Tracking R&B Guitars with sE

Tracking R&B Guitars with sE

Music production is forever becoming a more fast-paced career and artform. File sharing platforms make collaboration with musicians spread across the world no big deal! In today’s case, we have a classic Nashville and Los Angeles collab.

Producer/Engineer Jamey Z, who you may know from Slate Audio’s tutorials on The Raven (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cec5GW5alU,) asked me to lay down some guitar tracks on an R&B groove. I’ve been playing an Amplified Nation Dirty Wonderland 50W recently, which is the perfect amp for something like this. Incredibly open and uncompressed, every nuance of the instrument is represented.

The next step is getting the sound of the amplifier faithfully captured in a recording. I used my favorite close-mic combination, the VR1 passive ribbon microphone and the T1 large-diaphragm condenser. The VR1’s round, warm tone perfectly combines with the fast transients and clarity of the T1 to recreate the full color palette of the amplifier. An added bit of fun here is that I’m playing through a 2×12” cabinet with mismatched speakers, creating a nice color difference, and making each microphone channel more distinctive. I also mixed in a T2 large-diaphragm condenser in omnidirectional mode as a room mic.

Click the audio file to listen to a 30 second snippet of what I got done. I tracked three layers of rhythm guitar, arranging them to be stackable or standalone parts, so that Jamey has options. Then I threw a bit of lead on top! The amplifier settings, mic placements, and signal chain were identical for all four layers of guitar. The spring reverb is from the amp. No compression or EQ added. Just groovin’ vibes.