stereo? Hear the differences.
This column continues the unlikely premise of last month's installment. We used the digital models from Universal Audio's Ox Amp Top Box to make audio comparisons between electric guitar recording techniques.
Yeah, it's weird using a digital box to illustrate analog techniques. But it's useful here because Ox's models are so realistic. The process also isolates the variable in question. You hear the same guitar, pickup, amp, amp settings, and recording path throughout.
Last time we looked at speaker size, single-speaker versus multi-speaker cabs, and microphone types and placement. Now let's explore options that arise when using multiple mics.
Variable 1: One mic vs. two. In Clip 1 you hear single-mic clips featuring virtual versions of three common electric guitar mics: a Shure SM57 dynamic, a Neumann U 67 condenser, and a Royer R-121 ribbon. (We discussed their characters last month.) Next come three possible pairings: 57 plus 67, 57 plus 121, and 67 plus 121. In the modeling, the virtual mics are positioned near each other and close to the speaker.
TASTING NOTES: A single mic has the pointiest, most direct sound. Adding a second mic introduces phase cancellations as the two mics “listen" from slightly different perspectives. This can add cool complexity and texture, though it often softens the impact.
Variable 2: Panned vs. non-panned mics. With two miked guitar tracks, you can choose how far apart to pan them, if at all. Clip 2 compares mono sounds (both mics at center) and the same mic combinations panned far left and right. You hear the 57 and 67 in mono and then in stereo, the 57 and 121 in mono and then stereo, and finally the 67 and 121 in mono and stereo.
TASTING NOTES: What's best: stereo or mono? Duh—it depends on the context! A mono sound often has the most impact, but a panned sound can add interest and depth. Panning can also maintain a prominent guitar sound while leaving the mix's center clear for vocals, bass, and kick drum—at least in a conventional mix.
Tip: When combining two mics, always try reversing the phase of one of the tracks within your DAW. One setting will probably sound much better than the other. Use that one.
Variable 3: Dry sound vs. room sound. Ambient room miking is one of the defining qualities of rock guitar. Somewhere in the vast catalog of Led Zeppelin outtakes there's a clip in which someone solos the two mics on Pagey's “Heartbreaker" amp. First you hear a dry, close-miked sound, then a boomy room sound, and finally the two mics together. Suddenly it sounds like Led Zeppelin—and countless other rock guitar recordings since that 1969 session.
But with today's tech you can get similar sounds with a single close mic and a good digital room reverb, as heard here. Clip 3 features the 67 plus 121 blend with no ambient room miking. Next is the room sound only, as it might be captured by a condenser mic positioned six feet or more from the amp. Finally, you hear the blend: first with just a bit of room, and then with more ambience.
TASTING NOTES: A close mic is in your face. A distant mic is out in space. At risk of oversimplifying, close miking alone often works for groove parts where the guitar shouldn't hog the limelight, while a roomier sound might be better if the guitar is front in center for big riffs or solos. Also, consider the quality of your tracking room. If you're working in a great studio, it can be a crime not to capture the ambient sound. If you're in a crappy-sounding bedroom, an ambient mic might not be worth your while. (But remember, an unusual ambience is sometimes cooler than a “good" one.)
Tip: When recording a band with the guitar amp isolated in another room, room sound can make the guitar sound more like part of the group. That could mean re-amping the guitar track in the room where you'd previously recorded the drums, or applying the same simulated ambience (in varying amounts) to all the tracks.
Variable 4: Stereo vs. mono room miking. With enough mics, you can choose whether the ambient room sound is captured in mono by a single microphone, or in stereo via two mono mics or a stereo mic. Two close mics and a stereo room sound means four tracks to blend and pan. Clip 4 showcases a few options. First you hear the ambient sound alone in mono, then in stereo. After that you hear mono close miking plus mono room sound, stereo close miking with mono room sound, and finally stereo plus stereo.
TASTING NOTES: This parameter can be pretty darn subtle. It might be meaningful on a solo guitar recording, but in a full-band mix you might not hear a difference. Our ears sometimes perceive stereo and panning in strange ways. If, say, the drums are panned dramatically in stereo, there's a good chance you'll think the mono ambience is stereo as well. For more drama, take a mono close-miked track and a mono room track and pan them wide. Yeah, that's “fake" stereo, but it can sound epic.
Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.
“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
While it might be tempting to geek out and ask Albini about all the iconic albums that he’s recorded with the utmost finesse—and surely, there would be value in rapping about recording some of the biggest names in guitar music—that’s all been done.
What’s much more interesting is the work that goes on every single day at the studio. So, when he tells me, “My colleagues at Electrical Audio and I are constantly having to interrogate our methods and validate the things that we’re doing and come up with arguments for why we should do things this way or that,” that’s the stuff I want to know about. If you want to learn about how he recorded In Utero, go listen to Conan’s podcast. (Albini was a guest, along with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, on the October 23, 2023 episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and it’s a thorough discussion that is totally worth checking out.)
