Recording Guitarist: Becoming Self-Reliant

by Jon Chappell
Last month we talked about getting that clean country sound: bright, tight, and spanky. This month, I’ll detail just what can happen to your sound–or any sound–when it’s set up in isolation and brought out into the real world. I’ll also relate some warnings about using gear in your own studio versus someone else’s.

First of all, I’ve discovered that as a recording guitarist, you’re expected to have your sound together effects-wise. That may seem obvious for things like distortion and flangers, but not so obvious for things like EQ and reverb. Many engineers will tell you to leave off your crappy-sounding reverb because they’ve got a much better one, and besides, they don’t want to “print” with effects. That’s legitimate, except if you’ve tailored a reverb to be an integral part of your sound. Then it’s necessary to have a discussion with the engineer to make sure you understand each other.

EQ is an even dicier situation because engineers don’t usually see it as an effect, but as a means to correct deficiencies in the instrument itself, or to better highlight a signal in the mix. If you start telling the engineer how to set the knobs on his board in the control room from your chair out in the studio, you are exhibiting chutzpah bordering on arrogance. Better to put a graphic or parametric EQ in-line than to tell the engineer how to use his own gear. Have your sound together so that when it hits the board with the EQ flat, it sounds exactly like you’d expect. Any corrective measures from the board are for “big picture” considerations, not because you gave the control room a dull and lackluster guitar signal. As usual, I came to this knowledge the hard way.

Since I was used to recording in my own studio, I would cavalierly change whatever element I wanted, because I owned the board (and the room) as well as the guitar gear. Not enough highs? Just turn a board knob to get back some sizzle. Too much trouble to bend over the stompbox or enter the multieffect’s edit menu. Well, I don’t do that anymore. I realized that while my guitar gear traveled with me, my board did not. And every board has its own character, especially with regard to EQ. Even if you nominally dial in the same parameters on another board, you can never be guaranteed the same sound.

After I had recorded all the tracks for my country riffs book and CD project (discussed in detail last month), I decided to mix at my friend’s studio. I did this for two reasons. One, he had better gear than I did. We’d use his near-field monitors, his reverb, his compressor. The second reason was that I wanted to use not only my friend’s gear but his ears. I trust him implicitly anyway, but especially with regard to my own stuff where I’ve (by now) lost all objectivity. I always worry about creating something from start to finish in a vacuum. I was pretty sure I had recorded everything so that with the faders at zero, the EQ flat, and a touch of ambient reverb sitting on top, I would be 95 percent there.

Boy, was I wrong. To my horror, the lead on the first cut–a medium tempo ballad with lots of bends–was out of time. Out of time! I was extremely embarrassed, to say the least. Because I had my gear with me, my friend said, “No biggie, just set up and re-record it. I’ll run the board and we’ll have it done in a jiffy.” Trouble was, we couldn’t match my sound to the tone in cut #2. We even matched the EQ on his board to what I had on mine, but it didn’t work because my friend’s board (being a better one) had a subtler EQ effect, and no attempt we made could nail the original. We decided there was something “extra” going on in my board’s EQ and pre-amp that gave my sound a “sizzle.” Because I had employed the one “effect” that I didn’t bring–my mixing board–we couldn’t match the lead sound. I began to despair.

We ended up solving the problem by having me run home, unhook my board, and bring it back to the studio. It worked. We joked around about how I should put the mixer in my stompbox chain and bring it to club dates with tiny stages. This was not so absurd as it first seemed, though, when we realized that many guitarists–including Eric Johnson, who works with an old Neve console–will go through a board just to use the mic pre-amps.

There’s an old saying that goes: “If you learn by your mistakes, then I must be Einstein.” But in this situation I did learn two valuable lessons. I learned to get my sound from my gear and not to rely on a board, which I used to think of as a neutral element in the signal chain. I also learned that better equipment does not necessarily make better sound. My board of inferior quality actually made my guitar sound better than the higher-quality board, even though we finally concluded it was because of distortion. All of which proves–again–that you must go by your ears and not by the spec sheet.

Taken from June 1997 issue of Guitar Mag