First, the effect of pickups on guitar tone:

Even though we each have different ideas about our ultimate tone, I think we’re all looking for a rich sound – rich in harmonics, that is. Lots of harmonic content = lots of ‘tone’. If you have lots of harmonic content to start with, you can easily use other sound shaping tools (tone controls on the amp, in particular) to sculpt your favourite and unique sound. It’s a bit like giving an artist every colour he could wish for to paint a picture. If you only give him a pencil, he can still draw a great picture if he’s really good, but has limited options.

The principles of rock guitar tone:

The best rock tone is from saturated power tubes directly driving a guitar speaker hard, with no load or attenuator getting in the way. The only really satisfactory way to get actual cranked tube amp and speaker tone with almost no room noise is to use a speaker isolation cabinet and its attendant gear.

Finally, the mother of all pages: Derek Miller’s collection of articles about guitar tone in rock’n'roll:

Perhaps the stereotype rock tone is that of the Marshall stack: a rectangular, 100-watt (or more), tube-powered amplifier “head” stacked on top of two speaker cabinets, each containing four 12-inch speakers. In this case, the guitar is a bit less important to the overall sound, although most who prefer it use Gibson-style solidbody guitars like the Les Paul or Gibson SG, with dual-coil “humbucking” pickups. Cranking up the Marshall creates a buzzing, distorted, complex, and extremely loud sound.

See Also: Mic placement and tone video

It’s a lot of things, but most importainly[sic] it’s the blend of guitars and bass in the arrangement. If you listen closely to your fav guitar sounds, the guitars aren’t really that big on their own, but when played with the bass…..

Also, it helps to have a good player, with an in tune guitar, with a well maintained head and cab, and then you can throw up a couple of mic’s, blend them properly without phase problems (which cause comb filtering/cancellation of freq’s that make your guitars not huge), then mix them well and your done.

From Homerecording.com, How do I improve miking my guitar amp?

Get the amp cabinet off the floor. Use 1 ear and act like a mic. Move around and listen to the sound. If you like the sound, put the mic there. Many times, there is no place that has the sound you want. If that is true, then use a different amp, pedel, guitar etc. Don’t put the mic to the cloth. Put about 2″ from it. You will get a better sound if you back off on the distortion (if you are after distorted guitars). Don’t try to get a super heavy sound like some records as they double, triple etc. guitars. You are after a good sound with detail. More distortion kills the detail and hogs the available space for the total guitar sound. Doubling shitty guitar sounds only makes things worse.

… and some thoughts on thickening guitars:

Boost a wide band from80hz to about 150 hz.
Boost till it sounds fat.
Then put a multiband compressor next in line (Like a waves C4 or something of the like) to push the lows down under control. Doing this keeps the lows fat but not out of wack. This typically works well for me. Youll need to experiment, but its a good possiblilty you can make it work for you with some patience.

And finally, more on the same from TapeOp – Big ass guitar tone:

Whatever distortion/overdrive you think you need live, scale back by a 1/4 or 1/3 when you record.

Also: use heavier gauged strings on your guitar.

But taken together, small changes like these add up, and can really bring a mix to life.

Here are some of the small things you can do before hitting record to see big improvements at mix time:

• Tune everything: Guitars, piano, drums
• Change guitar strings
• Change drum heads
• Turn off fans, lights, and monitors while you record
• Clean and polish cymbals
• Make sure no inputs are clipping
• Put fresh batteries in effects pedals
• Use balanced drum sticks
• Put cat outside.

Double-tracking is straightforward: Record a part twice, both takes as similar as possible, and pan one take hard left and the other all the way right. This creates a much wider stereo image than tracking once with a stereo mic, because our ears interpret the separate takes as two different guitars.

All well and good when you decide before recording to use doubled guitars. But what if you realize only after you’ve started mixing that you need the hard-panned sound, and it’s too late to record a doubled track?

You can’t simply duplicate the track, and pan one copy left and the other right. That sends the same signal to both channels, so the result is effectively mono. And while it’s possible to duplicate the track, and apply effects to one hard-panned copy of it (such as delaying the left side by a few milliseconds,) this yields at best a noticeably fake stereo image. While each channel carries a different signal, our ears quickly sense the similarities, especially in the rhythm and timing.

Here’s a trick you can use to get a great stereo effect from mono tracks when the part you’d like to double has repeating sections. With the right source material, this approach yields a result indistinguishable from a properly double-tracked performance.

I’ll demonstrate on this guitar riff:

The track looks like this in Sonar. Note that it’s recorded in mono:

The riff has two repeating sections. I’ve labeled them “part A” and “part B,” and each repeats once.

Remember that the stereo effect arises in hard-panned, double-tracked songs because our ears hear two separate guitars playing. Since this track has repeated sections, I can create the illusion of two guitars playing by pairing different repeats of each section. I did that as follows:

• Duplicate the mono track.
• Split the second track into its repeating parts.
• Shuffle the split sections, so that parts A1 and B1 in the first track are paired with parts A2 and B2 in the second, and vice versa.
• Pan the tracks hard left and right.