The fact is, Albini has recorded countless records. I’m sure he has a tally in his books somewhere, but it would be exceedingly difficult to know for sure how many albums he’s engineered. That’s because, as extensive as his credits are in various record-collecting resources, he’s also impressively accessible as a for-hire engineer. All levels of artists—from superstars to harder-to-track, mostly unknown road dogs—have carved out their time with him. Plus, he’s been at it since he started renting four-track demo packages on the weekends during his high school years in Missoula, Montana.
The body of engineering work that Albini has amassed is monumental not just in size, but also in musical scope, which extends further than from Sunn O))) to Magnolia Electric Company, Cheap Trick to Neurosis, or Low to The Thing. And with those artists, he often helps capture a landmark album, or at least the record that fans refer to as “the one they recorded with Albini.”
Aside from his day job, there’s also his guitar playing. Albini serves as the compass for cutting, brutal tone in the punk and underground rock scenes. Since his early days in the hard-hitting Big Black through his continuing work alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer in the band Shellac—whose soon-to-be six (no info yet, but a new one is confirmed to be on the way) full-length albums and some other recorded odds and ends are maybe the purest documents of his overall sonic aesthetic—he’s used a fairly concise rig of well-suited esoteric gear to shape his incisive, metallic, and esoterically personal guitar sound in the creation of angular riffage and gnarly feedback.
Albini’s sonic mastery seems to know no bounds: He’s probably the most-cited proponent of analog recording. His live-band-in-a-room sound is unparalleled. And his drum sounds are peerless. But, while it’s not as if he never talks about guitar, it’s rare to see him dive deep on his guitar-specific processes.
So, we called up Electrical Audio and had a chat about his methods on recording guitars and how they’ve evolved, his take on modern guitar culture, and the definitive details of his sound.
In addition to his gear collection, Albini is also a good-bandname-T-shirt collector. (If this isn’t proof enough, go look up a photo from when he won his first gold bracelet in the World Series of Poker.)
Photo by Daniel Bergeron
When you’re going to record a guitarist, what’s your process of deciding how you’re going to choose a microphone, and how you’re going to mic their amp or cabinet?
Steve Albini: You have a conversation—what kind of sound are they shooting for? Who are some guitarists whose sound would be appropriate for their music? That sort of thing. And sometimes that’ll give you a clue about how to get started.
If they like a thick, bass-y, chewy, distorted sound, you want to make sure you’re using mics that capture that low-frequency stuff with good definition and not get muddy or soft. If the kind of guitar sound they’re shooting for is very bright and very crisp and dry, you’ll want to make sure to avoid using mics that can have some resonance or bloom to them that will soften that sort of precision.
I think it’s a bad idea to have a standard method where when whatever guitarist walks in you stick an SM57 on it and call it good. A lot of people do that as a default just because it resolves the issue quickly, and they can get on with their day and do more fancy stuff. But I think it’s absolutely critical to pair the microphone with the actual sound that’s coming out of the amp.
After having a conversation with the guitar player, understanding what their aesthetic is, I have them set up their gear and just play a bit, to get a feel what their playing style is like. Are they using a lot of feedback and sustain or are they hopping on a bunch of different pedals all the time? Is the sound derived from their playing style or from particular layering of pedals? Getting intimate with the exact specifics of the guitar style and sound and aesthetic guides you on what microphones to use and physically where to put them.
The main thing is not to have a preconceived notion about what mics are good for guitar. I’ve used everything from vocal-caliber condenser microphones to quite limited electret microphones to high-quality ribbon microphones to pawnshop junk microphones—I’ve used absolutely everything you can imagine on a guitar amp, and that selection is always based on the aesthetic of the person playing and then the actual sound that’s coming out of the cabinet. In your mind, you might have an idealized notion of what a heavy guitar sounds like or what a clean guitar sounds like, but until you get down on all fours and listen to the sound coming out of the speakers, you don’t really know what you’re dealing with.
“When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.”
How do you interpret what you’re hearing then?
Albini: When you’re down on all fours listening, you need to be forming a mental image of what that sound is like. Are there spikes and dips in the frequency response? Is there a lot of granular treble detail? Is it a really smooth sound? Does it have a sort of billowing quality, like a trombone-like fundamental, or is it really dry and raspy? Even using wine-tasting words like that, it helps you form an internal image of what that guitar is supposed to sound like when you hear it on playback, and from your experience with your mic collection, you’ll know what microphones are best suited to sounds like that, or you’ll know where to start anyway.
When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.
