Audio Recording

If you are producing rock music, you will most likely recording overdrive or distortion guitars. This is a tutorial for beginners on how to go about recording overdrive guitars using a guitar amplifier.

Assuming you have all the equipments needed. It is time to record your first overdrive guitar take. Let’s get started:

Set for that Perfect Overdrive Tone

Of course, before you will record the guitar overdriven sound; you need to set the tone. This is usually done by adjusting settings on the guitar amplifier (such as Marshall or Laney) where they have built-in overdrive effect. Adjust for that best tone you are targeting.

Another popular use are overdrive effect pedals. For example, I am still using my Rockteck overdrive pedal which I bought in 2004 and yet still works and sounds great for an extremely low price.

In adjusting the tone, you will set the levels, distortion level and the tone itself. For example, this is the setting I used for the demo sample recording on this tutorial:

Other important settings that you can implement that will influence the overdrive sound are the EQ knobs in the guitar amplifier. There is no standard EQ setting but if you want some heaviness and punchy overdrive sound, you may want to switch the mid and treble to slightly above minimum while setting the bass to average.

Once everything has been set and you are happy with the sound proceed to the next section.

Set the Microphones and Recording Levels

OK, so you need two microphones in this case. I use Rode NT1A and SM58. Although one microphone is just fine but I need to automate the double tracking when mixing; so I want to create two guitar tracks at the same time by recording using two microphones.

Point those microphones near the guitar amplifier cabinet around 4 to 6 inches for dynamic microphones and 8 to 12 inches for a condenser microphone. See below:

Then plug these microphones to your audio interface input 1 and 2 (with have pre-amps on it). I am using Saffire Pro 40 to record these microphones and these are my settings:

1.) 48 volt phantom power -on
2.) Instrument level (Inst) button – on
3.) Gain – somewhere around 50% to 75%.
4.) Input 1 – Rode NT1A
5.) Input 2 – SM 58 microphone

Opened up your DAW (using Reaper in this example) and insert two tracks. Configure the first track to accept inputs from Input 1 of your audio interface and the second track to accept inputs from Input 2.

This is how it looks like in Reaper (inside the yellow box):

IP1 is Input 1 of the audio interface while IP2 is the second input. Then aimed those two tracks for recording by hitting the small red button; take note you are not yet recording but just aiming the track ready for recording.

Play your guitar with overdrive effect and see the resulting recording levels that fluctuate in the meter. You want the volume coming from those two microphones to be as similar as possible. For example see screenshot (see they have comparable peaks in the level meter):

If the output from one microphone is weaker, then adjust the preamp gain accordingly.

Hit the record button, do some assessments

When everything has been set, hit the record button and the guitar tracks would be recorded into two tracks you have set in Reaper.

After recording, play the recorded guitar tracks to make sure it does sound similar before recording (on the amp). It should sound the same. If not, something is wrong on your signal chain; probably some effects have been unintentionally added or there is clipping on the recording.

To mix this, I pan one guitar track on the right and the other on the left; creating a nice ambiance on the stereo field. To further add the delay effect, you might want to move one microphones farther; but not to far because this will introduce serious phase cancellation issues.

This is the sample overdrive guitar recording following the above methods:

Other important factors you need to know

1.) The most popular microphone used for recording overdrive guitars with an amp is SM 57. I do not have one, so I just use SM 58 which have similar sound capturing characteristics.

2.) Be careful of aiming a condenser microphone very close to a loud guitar amplifier cabinet. It is because some condenser microphones are not designed to handle high sound pressure levels. It can damage the microphone.

3.) You can even use the lowest wattage guitar amplifier (such as a practice amp) to fully capture the great overdrive sound. The wattage of the guitar amplifier does not play the role on the capturing quality.