Solo Guitar Recording

Getting “good” sound for recording your guitar doesn’t require the most expensive gear, but it does

involve paying attention to the details. Lots and lots of details. When I record at home, I set my sights

on achieving a sound quality that can hold its own with even the multimillion-dollar professional

recording studios. When I recorded my last studio album (a duo guitar CD with John Stowell) we visited

one of those high-end facilities where one single Neumann microphone cost more than all of the

equipment in my home studio combined. And yeah, it sounded great, but no better than what I’ve

learned how to achieve in my 24/7 available home studio.

real space. The room or hall is every bit as important as is the capture of the guitar itself. If the end

listener is using earbuds or headphones they will for the most part hear your sound with the space as

you record and create it. But when they listen through speakers in their room, then they will hear your

room and their room combined, an acoustic mash up which is a very difficult to manage on the

production end. Maybe they’re even listening in their moving car! This is the reason audio engineers

will always check their work through a variety of speakers and playback environments to ensure their

sound is “translating” as best as possible.

Our most controllable approach is to avoid recording the sound of your room in the first place, and to

then create the recording space artificially using high quality digital reverb in your mixdown. If you have

access to doing a live recording in Cleveland’s Severance Hall, then by all means disregard this

is to get some long wires and play your guitar from a different room and listen to yourself in

headphones while a buddy moves the microphone around in front of the cab. Often the sweet spot is

somewhere near two thirds the way from the center cap to the rim of the speaker, but your milage will

vary. Oh, microphone angle matters too- a lot, so there are simply way to many combinations of this

trial and error process to do without some helping hands. Even better, is if you can have one helper play

the guitar while someone else moves the mike, and all YOU do is listen from a distance away from both

of them. Then you can really hear what the mike hears.

Once you have the mike in the perfect sweet spot, I would recommend using as little of the amp’s

reverb as you can get by with. Remember, we’re going to be adding digital reverb to the signal later to

create the illusion of a room, stage, concert hall or whatever you want, but amp reverb is really different

(illusion of space). I mention this because it’s exactly what I do on my recordings. I’m using a small

battery powered Roland micro-cube (bass Rx model) stereo amp and close miking it with an Audio

Technica 8022 stereo mike. I’d never dream of using this amp for live gigging, but it’s sweet, flat and



performer. I use a large diaphragm condenser mike (Rode K2) about a foot or two away from

the guitar (again, move it around a bunch for your personal sweet spot) and then mix in at low

level to combine just a hint of it in the final mix.

postproduction 

, I want to come up with the right blend of the close mike

speaker cab with The blend I typically wind up with is

80% to 90% in favor of the amp cab, so truly just a pinch of the string noise channel goes a long

way. The next question is to examine the frequency balance of our sound and determine if any

EQ is called for. If the microphones are halfway decent and well placed to begin with you may

As mentioned earlier, artificial digital reverb is the most important tool in the toolkit for creating

the right space to surround and envelope your guitar. In most basic terms, reverb is often

described as wet or dry, and indeed, most guitar amp reverbs have but one knob to control how

much. A quality plug-in reverb in your DAW will have a great many more adjustable parameters



will do for you. My all-time favorite reverb is a plug-

convolution reverb because it uses actual impulse samples recorded in real spaces, including

some of the best concert halls and cathedrals round the world, and digitally maps these impulse

responses to th

achieving that natural and realistic space.

little bit like ear candy, so be careful of the temptation to overdo it, but this seems to make

everything sound better, a little more open, a little more air, on any set of speakers or

headphones you throw at it. The other processor I always use is a limiter. This is similar to a

n a way that the peak volumes are only affected at a set

threshold and everything below the threshold is untouched. It should only engage on the

loudest peaks and have the effect of making all of the softer sections of the music louder with

no sonic impact. Judicious user of compression on a guitar track in a band recording can really

help, but I can safely say I would never use compression on a solo guitar recording. My choice of

limiter is to go with either the Waves L-

rendering my finished video.

196K and 32bit, but by the time you had to convert the files back to the limits of the delivery



I hope this helps you on your journey to better solo guitar sound. If I were to sum this all up

improve your sound is

better microphone placement and reverb management. Happy tracking!

-Mark Kleinhaut 1/20/2022