Steve Albini's Gear
Hands on faders, Albini and his team at Electrical Audio are “constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
Photo by Kevin Tiongson
Guitars
- Travis Bean TB500
Amps
- Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp
- Fender Bassman
- Custom homemade speaker enclosure based on Electro-Voice TL Series plans with 10" and 12" Celestion Greenbacks
Effects
- Interfax Harmonic Percolator
- MXR Smartgate
Strings and Picks
- Ice picks with the points cut off
- D’Addario XLs (.012–.016–.020w–.028–.038–.048)
Once you’ve chosen a mic, what’s next in the decision-making process?
Albini: One thing that I do that I think is probably distinctly different from what a lot of other engineers do, I tend to have whatever microphone I’m using on the guitar in the middle of the speaker cone, and I don’t generally use microphones pressed up close to the grille cloth right next to the speaker. I tend to use microphones at a working distance of between eight and 14 inches from the cabinet.
A lot of engineers made their bones as live engineers, where they’re trying to get isolation on stage, so they have the mics as close as possible to the speaker cabinet, and that practice translated into the studio. I experimented with that technique because I saw everybody else doing it, but I just never got good results with it. It always sounded slightly tweaked and muffled and weird. I found that when I put the microphone dead center on the speaker, then the sound hitting the microphone sounded more like what I heard when I was down on all fours listening to the speaker myself.
Working distance has a big effect on the sound quality. If the microphone is choked up tight on the speaker, you get a lot more low-frequency energy. You get a lot more muscular pumping low end from the proximity effect of the microphone, and, especially with ribbon microphones that are bi-directional and have a fairly exaggerated proximity effect, you can really use that to tune the response of the microphone. So, I say that I use a working distance of between eight and 14 inches. If I’m in the closer part of that range, six to eight inches from the speaker, there’s going to be a lot more of the sub low end emphasized in a bi-directional ribbon microphone, and that can be great to add weight and heaviness to a heavy guitar.
Then, if the microphone is backed off more like 12 to 14 inches, then you get much more of an overall picture of the sound of the cabinet, where it’s not emphasizing any particular region, for lack of a better word. It’s a flatter representation of the sound coming off the speaker. Being able to tune the behavior of the microphone by moving the microphone in and out just by a matter of inches can make a noticeable difference in the sound quality.
At this point in your career, do you know what mic to use as soon as you listen to someone’s playing?
Albini: It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius. That’s really satisfying. That means the first 30 years of your career weren’t wasted, but it doesn’t happen often.
Often, you have to move the microphone, or sometimes you have to swap the microphone out completely, like this microphone just can’t handle that much high end, it sounds too raspy, it’s just too midrange forward, it starts to sound nasal and different parts of the playing vocabulary can sound different as well. Sometimes, you’ll have a setup that sounds amazing when the guitarist is just playing rhythm stuff, but then when they go up the strip and start showing off, it can be too piercing or too woolly sounding, so it’s often a good idea to have a complement microphone.
“It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius.”
You’ll have a couple of microphones in the same position, one that is maybe a brighter, drier sound and one that’s maybe a fatter, darker sound. And that way you can either balance those microphones against each other for a composite sound or use them in stereo to synthesize a stereo image. Or when the lead kicks in, you can nudge the brighter microphone for a little bit more bite and attack.
I think having an ambient character available on the recording often helps with the sense of realism. If you’re just using a single guitar, for example, then having an ambient microphone that you can use to create a stereo image helps add to the sensation of hearing the sound in a room, even if it’s a very dry room. Having close mics on the amp and then also having a distant mic out in the room eight or 10 feet away gives you a little bit of air on that secondary mic, which you can then use to create a stereo image to help localize the guitar in the stereo image of the whole thing.
All of those little things, if you don’t have it set up so you have those kinds of options available, then you can’t make those choices down the road. I have been in sessions where some engineers have an array of microphones around a speaker cabinet. They’ll have eight or 10 microphones in a sort of swarm around a speaker cabinet. And that, to me, just speaks of really poor decision making. If you’re recording eight or 10 microphones at once and with the idea that you’ll sort it all out later, that just puts all your critical decisions off until the last minute and means that you’re going to make those decisions poorly. I think it’s much, much better to listen to it on the first playback and decide if you are on the right track or not. And if you’re not, just stop and fix it. Don’t just carry on with the plan to deal with it later, because when you get to later, you just have way too much shit to deal with.
Onstage with Shellac, Albini wields “Old Ironsides,” his Travis Bean TB500. Behind the guitarist lurks his customized amp head, which contains a Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp and Fender Bassman, and his homemade speaker cabs.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
It’s like it creates option anxiety, and at that point, you’re just making the mix all that much longer.
Albini: Yeah, it’s not even the amount of effort that it takes. I don’t think it’s possible to make 10,000 critical decisions simultaneously and have them all be as valid as if you were to make those decisions one at a time as they came up with all your attention and full consideration. So, while you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.
I also feel like over the course of working on a record, you get acclimated to the sound that you’re listening to, and then that becomes the basis on which you make other decisions. If you pull the plug on that by changing the sound around at the last minute, then all of those predicate decisions that were made based on that original place keeper have somewhat been invalidated. And I think that’s a dangerous thing as well.
