Roundtable: A Plethora Of Approaches For Dealing With Guitar Inputs

Jim Yakabuski: There are plenty of options when placing guitar inputs in the front of house mix. I’ll begin by saying that a good player with good gear and control over their various tones and levels is a fantastic starting point, so assuming you have that, here are a couple of options.

If there’s just one guitar player in the band, it’s best to incorporate some method for making the sound more “stereo” by either running it through a delay, reverb, harmonizer or a combination of these, and returning those FX into a stereo channel. This occupies more space in the mix and lends a wider, fatter sound. This can also be accomplished by putting two mics on two speaker cones in a single cabinet. Pan one channel a bit left and the other a bit right to attain added depth.

With two guitarists, pan one player’s sound left and one right to it sounds nice and big in the PA. If they’re each playing rhythm parts in a song this works nicely, but if one begins the song or takes a solo, there may need to be some quick panning back to the center. (See “Dueling Guitars” for more about working with two players in the mix.)

Eddie Caipo: When mixing guitar for in-ear monitors it’s important to create some form of space to avoid the instrument sounding very dry or out of context with what the musician is seeing around him. Try to match the environment. This can be accomplished with stage mics and audience mics, but the simplest and most common technique is adding reverb on the guitar and blending it in the mix.

Even if the guitar player listens to just the guitar, and it may seem like an excessive amount of reverb, it’s important to note that in context with other instruments, it will actually be unnoticeable but will make the experience for the player much more enjoyable and pleasant.

When there’s a single (mono) guitar signal (mic or DI) and the goal is a wider or more “3D” version of the source, double patch the guitar input into two faders in the console, delay one of the inputs between 20 to 40 milliseconds, and hard pan each to left and right. This provides a sense of dimension.

Chris Grimshaw: I like to keep things simple, which usually means one input channel. When there are multiple captures of the same instrument (i.e., mic and DI), there will be phase differences and cancellations when putting both in the mix.

Here’s how I like to do things. Acoustic guitar – mic preferred for quality (and if the musician will stay near the mic), DI preferred when gain before feedback is a primary concern. The choice of mic varies at times, but a beyerdynamic M201TG dynamic works well on smaller stages, with a beyerdynamic MC930 condenser being the choice for larger spaces where gain before feedback is less of a concern.

With electric guitar, it’s important to capture the sound of the amp, since that’s very much part of the instrument. Most of the time, I drape a Sennheiser e906 over the cabinet and off we go. I usually aim for halfway between the edge of the dustcap and edge of the cone on the speaker, since most guitarists set their amps up while listening off-axis. Putting the mic directly on-axis with the speaker often gives a very harsh sound, which I try to avoid.

For emergencies, I have an EQ curve saved on my desk that emulates my own guitar amp – if the pedal board (or guitar) is on a DI, adding that EQ curve will make it sound more like a guitar with an amp and less like a DI’d electric guitar. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you’re running a festival stage and an amp goes down, it keeps everything running with minimal down time.

Andy Coules: My go-to is the SM57, the “old faithful” of guitar mics. (If you can’t get a decent guitar sound with a 57, consider a career in lighting.) A worthy second choice is the Sennheiser e609, the only mic that can be effectively dangled over an amp (do this with a 57 and you’re essentially miking up the floor because the side of the capsule picks the signal up 6 dB lower than the front).

If I want something a bit extra I use the dual-element AE2500 that arguably works better on guitars than the kick drums it was designed for (and sounds great with the two channels panned opposite each other).

Be aware that close miking guitar cabs has a tendency to bring out the proximity effect intrinsic in all directional mics. This is easily observed if you listen to the amp in the room, then slowly bring up the fader, and you hear the guitar getting louder but with a pronounced enhancement of the bottom end.

This is a common source of the lower midrange “mud” that plagues many live mixes so judicious application of a high-pass filter (HPF) can avoid the issue. Most HPFs have a very steep slope (typically 18 to 24 dB per octave), which isn’t ideal for negating the proximity effect so if there’s an option for a gentler slope (such as 12 dB per octave) it should work better; alternatively using a low-mid filter with a wide Q in addition to the HPF can also achieve a gentler slope.

With mic placement, I tend to start with the mic in the center of one of the speakers (shining a torch into the cabinet can help establish where that is) and then move it towards the edge until I get the sound I want. Understand the difference between open- and closed-back speaker cabinets – open-back cabs are less directional and tend to lack low-end punch whereas closed-back designs are much more directional and have a pronounced fullness in the bottom end.

One trick I like to use with open-back cabs is to point an additional mic into the back of the cab, flip the polarity, and then combine it with the front mic to get a fuller sound. Using the front mic to get the treble and the back mic for the bass allows easy altering of the tone of the guitar just by pushing the faders.

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