Now the two tracks each play the same part (A or B) at the same time, but a different “take” of each part. Here’s how it sounds:

A great stereo spread from a single mono recording!

Note that I left the last section (labeled “part A-3″) the same in both channels so you can clearly hear the difference between the “stereo-ified” version of the track, and the mono that results when both channels play the same thing. And for contrast, I mixed a “fake stereo” version created by duplicating and hard-panning the track, and delaying the left side by 5ms:

While this initially sounds like a stereo recording, your ears should quickly sense the overriding similarity in the left and right channels. The stereo effect collapses, especially after repeated listens. Contrast this with the doubled version above which sounds wide and dynamic no matter how many times you hear it!

For more home recording tips,
Subscribe to the Hometracked feed, or receive email updates.

you’re going to get a better sound recording electric guitars on analog than digital. If you’re going digital, you may want to use a bit more compression than normal, maybe dial more low-end because digital is like a clear pane of glass. And it’s important to make sure the guitars have been set up well, that the intonations are in good shape so the players are not having a tuning nightmare.

I like to record steel stringed acoustic guitars with two mics, one aimed at the bridge and one aimed towards the neck, just about where the neck meets the body. The mic aimed at the bridge will get the bright stuff and the one aimed at the neck gets the dark stuff. The beauty of this approach is it lets you mix ‘n’ match to taste at mixdown. In other words, if it’s just naked guitar or guitar and vocals, you can balance the tracks for a full sound.

This Gearslutz thread has tips on getting a stereo sound from only one guitar:

If you put up a room mic, and you aim it to the side instead of the amp, then that mic gets no direct sound from the amp, and you get no phase problems when you blend it into the mix. Figure 8 pattern works great for this, because there is more rejection at the null point. If the player is into the purity of a trio, with no doubletracking, this would be a good way to go.

And here are some approaches to recording a BIG guitar sound:

take a split of the guitar track & feed it through an eq, then a compressor, then another identical eq. find the spot, usually around 800hz, where the guitar sounds nice & thick & boost it till the eq just starts to dominate, then double that boost. compress that sound like you normally would a guitar, then, on the second eq, cut the same frequency by half the amount you boosted with the first eq. blend this sound in with your original track.

Peaks and valleys in your spectrum don’t determine what’s “good” or “bad,” your ears do… And what causes records to sound different in different listening environments is a poorly balanced mix, again something you fix with your ears, not your eyes.

This conversation about ultrasonic frequencies (those above the range of human hearing) is technical, and does nothing to settle the debate about whether recording at 192KHz really yields improved transparency. But it’s interesting nonetheless:

if you do record all the way up to, say, 100 kHz, you will be capturing signal that can foldback and alias into the sub-20 kHz regions. If you take care of these things prior to the decimation, there will be less energy to foldback.

How do I get a big thick guitar sound? (The best advice is on page 2)

Drop any distortion simulation like a hot potato. Forget about it….you will thank me later. I tried to do “professional” recordings with it, and it just doesn’t work….though I do actually rely on sims for pristine cleans. The whole thing is that emulation hasn’t got to the authentic stage, because it doesn’t sound like it’s pushing air, and it’s using transistors, which add a 3rd harmonic in the distortion, which is not pleasant to the ears. For single notes it’s okay, but transistor distortion just sounds unpleasant when you have multiple strings playing, especially on an open d or g chord….it’s a whole bunch of these harsh overtones. I just don’t think that transistor power amps can process all the information in a way that it’s pleasing to the ears….it’s trying to process numbers, where the ears are processing overtones.

Joey Moi, who co-produced and engineered Nickelback’s The Long Road shows up on this thread at Gearslutz to offer his thoughts on recording the band.

whats noted is pretty close to the set up we used on “The Long Road” give or take a mic or 2…or 4. Its alot different now that we have moved to the barn and our Live room is smaller. For the record…the SSL we have is great, it is the old board from the A room in Little Mountain, we have a lot of fun using it and it has never let us down. (We thinks it has magic)

i’ve also had decent results with the harmonica player playing straight into an sm58/vocal mic, and driving (overdriving?) the preamp a little/lot. it’s an entirely different sound–more immediate and “direct” sounding (and can get brittle if you don’t watch out)……but one that may work depending on what the song/production calls for.

Some thoughts on recording acoustic guitar:

Vertical X-Y (SDC’s) about 1-1.5′ away (around the neck joint) to get the bulk, and maybe a LDC around the lower quarter of the soundboard.

Here’s a neat idea: Use a digital camera to capture your gear settings for easy recall later:

I’ve always seen mastering engineers complaining about the time they have to spend writing the settings of their outboard gears for recall purposes. Did any of you guys think about using a digital camera to take pictures of your gears and save them in the same project folder. That way, you should be able to recall the settings by looking at these pictures.