In one of the videos on the Electrical Audio YouTube page, you talk about developing your practices through an iterative process of trial and error. Is experimentation still a part of your process?
Albini: I actively question myself and verify my preconceptions or challenge my preconceptions. One nice way to do that in a kind of a programmatic way is something I stole from Bob Weston, the bass player in the band Shellac that I’m in. He’s also a fine recording engineer and mastering engineer. I read an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he said that on every session he does, he tries to do just one thing that he’s never done before. It might be the choice of microphone or positioning a microphone or a processing choice or a routing, just something, and that seemed brilliant to me. Just a very simple way to make sure that you’re always expanding your repertoire and always expanding your knowledge base. You don’t get set in your habits. And so, I stole that, and I do that to this day.
“While you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.”
Also, microphones come in over the transom. There are microphones being designed and invented every day, and we get a chance to hear a lot of those either as trial or because people want our opinions on them. They’ll send them to us to put them in use for a while and play around with them. So, I get to play around with stuff that I’ve never heard before pretty regularly, and I like to try microphones I’ve never heard before.
This has proven enormously valuable over the course of the last 15 or 20 years. My routine behaviors have changed quite a bit as a result of these little, tiny experiments that I’ve done one at a time.
With Shellac bandmates Todd Trainer (drums) and Bob Weston (bass) in view, the most legendary Harmonic Percolator is at Steve’s feet, next to his MXR Smart Gate. If you’re wondering, Albini uses a waist strap for his guitar.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
I would imagine that, making as many records as you do, that’s like constant revision.
Albini: I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.
I did an album with the group Sunn O))). Their music is really slow-moving, impossibly heavy riffs, but the sound is really minimal. It’s just two guitars most of the time. In the studio, they added a few guests. One of is Hildur Guðnadóttir; she plays the cello.
There’s an instrument that was invented for her by a friend of hers called the halldorophone. It’s an electric cello that has built into it an amplifier and loudspeaker, so it’s a self-resonating, self-feeding-back, infinite-sustain cello. It’s a super bizarre thing, but she’s an expert. There’s one in the world and I’m staring at it and I have to figure out how to record it.
The fact that I am confronted with these new and different things all the time means that my vocabulary and my skillset and my facilities are constantly being tested and improved. And that’s one of the great joys, for me anyway, of doing what I do for a living, that I do get to do these freakish things once in a while.
You use a small pedal setup as a player, but you’re engaging with different kinds of players all the time. What do you think about modern pedal technology?
Albini: The stage that we are at now, where every player in every band has a pedalboard and have this sort of a curated collection of sounds that they come up with, I actually got a preview of that in the late ’80s. The first time I went to Japan, most guitarists that I worked with had a pedalboard with a half a dozen pedals on it, and that’s how they would craft their sound. They could bring that anywhere and plug it into any amp and they’d be happy.
Something very similar is happening now in the U.S. where a lot of people are doing demo recording at home through modeling amps or through interfaces, and rather than using an amplifier for its inherent qualities, they’re kind of defeating the amplifier by using pedals as the principal source of their sound. It’s a trend. I don’t really have an opinion about it.
“I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.”
There are some people who are more adept at it than others, but it’s absolutely the case that most players in most bands now have multiple pedals that they’re using, and the songs are arranged in a way where you use this combination for this part and this combination for this part. And nothing about it seems bad to me. It’s a little more cumbersome, especially when you’re in the studio and you’re trying to track down problems. But when you see somebody who’s really put some thought and attention into it and they’re really using the pedals in an expressive way….
I did a session with Reba Myers from Code Orange. She has this really expansive pedal setup where she’s got a main soundboard where the general tone for a given song comes from, and then she’s got a kind of an expression board, which is just all the crazy shit, and she’s constantly going back and forth. She’s an example of someone who’s put a lot of thought and attention into the specifics of the pedalboard and is using it as a creative tool. I’ve seen other people where it’s kind of pro forma—like, Kiss wore funny outfits on stage, and so for a while a lot of bands felt obliged to wear funny outfits on stage.
I know some old school guys are like, ‘Plug the guitar straight into the amp, and if you can’t get it done with that, you’re not a real musician,’ or whatever. That’s horse shit. That’s just boomer shit. I’m not into that at all.
How Steve Albini Gets His Guitar Sound
How did your personal guitar sound develop over the years?
Albini: When I was in Big Black, that band was predicated on the do-it-cheap, do-it-quick, take-no-prisoners approach. That was very much the cornerstone of the behavior in the punk rock scene. Don’t try to get it perfect, just get it. So, everything about that band was done sort of extemporaneously. I made the first Big Black record on my own in my apartment, so I needed an amplifier that I could use for either guitar or bass. I stumbled onto this bizarre preamp called the Tapco/Intersound IVP. It had a clean channel and a distorted channel. I didn’t find much use for the clean channel, but the distorted channel sounded great on either bass or guitar—or great toward my aesthetic at the moment, which was a pretty brutal one.
