Mikes: Difference between revisions

What kind of mikes did you select for your amps?

I'm always experimenting, but for the most part I used Neumann U-87s, because they "hear" the way I hear. You know sometimes you put a certain microphone on a guitar, and when you hear it in the control room, it's got every single part of the sound that you didn't want to hear and none of the part you did. Now, that would be different for every person, because everybody's ears are different. But I quite like those microphones. I've tired a lot of other ones, but the Neumann gives the sound that's close to what I'm doing. And that's important, because the idea is to try to capture the sound you're actually making.

Did you use mikes to capture all of the guitar parts on the I.O.U. album?

Well, actually I went DI direct input into the mixing console on one song, "Temporary Fault." I did that one DI just to see how it would come out, and I was quite pleased with the results. I could have probably gone DI on more. The Hartley Thompson works well for miking and DI. It does everything. The reason I didn't use DI more in the studio was that chords and the solos would have been coming down on the same track. At that time I didn't own enough Hartley Thompsons to set them up like one for the solo and one for the chords.

But when you mixed the album, didn't you have to add reverb to give everything more space?

I guess so, but I always had good results with one mike before. The way my amp setup is now, I can make the mike hear something that it thinks sounds ambient.