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Recording Rhythm Guitar and “Scratch” Vocal

Other than drums, bass and lead vocal, the rhythm guitar defines a song more than any other element. It provides nearly all the cues for the other melodic instruments and determines the feel of the song. The techniques involved are going to depend on whether the rhythm guitar is electric or acoustic. We’ll tackle the acoustic first since getting a good acoustic guitar sound can be very difficult. The first thing you will need is a very quiet recording space. Any extraneous noise will be very noticeable. The second thing you will need is a large diaphragm condenser mic. This mic will placed approximately even with the 12th fret with address side of the mic pointed at the fret board. A second small diaphragm condenser mic will be placed behind the guitarist approximately level with his (her) ear pointing down towards the top of the guitar. Compression and low cut eq are an absolute must in this situation. These two channels can be panned to either side but not completely right and left. If you have an acoustic/electric, you can take the output from the guitar and record this on another track. This results in an absolutely huge acoustic guitar sound. In addition to this, you can capo the guitar to say the 3rd or 4th fret and rewrite the chord progression so that the chords are the same but the voicings are different and record another guitar track. This track would be panned to the opposite side as the first one and delayed by about 3ms or so. This will take it up another notch entirely. To record electric rhythm guitar, you have two choices. You can mic the guitar amp or use a modeling pre-amp like Boss’s GT-8 or Line-6’s PodXT. The preferred mic choice is a Shure SM-57 pointed directly at the center of the speaker cone and actually touching the grill cloth of the speaker cabinet. If you have a cabinet with more than one speaker, experiment to see which one sounds best. As with the acoustic guitar, a small amount of compression will help immensely. My personal choice is to dial in the sound you want on the modeling pedal and then mic it after running it through the power section of solid state guitar amplifier. That way you get clean amplification with the modeling pedal providing the color of a preamp. If you have a direct box, you can split the signal and send a completely clean signal to one channel while the other channel receives the output from the mic’d guitar amplifier. Try not to put any additional effects on the track until you see how it sits with the rest of the mix. You can always add effects but you can’t take them out. The amplifier should be as loud as possible without distorting the input channel. If you want to pick up some room ambience, you can place another mic about 3 –5 feet away from the amp and point it away from the front of the amp. That will pick up the reflections from the opposing wall. Once you do this a couple of times, it will be like second nature.

“Scratch” Vocals

The “Scratch” Vocal is simply the lead vocal for the song sung along with the rhythm guitar track. It’s also known as a guide vocal and it’s purpose is to establish where the verses begin and end, where the choruses begin and end and also to give some direction to people recording after this such as “This is where the blazing lead solo guitar comes in” or “Background vocals swell now”. It should be recorded in isolation from the rhythm guitar so you don’t get any mic bleed. The last thing you need on a acoustic guitar track is some mumbling about percussion or whatnot coming through. If you can’t record the vocal in isolation, don’t do it. Wait until the it’s time to record the lead vocal and hope for the best. I have had times when we recorded an absolutely gorgeous guitar track only to find out that the guitarist forgot to play one of the verses or choruses. It’s not too bad if you’ve recorded the guitar to a click track but it still won’t sound natural when you piece it together.

For a more in depth treatment on recording Acoustic Guitar,

check out “ The Musician’s Guide to Recoding Acoustic Guitar” by Dallen Beck

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