When Shellac started, I was looking for a fatter, fuller sound than the scrabble-scratchy sound I had with Big Black. I eventually gravitated toward the Fender Bassman as the perfect tube amp for me. But when I would play just the Bassman, I missed a little bit of the bite and the sizzle from the old transistor days. So, I ended up making a hybrid setup with the Tapco IVP preamp, typically recorded direct. And then on stage, I’ll have a monitor cabinet for it that has a horn in it, so it’s like a full-range speaker, and the Fender Bassman going into a fairly bass-y cabinet, typically a 4x12 when we’re on tour in Europe and we’re using backline.
The cabinets that Bob and I made for our amps—I have two Celestion greenbacks in that, a 10" and a 12"—are based on the TL series cabinet that are the published plans that Electro-Voice made available for using their speakers in an enclosure. If you just built a cabinet along those published plans, you would end up with exactly what Bob and I use for our speaker setups.
When you record yourself for a Shellac album, do you always use the same gear?
Albini: No, it has been different on literally every session. I often use the amp that I use on stage. Often, I do not. Often, I’ll use some other transistor amp and some other tube amp as the two complement signals. It’s essentially always two amplifiers, a transistor amp and a tube amp. The transistor amp is typically being recorded direct, and the tube amp is always recorded acoustically through a speaker cabinet with microphones and stuff.
But I have used an Orange OR80. There’s an amp that was made by a company called Sam Amp, and I believe there are very few of them in the world, but I ended up with one of them, and I’ve used the Sam Amp. I’ve used the Traynor YBA-3, Traynor YBA-1, a Marshall JTM-45. I’ve used a lot of different amplifiers for the studio recordings.
The Travis Bean that I use is such an indestructible sound. It’s weird that I’m so fussy about my amp because I’ve demonstrated myself that it kind of doesn’t matter what amp I play through, I can always get something that I like out of it.
We did a tour of Japan very early in the band’s tenure, right after we started. In Japan, it’s normal practice for the venue to have a backline. Every night it was a different, quite crappy by our standards, amplifier on stage. One night, it was a Roland Jazz Chorus. I used a Guyatone amplifier several times, and other Japanese brand names that I was unfamiliar with. Every night sounded fine. As specific as I am about what I like and don’t like, I have sort of taught myself that it’s not that important and that I can zero in on what I like and don’t like about even an imperfect setup.
For pedals, do you use anything other than the Harmonic Percolator, which you’re most known for using?
Albini: I’ve used a noise gate since I first started playing on stage. For many, many years it was just one of the original old-school MXR noise gates. They’ve all crapped out and been repaired and crapped out again many times. There’s an updated version of that MXR called the Smart Gate. I switched over to that. It’s set so that I can just touch the guitar and it opens up, but if I’m not actively playing it, it doesn’t open.
The output of the noise gate goes into the fuzz tone. And the fuzz tone has been a Harmonic Percolator [made by Interfax] since, I want to say, 1986. My friend Jay Tiller from Milwaukee worked at a head shop, record shop, and pawn shop combo in Milwaukee called Record Head. When I was there one time, he said, ‘We have this cool fuzz tone this guy made here. You should try it out.’ And I loved it. So, I bought one from him, and then over the years, I’ve bought a couple more when he stumbled across them at record swap or whatever, or at guitar fairs or whatever, he’s picked them up and I got ’em from him.
I’ve referred to the Percolator as a labor-saving device, because as soon as you hit the switch, the guitar just starts playing. I don’t even need to tell it what notes or anything. It just goes, and that’s my favorite thing about the Percolator, how it’s completely unhinged using it for feedback or whatever. It will choose little melodies that it wants to play, and it’ll just whistle them for you. But you kind of need to be physically moving. I’ve noticed that if you stand in one spot, it just squeals. But if you’re moving around, if the distance between you and your amplifier changes, then the fundamental frequency changes from the physical distance, and you get these really great psychedelic melodies that it creates.
Have you played any of the Percolator clones?
Albini: They all sound very slightly different, but they’re all basically the same. Chuck Collins made a complete, meticulous resurrection of the Harmonic Percolator [through his company, Theremaniacs] a few years ago—those are absolutely perfect. They respond exactly the same way. They sound the same. Almost all the others that I have seen—people send them to me because they feel like I should pass my hands over their Percolator or whatever, I’ve had maybe six or eight others—I can’t use any of ’em. They all behave differently somehow.
I think one of the perversions of my setup is that coming out of the noise gate, the signal into the Percolator is buffered, so it sounds different if you just plug your guitar straight into it, and I never do that.
Get creative with faux-analog delay tones.
