Savvy studio guitarists are hip to an old but rarely used electric guitar recording technique: capturing the acoustic sound of the instrument while simultaneously recording through an amp. We'll begin with the “traditional" approach, and then take it to other places, including ones where the sun don't shine.
But first: Why fuss with two mics when a miked amp sounds awesome on its own?
When Bright Bite is Right
Acoustic miking expands the electric guitar's frequency range. Amps and speakers siphon off highs—everything above 5 kHz or so. Your guitar produces overtones an octave or two higher, though you seldom hear them.
Sometimes aggressive high-end sizzle is exactly what a guitar needs to cut through a mix.
Usually we don't want those highs. They're not present in most electric guitar sounds we know and love. Also, electric guitar's limited frequency range is generally a blessing at mix time, leaving the top end free for voice, cymbals, piano, or anything else with lots of high-end action.
But sometimes, aggressive high-end sizzle is exactly what a guitar needs to cut through a mix. It can add mass and impact, especially on recordings with sparse instrumentation (one guitar and drums, for example). Also, dual signals permit processing tricks that can yield unique, hypnotic, and generally bitchin' tones.
Outside Looking In
Most players who use this technique simply aim a mic at the guitar's body. (Audition locations by monitoring through headphones, playing as you shift the mic around.) Ex. 1 features a Trussart Steelcaster, whose metal body generates odd rattles and resonance (Photo 1).
Ex. 1
First you hear the mic alone (an Ear Trumpet Edna, a small-diaphragm condenser), and then the same signal mixed with an amp sound. I used amp simulators for the non-miked tones in all these examples—specifically, Amp Designer from Apple's Logic Pro. [Disclosure:I'm a Logic developer.] If you use analog amps, it's best to isolate them. Amp bleed through the acoustic mic can produce unpleasant phase cancellation.
The miked tone is thin and brittle—but dig how it adds edge when blended with the darker amp sound. (It's a weird tone, but weird is good.) I applied contrasting processing to the two tracks: The amp sound has heavy tremolo and a hint of plate reverb. The mic has no trem, but heavy vibrato. The two parts are slightly panned, and there's compression and EQ on the master bus where the two parts meet.
Photo 2 (left) and photo 3 (right)
Let's go deeper—literally! For the remaining examples, I used a tiny lavalier mic like broadcasters clip to their lapels. Mine is a nice Shure SM93 (Photo 2), but you can get cool results with ultra-cheap lav mics—a hi-fi effect, this ain't. For Ex. 2, I inserted the mic through the diamond soundhole on a Gibson Trini Lopez (Photo 3). Again, you hear mic first, then mic and amp simulation together.
Ex. 2
It sounds surreal. There's reverb on the mic signal, while the faux-amps are bone-dry. Since low notes disproportionately drive the amp, low chords seem to come from the sides, while the center-panned mic signal predominates when low notes are absent. There's no panning automation, yet the sound seems to oscillate between the center and sides. The "not found in nature" dirty/clean blend adds more weirdness. You know how fat distorted tones can vanish in a mix? This composite won't.
Take It to the Bridge
Photo 4
Another place only lav mics can go is beneath bridge hardware. For Ex. 3 I slid the mic under the metal hardware of the Trini's tailpiece, securing it with tape (Photo 4). (Use painter's tape, which leaves no sticky residue.)
Ex. 3
Yow—that vibrating metal is super-bright! Yet it sounds cool combined with two amp simulators panned left and right. The right-channel amp has delay, also panned right, while the other amp is dry. The mic sound is panned center, but its delay is panned hard left, opposite the amp delay. It's a compelling sonic soup.
Photo 5
A Bigsby tailpiece sounds quite different. For Ex. 4 I switched to a homemade Bigsby-equipped "parts" guitar, aiming the mic toward the strings behind the tension bar (Photo 5).
Ex. 4
Here the mic tone meshes nicely with a pawnshop combo simulation. I've processed the amp tone with stereo chorus/vibrato (from Universal Audio's Boss CE-1 plug-in) for a fun "rubber band" tone. The mic adds a hard percussive edge to a rather soft amp sound.
Nuts to You
Photo 6
For Ex. 5 I inserted the lav mic under the strings behind the nut (Photo 6). It was a tight fit on this guitar—some strings lightly touch the mic, creating a hard thwap that reminds me of an aggressively plucked upright bass (minus any actual bass frequencies).
Ex. 5
For the composite sound, I sent the mic signal to a short plate reverb, choosing the pre-fader send option so the reverb overshadows the dry signal. The amp tone is warm and dry. Result: a clip-clopping, horse's hooves effect. Both mic and amp are panned dead center, but the mic's reverb provides stereo animation. Only the highest highs get reverb—another surreal effect.
Sounds like these aren't for all occasions—god forbid! But the extended treble and snappy attack of mic tones sometimes add welcome edge, animation, and just plain weirdness. These composite sounds won't disappear in a mix—or a listener's memory.
[Updated 10/11/21]
- Eliminate Mic-Placement Guesswork with the "Shavering ... ›
- The Recording Guitarist: Two Mics Are (Sometimes) Better than One ... ›
- Tracking Guitars? Get a Room! - Premier Guitar ›
- Recording Dojo: The Case for Miking Your Electric Guitar - Premier Guitar ›
- Recording Dojo: The Case for Miking Your Electric Guitar - Premier Guitar ›
- How to Get Better Recorded Guitar Tones - Premier Guitar ›
We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.
