Misha Mansoor's Guitar Recording Tips

what's up guys meet you here I'm going to show you how I go about recording guitars and I'm gonna do it using this focusrite scarlett 2i2 interface you can actually get good results with a pretty inexpensive interfaces this one's actually USB powered so it's very portable as well you can record up to 96 kilohertz 24-bit I'm gonna be recording at 40 for one just because that's how I like to do it but I'm in 24-bit right now and obviously I'm using my Jackson Custom Shop sixth string it's got bare-knuckle juggernauts and I'm running to my axe FX 2 and that is just going direct as you can see here direct into the inputs so that is the rig that we are going to be using we are going into a Mac with Q basics on it right now so first things first what I like to do is especially when I'm using it a new patch or whatever I want to make sure my levels right and that means no clipping now this action is very useful tool for that see those halos there that's a schooling green that's mean that you are safe now turn this up the orange and eventually red red means you're clipping although that may not be audibly apparent there is a there is cooking going on there and it'll just get worse as you do it so to get an ideal signal-to-noise ratio you want to get it right to the point where it just kind of starts going into the green now signal-to-noise ratio that's important if you have a low signal like this for example you'll be in the green safely no matter what but you won't be getting the most efficient signal there'll be a little bit of noise relative to your total output so that is the reason why now here's an interesting thing especially if you're using heavier tones you want to check that your your signal that has the most amount of output isn't going to clip so in this case of palm mute it's a very effective way of testing that now you'll notice like from the green but palm news are sending it into the right superbaby poets so that's why I want to roll back a little bit and basically just make sure that the loudest setting I'm gonna have isn't going to send it into clipping now the other thing that you'll want to check and this is on your screen you probably have an input monitor like this you can see it's not put in there they're so you know this makes a little bit of tweaking because you want to ensure that you're writing right in the French it's nice and medium it sounds terrible but the idea is that you want to get as much low-end low-end obviously uses up a lot of the Headroom so that's why that's what I'm using goodness we're actually clipping a little bit here so I'm gonna roll off back it's good test now this has a line and instrument inputs so the line inputs are what you would use if you're plugging in something like a preamp or whatever some that already has volume to it that you can adjust so on the instrument inputs or what you would use if you are going to just go in directly like if you're going to plug your guitar directly into there go di and use a software and for something like that so that's a distinction that's why both of these are currently online now a really cool feature with this is this direct monitoring feature just making my life very easy now if you turn that off you can actually just monitor through the software now that has its advantages because it's actually going through the whole mix here you know out to the stereo out when you do that but the reason I don't like is just because there's a little bit of latency at all times it is cool to sort of dialing tones but the latency kind of throws me off a little bit so this feature is really cool you're not going through the the software at all it's just directly going out so no latency at all for tracking I find that to be very nice especially parts that need to be tracked with some precision over here we have the the phantom power which we're obviously not using but if you were miking up a condenser mic or two it would send phantom power power up your your mic for you and then obviously this is my level control here this is how loud and you have a separate headphone control here sometimes it's nice to track with headphones especially for detailed parts so you can switch that off or whatever set this to whatever level you want and just put these on and have independent volume level there so uh I'm dialing this tone here using the Friedmann model and then it sound improved and I've actually like pre-recorded a couple riffs I just deleted the guitar so the drums are program the bass is good to go mute the bass because I find it a little bit distracting when I'm trying to track so what I do for setting up my tracks as you can see here I've got left and right track these are hardpan all the way and double-tracking is kind of an important thing if you don't know too much about recording probably all the modern rock and metal recordings you listen to have double track guitars now a lot of people ask if you could just do one performance and just copy it over to the other track and the answer is no you can't a make like kind of awesome but unfortunately you just end up with a centered track that's louder so you have to do two individual performances and it's actually the slight differences between those performances that creates that cool wide effect that double track guitars have so let me double track this riff and show you how I go about it we have all our levels set and it looks like on our guitar channel we have nothing right now going and this guitar tone might actually just work in the