Many modern players are smitten with the quirky, warts-and-all character of pre-digital delays. Partly, that’s nostalgia. It’s fun to clone Scotty Moore’s rockabilly slap or David Gilmour’s spatial grandeur.
But there’s more to it than looking backwards, I think. While pre-digital delays were designed to mimic the effect of playing in reverberant spaces, the results rarely sound realistic in the way that, say, digital hall reverb algorithms can sound like actual rooms. Much of their charm lies in their “not found in nature” artificiality. This sonic character can convey many emotions: warmth or iciness, spaciousness or claustrophobia, relaxation or tension, and more.
or tension, and much more.
This column and my next one are about crafting faux-analog delays, especially unconventional ones. I’ve used SoundToys’ EchoBoy plugin throughout. But while EchoBoy is powerful and versatile, you can try these techniques with many delay plug-ins or with relatively sophisticated delay stompboxes that feature tone controls in addition to the usual time, feedback, and mix knobs.
Analog Artifice. Let’s start by faking analog sounds. Old tape, oilcan, and bucket brigade delays aren’t very good at reproducing higher frequencies, and the treble content diminishes with each echo. Check out Ex. 1, with its relatively hi-fi delay tone.
Ex. 2 is the same recording, but with much treble removed. I’ve also added distortion using EchoBoy’s saturation control. (Don’t worry if your delay doesn’t have a distortion setting. Next month we’ll see how to add distortion to delay using separate delay and overdrive plug-ins.) Image 1 shows the settings.
You can hear the same properties in Scotty Moore’s definitive rockabilly slap on Elvis Presley’s classic “Mystery Train.”
Ex. 3 uses a small tweed amp model and a similar delay setting to approximate the dark, somewhat distorted sound of Moore’s Echosonic, an amp with built-in tape echo. For a similar sound, cut lots of delay treble, turn the feedback control to zero (just one echo), and add a touch of distortion if possible. Try delay times between 100 and 150 milliseconds, depending on the song’s tempo.
That rockabilly slap is a great sound, but for better or worse, a familiar one. So let’s explore some cool alternatives.
Echoes of Africa. Tape delay was a popular sound for African guitarists from the late 1960s through the ’70s. It adds a lovely liquid fluidity to the pretty arpeggios and double stops of Central African pop guitar playing. Here's a fine example, “Malala,” by the great Congolese guitarist Nicolas Kasanda (better known as Docteur Nico), one of the creators of the guitar-driven rumba-rock style later known as soukous.
It’s a brighter tape sound, with a longer delay time and two or three echoes rather than single slap. Here it sounds like le Docteur is playing through an amp. But many guitarists from Africa—a continent rich in music, but poor in gear—recorded directly into the mixing board, adding tape delay to their squeaky-clean tones. In Ex. 4 I bypassed the amp model for a similar effect. Image 2 shows my EchoBoy settings, with a delay time of 285 milliseconds, some high and low cut (but not as dark as the rockabilly sound), and lots of simulated tape saturation.
It sounds a little chaotic soloed like this. But somewhat counter-intuitively, the rhythm seems more coherent when you add bass, drums, and dry-toned backing guitars, as in the Dr. Nico example. This musical style often features three or four guitars, and the echo on the lead guitar helps it stand out as the solo instrument.
Image 2
Authoritative Echo. Here’s a slapback variation I call “the Great Dictator,” because it makes me think of some autocrat addressing a stadium full of followers, with a hard, steely echo bouncing off of reflective concrete surfaces. For this sound I keep the treble strong, cut some bass, add modest distortion, set a delay time of about 250 ms, and select a low feedback setting—maybe two or three echoes. [Ex. 5.]
Again, it can seem rhythmically chaotic. But if you dial back the wet level, you get a spacious sound that stands out against backing instruments, as in Ex. 6.
Now let’s introduce a new idea: subtlety! A not-so-secret trick among pop producers is to add a single short echo to lead vocals, in addition to reverb and other effects. The echo can be nearly subliminal, yet it helps a lead vocal (or a guitar!) stand out in a mix. The lead guitar that enters at 00:07 in Ex. 7 is as present as a poke in the nose, even though the track has generous amounts of spring reverb.
Ex. 8 adds a touch of echo on the lead part, paradoxically helping the sound blend into the mix and command centerstage.
This time I didn’t add the delay effect directly to the guitar’s channel strip, but placed it on an aux bus. Routing the sound this way opens up many more sonic possibilities—ones we’ll explore next month!
This ugly effect can be a thing of beauty.
Imagine an effect that can single-handedly destroy everything guitarists traditionally love about tone. How awesome would that be?
Don't dream it—use it! It's called bitcrushing, and it's been around since the dawn of digital audio. This harsh, clangorous distortion is everything that “classic rock crunch" is not. It produces dissonant, chaotic sounds with sharp, steely edges. Taken to extremes, bitcrushed audio degrades into insect-like clicks and farts, often with bizarre and unpredictable rhythmic side effects.
