I dont know what to think anymore...
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Posted on Apr 02, 2008 09:26 am
Novanium
Member Since: Feb 02, 2008
Question 1:
While micing a drum kit the other day, i got my friend to help set up the mics with me. He mistakenly put a shure pg48 as the overhead. I laughed and told him how bad it would sound; but to my surprise...it sounded awesome. I don't know why, don't know how, but the crashes where high and smooth, the ride bell was edgy, and the snare was thick and balanced with the other snare mic. Oh, and hihat and toms were very good.
WHY did this sound good? WHY does it work? Can someone else try this out just to check if its not a freak mic or something?
Question 2: About a year ago, i screwed up my laptop soundcard by plugging the output of a powered mixer into the mic in (yeah, i know, i know. I don't even know why i did it...i knew it was bad...) Anyway, i dont know how to say it, but it...sort of...deafened my mic input. To listen to things normally i have to mute the microphone slider on the windows volume control thing, or else everything i hear is distorted. When i try and record, i can't hear any sound, and the audio image is a line very high up (as opposed to a line in the middle when talking about complete silence).
I just ordered an echo indigo IO for it, to record will i have to disable my inbuilt soundcard, or can i just leave it the way it is?
Question 3:
Lastly, this is concerning guitar recording. I have an ESP LTD F400FM with emg81s in the neck and bridge positions. It is made of mahogany with flamed maple on the top, providing a very nice balance of high, middle, and low tones. Because of this, the guitar sounds very nice acoustically, very clear. But when i play through the pickups, the emgs destroy the tones, making it sound horrible. Of course, it sounds killer with distortion on powerchords, shorter chords and single notes (especially palm muting...) which is why i still keep the pickups, but with many larger chords, the sound is very unclear.
Does anyone mic electrics acoustically and mix that with a di/amp mic'd signal? How do you think it would sound? I googled it and couldn't find anything even referencing it.
Question 4.5: I get a pretty good sound out of a zoom fx pedal di; mainly because i have no good amps to try and mic. What would you do: DI from the pedal or mic up a marshall 10 watt practise amp?
Wow, thats a lot of text i just typed...anyway...the reason i'm asking is because i have no way of recording anything at the moment and would like to get some opinions on how it would sound.
(i seriously cannot believe how much i just wrote...)
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Apr 02, 2008 10:15 am 1 - Decent playing and good mic placement do wonders for good sound, eh? :) How did the drums sound in the room?
2 - Other sound cards will have no relation to the fried input of your onboard sound.
3 - EMG's are basically pickups with built-in preamps and compressors. You won't get very good tone out of them for anything but thrash-metal. You'll want to put different pickups in your guitar, like a good set of Seymour Duncans! To further answer your question, many people have a splitter box that lets you record the clean output from the guitar (or in your case, "clean" output hah), and send the signal to an amp to be recorded.
4.5 - You should do what sounds best, but even having never heard your setup, I'd bet micing the amp sounds 1000x better than the pedal going DI
Dematrixhttp://www.reverbnation.com/2ndgMember
Since: Nov 27, 2007
Apr 02, 2008 08:53 pm ya really need an 85 meg in the neck, i use one and its not too bad at all.
81's are more for crisp edge, i got one in the bridge also, awsome pick ups.
never heard of anyone micing the strings but try it.
Apr 04, 2008 12:10 am EMGs will give you killer tone if you adjust your amp settings to what you desire. They are very good for Death Metal and Thrash but i get very decent clean tones.
Turn down the gain a little and lower the volume knob on the guitar, and adjust the tone knob on the guitar also.
As for micing the strings, I have done this for years.
I got the idea when i read Janes Addiction did it for clean sounds. An Example is their song Been Caught Stealing.
Oh yeah one more thing to try on the EMGs,
change the battery.
I made this mistake before myself.
joepMember
Since: Feb 29, 2008
Apr 04, 2008 06:20 pm the best od ive ever heard come out of my bass was from dead 9vs. sounds killer for about an hour then dies out. -joep
Apr 14, 2008 03:41 am ok, some resolution:
micing the strings will probably only work with either good dynamics, or condenser mics. cheap behringer and shure mics don't seem to cut it...
oh, and my zoom pedal di sounds professional, while micing the practise amp sounds like absolute crap.