mix the way it is so let's give this a shot get the click going for this anyways that's one repetition of the riff I don't mind copying pasting if it's the same riff in the same tempo but what I like to do is just play the first few notes of the next repetition just so it flows a little better and let's get the other side now there you go as you can hear you get this cool double track sound here as opposed to if we were to copy and paste this Center guitar as I said so that's the beauty of it so let's trim this up a little bit here and just cut the end off right here and this is a cool feature I'm sure any any DAW that you're going to use has this but just duplicate them I'm gonna copy that sounds pretty good let's unmute the bass and see if this works sounds pretty good uh with quad tracking I find that you lose a little bit of tread the transient detail but that you do get this cool sort of washy sound as a result and the bass I feel like the bass would usually cut through the mix a little bit cleaner with double track guitars but here let's let's try it with this riff and you can hear for yourself we'll just do the first half let me get a comparison all right so I just did like the first half that riff just that you can hear direct comparison so what I generally do when I'm quad tracking is I will lower the volume of two or if not all the tracks just so I get sort of the same perceived volume as I started out with you can just do that by ear by uh taking these and clip getting them down a bit so let's try it like DB or so yeah so uh as you can hear it has a different aesthetic it's not like an eye toward a difference but guitarists will probably notice and somebody else I like to do is you can see that these ones are panned left 79 right 79 so I like to bring those in a little bit occupies a slightly different space and a bit more of the center channel so that's that's quad tracking that's you know you can hear it's not like an earth-shattering difference but it is a cool little effect and it is something that I like to use as a tool sometimes so the problem that you have the problem that I have a little bit is that when you're dialing in a tone hearing it in the center and doubletrack tones don't always retain the exact quality in fact you'll find that they get a little bit smoother so you can get away with slightly brighter tones and that's why I've said a lot that my recording tones aren't necessarily the best tones the jam on there really suited to the mix but you know a tone that that would work well in the center might sound a little bit dull if you double tracked with it so for example so if I were to just record this riff here so that on its own right they actually let me double track that so we can do an easy comparison all right so this is how it sounds centered but if we were to actually let me edit this just a little bit moving it around a little bit easier so yeah that's a tone by itself but double-tracked and pan full sounds like so it's actually like a little bit smoother as you can hear and that that's something that you kind of have to just dial as you go along so what I'll do is I'll actually just I'll listen I don't be like hum that that probably use a little bit more top end to it or something so I'll dial it in and then I'll double track it so it is a bit of a process that's kind of how I go about it I'm sure there's probably easier ways to do it but that's just the way how I know what to do it once you're done with that what you can do then is you can EQ so like we've got just the track EQ here and I like to EQ with at least drums or something you know so I can get a sense of how it's working in the mix think I've found some preset so this is actually a low pass here it's kind of cutting off the top end but it's kind of doing a little boost here as well here's a little cut at 3,800 or so smoothing out the top end there and then here we have a high pass just you know let the let the low end kind of fade out let the base do its job kind of thing tightens up the low-end and then you know we checked that against the base make sure that work wrong wrong duplication right there with the so on all that sounding pre-use in there and that's basically how I go about recording guitars hopefully that answers some questions that my process and I go about plugging everything in down everything in there you go you

Channel: Top Secret Audio

Views: 1,694,589

Rating: 4.907465 out of 5

Keywords: guitar tracking, recording from home, misha mansoor, top secret audio, Guitar (Musical Instrument), home studio, Recording, Recording Studio (Industry)

Id: er9VhozNHNk

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Ferrington]

Are there youtube videos out there like this but for vocals? I'm brand new to this whole recording business and found this video really cool (except I don't play guitar!).

[u/barden1069]

I wonder what he's using for drums. EZ Drummer?

[u/Erkahove]

Cool video. X-posted it to /r/audioengineering

[u/GL_HaveFun]

I wish he would've gone more into how he got that RIDICULOUS axefx tone. I don't have one and the clarity he gets switchinig between those lows and highs is unreal. If I get a decent low end sound my chords turn to mud. Good chords? no balls! =(

[u/Re-Define]

Holy shit his gain staging is terrible

[u/sambtbam]

Apology in advance as I am a complete noob when it comes to this kind of stuff. So essentially the Focusrite is basically used to get the actual guitar on the computer and the Axe-FX is additional tones? Do you need both to be able to record?