In this article I’m going to go over acoustic guitar, electric guitar, upright bass guitar, electric bass guitar, horns and vocals. Remember that this is the way I mic these instruments and you should not take it as the “right and only way”. You should experiment, listen carefully and tell me when you find a cool sound.

Let us begin with the acoustic guitar. Almost every acoustic guitarist I’ve worked with has had an internal pickup built into his or her instrument. This makes any sound mixers’ life tons easier for two reasons. One: We can use a direct box (I use Countryman’s Type-85), which gives us greater gain before feedback than would a microphone.

Countryman D.I.

And Two: the pickup is in a fixed position on the instrument, meaning no matter what the person playing the guitar does (flips, stage dives, summersaults) we will get a constant and stable sound source. If we were using a microphone on a stand any movement of the player holding the instrument would effect the signal.

Of course I’ve had a few players who did not have a pickup. When this happens I use an ATM-63 or SM-57. I place it as close to the instrument as possible and aim it at the top of the sound hole. This gives you a good combination of the body and the neck resonance. The closer you get to the center of the sound hole the more mid range (sustain) and less high end (scratch) you will hear. Here’s something else you can try. Use both DI (direct box) and a mic. Now you can turn up the gain on the mic without having to worry about it feeding back in the monitors. (Only put the DI in the monitors) I’ve gotten some pretty big sounding acoustics with this technique.

Mic-ing a guitar amp

Next we have the electric guitar. Electric guitarist take pride in their sound and are usually very particular on what kind of amplifier they play through. So capturing that sound is important to me. I usually use an ATM-63 or SM-57 and place it against the grill of the amp, aiming it at the cone. If you’re looking at a speaker the center part is called the dust cover (It looks like a little dome). Around that dust cover is the cone section. The cone is the part of the speaker that is vibrating the air to make sound.