A song really starts to take shape when you get some rhythm guitar on top of some drum tracks and this is exactly what happened in this weeks guitar tracking session. After Philip and I worked on choosing the best drum track takes from the past session we did some rough level mixing ready for O’Brien to start building guitar parts on top of the drums. Prior to the session my main concern was to book out two SM57 microphones and an AKG 414 with some placement ideas in mind. After O’Brien arrived we got to work on placing the microphones with the two 57’s close miked an inch away from the grill on the two speaker cones of the Line 6 Spider 212 amplifier. One 57 was placed an inch away directly facing the center of the cone whereas the other was angled facing the inner part of the cone, off the center. This was done to allow us options in post-production with various sounds, the AKG 414 was placed 8 foot away at a height of 2 foot in the air facing the front grill of the amp. The polar pattern we chose for the 414 was cardiod as we decided against omnidirectional as we were setting up in the ‘dead room’, therefore not a lot of reverberation would have been captured anyway.

The pair of SM57’s

After getting a good sound from the microphones and checking the phase on the 414 room microphone, we started to track different guitar takes and listened back to them and we very pleased with the sound we were getting. From this session I learned how it was best to get as many takes as was possible to then allow us more options when it came to mixing these tracks, choosing the best possible ones. We layered guitar overdubs with O’Brien and I even got a chance to play a few guitar parts including a guitar lick in the middle of ‘Another Day‘. Overall, this was a very successful session and now the tracks were starting to take shape.

O’Brien Hesson