There are two guitar passes in the mix. One is relatively clean, the second is a little dirtier.
A picture being worth 1000 words (though I of course also added those, too!), here’s a shot of the recording setup I used that day. The HXDA I recorded is the black amp on the left. Note that at the time I took the pic, I’d already moved the room mic a little closer to the amps than it was when I recorded the tracks. You might have to zoom in to see the mic placement on the HXDA - the mic is suspended from the left arm of the dual-boom stand:
The complete signal chain is:
PS20 Ltd >> Pettyjohn Lift Buffer >> Pettyjohn Pettydrive 2 used as a near-unity-gain color tool, not to add dirt >> Pettyjohn Filter EQ >> Suhr Alexa Chorus (only on the more overdriven track) >> Eventide H9 (ducked delay) >> Eventide H9 #2 (plate reverb) >> HXDA through PRS Big Mouth 212 cab with V30s >> Audix i5 microphone about a foot away from the speaker, with the mic at an angle pointing toward the speaker cone. The i5 pairs up well with the combination of Plexi sound and V-30.
On both guitar passes I cut a second simultaneous track with a Rode NTR ribbon used as a room mic about 7-8 feet back, facing the amp a few degrees off-axis on a boom stand, with the mic raised to about ear level. This was blended into the mix, the idea being to capture the way the amp sounded to me in the room. Seems to work. I like the Rode for this purpose, because its frequency response is more linear than most other ribbon mics - the only caveat with this mic is that it has a big, heavy transformer, so you need a very sturdy stand.
I flipped the phase on each room mic track to reduce phase cancellation between the two mics after listening to the blended tracks both ways.
Both mics were plugged into a Universal Audio Apollo with a Helios Type 69 mic preamp plugin on each channel >> Logic Pro.
During mixdown, I used a little LA-2A compression and a little EQ on the top end to roll off some of the harshness the LA-2A seemed to overly accentuate. There are Manley EQ and Elysia Alpha compressor plugins on the overall mix, followed by the Limitless limiter. Of course, every recording is different, but these worked for this particular track.
Being the lazy type, I usually have the close-mics set up as you see them in the pic all the time, so if an idea strikes, I can lay it down quickly. The room mic comes and goes, and of course, I use different mics for different purposes.
Also, I prefer to place a dynamic mic a foot to 18 inches (or more) away from the speaker, to capture the way the cab actually sounds a little better. I get the whole “mic on top of the grill” thing, and recorded that way for a long time, but gradually it dawned on me that no one actually listens to an amp with their ear up against the speaker. Even a foot or more is obviously too close, but I want to control the room tone a little bit, and find that a decent solution is to blend a room mic track and adjust to approximate what I want.
As a side note, I created the tone mostly to test out a new pedalboard, and then got inspired to create a little demo tune.
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