Five tips for your next guitar recording session – how to sound better on record
Recording can be a stressful affair, we all know that. Months, sometimes years of writing, producing, refining and editing your songs culminate in a couple of days (if you’re lucky and have the budget!) staring at the omnipresent red light, a metronome most likely ticking away.
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Most anxiety inducing of all, is that sometimes despite your best efforts, you need to adapt, think, play and perform under unfamiliar circumstances, so you’ll need to be rehearsed enough to think and change on the fly. Being practiced and rehearsed should be a given, and while it’s not included in the five tips we’re exploring, that’s the best thing you can do to get the best out of yourself, as obvious as that seems. Practice aside, it can be really beneficial to…
1 Set up your guitar!
The microscopic nature of recording can exaggerate problems that weren’t so obvious in a noisy jam room. A couple of mics placed a few inches from your guitar amp will have you hearing things more clearly than you ever have before, so issues like fretbuzz, intonation, tuning and the other rattles that guitars impart will be, quite literally, amplified.
A professional setup will pay dividends as trying to perform around intonation and tuning issues is like adding hurdles to a marathon. If you’re having tuning stability issues, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll be at their worst during your best take, so get them sorted before the recording. Fresh strings are great, but a brand new set will take a little while to settle, so be prepared to tune between every take, or give them a day to wear in.
Tiny rattles from screws, bridge pieces, tremolo arms and loose components can also wreak havoc on an otherwise perfect take, so tightening, fixing and securing all those moving parts is a great step towards success as well!
2 Have various tools, tricks and options
With your guitar playing in tip top shape, your parts well rehearsed, there’s a handful of odd little tips and tricks to push your recording to the next level. Tonality, feel and timbre of your recording can elevate it sonically or push it further than with just good playing.
For this reason, a handful of different plectrums can be great to subtly change the sound, as can various types of strings (as long as you’re prepared to set-up on the fly). Things like foam and tape to stop rattles, a tool to mute strings (a sock or hair tie works well, but there’s commercial options available), or various pieces of foam and rubber to help mute tremolo springs, ring-y tailpieces and the like can help you ready to perform your best. High quality microphones will pick up every nuance of your guitar, and trying to ‘fix’ or EQ these out in the mixing stage will be at the detriment of your tone.
3 Bring extra leads, cables, isolated power and be ready to pull your pedalboard apart
You might have your sounds and tone sorted at home, but once you’re at the studio playing in a different acoustic space, you might want or need to change things up. Common tools for live performance like noise gates, EQs, effects loops and more can suck tone, and while it’s practical for live performance, you can afford to lose them in the studio in the pursuit of an extra 5-10 per cent of sonic bliss!
For this reason, be ready to pull your pedalboard apart to get down to the crux of what’s necessary. Less is more, and each patch cable and pedal is sucking a little life from your guitar before it reaches your amp. If they’re not being used, get ‘em out of there!
On the subject of pedals, isolated power supplies are a great idea for the studio because of how they handle hum, something that is greatly exacerbated once you begin to add gain, let alone EQ and compression in a mix. A worthwhile investment, isolated power supplies can power multiple pedals, all the while isolating the pedal’s power from each other for a quieter result.
4 Know your songs, and know how you like to record them
Now that you’re sonically sorted, we’ve got some more holistic approaches to a great recording. Notes, timing and performance are important to practice, but it’s equally important to know your song and arrangement inside out and back to front. You might need to drop in from multiple points in a song, and going straight into the verse instead of the intro can feel very odd. Your engineer or producer might have questions about timing, metering and arrangement that you’ll need to confirm on the fly. For example, you might need to record scratch and guide guitars for your drummer, so you’ll need to be ready to play the song back to front with just a click track bleeping in your face, without the vocals guiding the amount of repeats, the drummer feeling it out, or the bass player bopping along.
On top of knowing the music itself, it’s important to understand how you like to record. Do you play better with headphones, isolated from the outside world? Maybe you need to stand in front of your amp, the speakers pumping at you and allowing you to use feedback creatively, or maybe you need to sit? Stand? The choice is yours, but only if you know what makes you play your best!
5 Have an open mind
Finally, it’s really important to have an open mind in the studio. While it’s essential to have a vision in mind for how the resulting recording will sound, stubbornness can sometimes push and pull the entire session to a halt if it’s not exactly as you’d imagined.
A lot of the time we’re more concerned with what something isn’t, rather than what it is. Just because a recording isn’t precisely as we’d envisioned, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. That’s not to say you should let go of the reins and allow the producer and engineer to make the songs their own, but a little flexibility can make for a better result overall, and that’s what all of these tips will help you do!
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