Bob Clearmountain's Guide to Recording an Electric Guitar Amp, Part 2

Last time, legendary recording engineer Bob Clearmountain (David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones) showed you how to mic and record an electric guitar amp using one mic and an Apogee Duet audio interface.

In this second part of our series, Clearmountain shows how to record an electric guitar amp using two microphones.

"What’s been common lately, I’ve noticed, is using ribbons on guitar amps," Clearmountain says.

"The Royer ribbon, the 121, is a very common mic to use on guitar amps. I generally like to couple it with an SM57 so you can get that bright, edgy, more aggressive sound out of the 57 and the ribbon will give you more rounded warmer sound and sometimes that way once you get to the mix you can use either one depending on the guitar’s contribution to the big picture of the mix.

"Or sometimes a combination can work you can get somewhere in between and it gives you quite a wide range of different sounds to use later on.

"As far as placing the mic, it’s really to taste. Generally I just have this ribbon pointing directly at the speaker, the 57 I have slightly off axis to the other speaker. You can put them on the same speaker if you want, it doesn’t make a lot of difference."