Yes, it's that cool.
Crush, kill, destroy. Admittedly, large doses of bitcrushing can be hard to swallow. But applied judiciously, the effect can animate an arrangement with unexpected colors and quirky rhythmic glitches. Also, bitcrushed sounds can cut through anything, so they can be especially useful for adding guitars to dense EDM tracks. Bitcrushing is the hydrochloric acid of audio.
Many DAWs include bitcrushing plugins, such as Ableton Live's Redux, Reason's Scream, and Logic Pro's imaginatively named Bitcrusher. There are also some great free bitcrushing plugins. In fact, Tritik's Krush is so cool that you should probably just grab a copy now. It's free, feature-rich, and fully functional, and there are versions for both Mac OS and Windows. I used Krush to record all the audio for this column.
Do the numbers. While you're downloading, let's discuss the effect. Like all things digital, bitcrushing involves numbers—two, specifically. The first is bit depth, which is roughly akin to resolution in a photograph. If you compare, say, a studio recording at its original 32-bit depth and the same recording at a CD's 16-bit rate, you probably won't perceive a loss of highs or lows. But the 16-bit recording probably sounds “shallower." If you listen on studio monitors with your eyes closed, the higher-bit-rate recording can seem to have a deeper “soundstage," with more of a sense of instruments being nearer and farther in relation to the listener. At lower rates, it can sound like the musicians are all lined up next to each other on a narrow stage. Dynamics may feel relatively squashed, and the quietest sections—the final ring of a decaying chord, for example—can feel grainy and relatively low-res.
But we're not talking about the usual “dumbing down" that occurs when transferring 32-bit recordings to CD-quality 16-bit. Heavily bitcrushed sounds display increasing amounts of noise. Pushed to the limit, you get mere pops and clicks. In Clip 1, a guitar phrase gets subjected to decreasing bit rates. Behold the devastation and weep!
The other important number is sampling rate: the higher the number, the higher the fidelity. We listen to CDs and MP3s at 44.1 kHz, though we often record at higher rates such as 96 kHz or 192 kHz. Meanwhile, a talking musical toy from the 1970s might have had a 10 kHz sampling rate.
When you drop the rate below 20 kHz or so, you audibly and increasingly lose high end. Go low enough, and the sound degrades into clangorous noise. This process is called downsampling. In Clip 2, the sample rate descends from full frequency to a coarse grumble. Can you hear how low-rate settings might work as (or at least with) bass sounds?
Those are the basics, though some bitcrushing plug-ins add additional tools. Krush is a great example. Check out the interface (Image 1).
Image 1
Two of the big knobs control bit crushing and downsampling (labeled “dwsp"). The leftmost knob sets the drive level feeding the effect. Higher drive settings are wilder and noisier.
To the right of the big knobs are simple low-pass and high-pass tone controls that siphon off highs and/or lows downstream from the digital distortion. The res control adds resonant feedback at the filter cutoff frequencies. At the far right are wet/dry faders. (All examples heard here are 100 percent wet.) The bottom row is the modulation section, with an LFO that can sync to a track's metronome. There are four modulating waveforms to choose from. The remaining knobs specify which parameters are subject to modulation. Impressive for a free plug-in, huh?
You can combine bitcrushing and downsampling, as heard in Clip 3. (The settings are those shown in Image 1.) Obviously, bitcrushed sounds can be so degraded that they have no definite pitch. That's not a bad thing, necessarily—you can say the same about many cymbal and drum sounds. But as you downsample, there's a strong resonance at the filter cutoff point, which you can use to roughly tune the effect.
You might not identify the primary pitch in Ex. 4 as D. But when the Dm bass-synth riff enters after four bars, they kinda/sorta cooperate harmonically.
Image 2
The heavy downsampling in Ex. 4 yields a more bass-like tone. Image 2 shows the settings.
Image 3
Now let's try incorporating Krush's modulation section, as seen in Image 3. With the lowpass filter resonance set high and fast 64th note triple modulation routed to both the filter frequency and the downsampling amount, you get the splish-splash water effect of Clip 5.
Naturally, once you capture such sounds within your DAW, you can stir up additional trouble. In Clip 6, for instance, I doubled the guitar recording, processed each clip with its own Krush setting, and panned the two tracks in stereo. Note how the glitching adds rhythmic tension as it clashes against the quantized electronic beats. It's similar to the way rhythmically imperfect loops can add tension and character to hip-hop tracks.
Bring the noise. Here we've looked at downsampling within your DAW. But you can create similar effects without a computer thanks to recent bitcrushing stompboxes such as Catalinbread's Heliotrope and Malekko Heavy Industries' Scrutator, which convert your analog signal to lo-res digital.
Obviously, these flavors aren't for everybody. But before you shriek “never!" I urge you to explore these sounds in musical contexts. Bitcrushed audio can be brutal on its own, but you may be surprised by how often this abrasive effect can lend texture and interest to a mix, especially alongside less extreme sounds.
T’aint bass, t’aint guitar, ’tis versatile.
This column was inspired by a fine April 2014 Premier Guitar article: “Deep 6: A Brief History of the Tragically Underused Electric Baritone Guitar” by Thomas V. Jones—better known as TV Jones, famed pickup maker and luthier. Tom’s right. Baritone is tragically underused. So let’s ameliorate the tragedy with an overview of ways to arrange and record with bari.
Here’s how Jones defines baritone guitar: “a long-scale guitar tuned below standard E tuning, but not as far down as a full octave. Most baritone scale lengths are between 26" and 30".”
My definition is looser: any fretted instrument that specializes in bridging the bass and guitar registers. That can include purpose-made baris like Jones describes, 6-string basses tuned E to E (the original tuning for Danelectro and Fender 6-string basses), and even standard-scale guitars cranked down to B or A. With the latter option, string gets floppy and intonation suffers. And sometimes that’s awesome.
Here’s an example on YouTube. I recorded all the guitar tracks on Tom Waits’ “Going Out West” with a vintage Telecaster tuned down to B, without even installing heavy strings. The intonation is abysmal! It’s a sour-sounding racket! And Waits wouldn’t have had it any other way. The amp was a blackface Super Reverb. I’d applied reverb and trem, but just before we rolled tape, Tom turned both controls up to 10.
The slippery slope. Baritone guitar’s musical uses are equally varied. On one end of the spectrum are low single-note parts that might double a standard bass, or simple single-note melodies near or below the bottom of the guitar register, like, say the iconic Bass VI melodies Glen Campbell played on his ’60s hits “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston.” The Bass VI in Clip 1 is tuned from E to E as Leo intended. (As on nearly all baritone guitar recordings from the 1950s and ’60, the strings are flatwound.)
Thanks to the Bass VI’s extended 30"-scale, low notes are authoritative and higher notes are reasonably well-intonated. It’s a far cry from the loose, sloppy sound of the Waits track. But low-tuned standard-scale guitars don’t always sound so anarchic. I’ve had great luck recording with a Baldwin Virginian, a standard 25.5"-scale semi-acoustic that I snagged back in the ’90s for a mere $90 (Clip 2).
If the Bass VI resonates like steel bridge cables and the low-tuned Tele is like a clothesline flapping in the breeze, this is like … a tightrope, maybe? It’s reasonably in tune, and the shorter scale facilitates chordal/fingerstyle playing. I tune it A–E–A–D–F#–B—like dropped-D, but down a fourth.
Clip 1 and Clip 2 were both recorded guitar-style, with amp, reverb, and tremolo sounds. But there are other possibilities. Check out Clip 3, a quickie demo track featuring drums, bass, acoustic guitar, and electric guitar. There’s no bari—yet.
Let’s consider some ways you might incorporate bari here. In Clip 4, I double the original bass line in unison using the Bass VI—the same technique employed on many vintage Nashville recordings. The Fender certainly brings out the bass line, especially against the deep, dark-sounding Guild Starfire bass on the primary bass track. This time I recorded direct, straight into a preamp with no amp or effect simulation.
I don’t miss an amp sound here, though it would probably sound just as good with one. Still, I manipulated the track in the mix, filtering out a lot of low end on the bari so it wouldn’t muddy the sub-200 Hz frequencies. I also added plate reverb and panned the parts slightly in stereo. Conventional wisdom says bass tracks should be dry—a great principle to violate! Here, though, blending dry bass and wet bari creates a cool ambience while maintaining melodic clarity.
Clip 5 flips the equation. Here I double the electric guitar part an octave below using a 29.4"-scale Gretsch Spectra Sonic baritone, an instrument created by TV Jones himself. (Gretsch no longer produces these, though Jones sells them directly.) This creates a mutant 12-string effect.
The Spectra Sonic is a great “compromise” guitar. It has sufficient tension and scale length for classic baritone sounds, yet it’s relatively comfy for chordal and fingerstyle playing. I tune it A–E–A–D–F#–B, same as the Baldwin.
Did you know that Robert Smith used Bass VI on many, many Cure tracks? But he rarely doubles guitar or bass parts. Instead, he plays simple, stepwise countermelodies that weave around the vocals and other guitars. Sadly, Clip 6 sounds nothing like my beloved Cure, though the musical concept is similar. It’s the Baldwin again.This is far from a complete list of baritone guitar techniques. We didn’t even get into reinforcing distorted guitar riffs with extra low notes, a long-running metal/rock technique. But the real adventure happens when you discover your own techniques. You don’t even need a dedicated baritone guitar to experiment. Just install a set of heavy-gauge flatwounds on a standard-scale guitar and tune B to B. Or for a less traditional bari sound, just use your current strings. Intonation may become an unobtainable fantasy, but you’ll have good anarchic fun.