Headroom tips

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use 24 bit recording it opens up alot.

The distant guitar sound you want can be acheived with simple volume and panning. You want to pan a little harder left or right than you normaly would. You can play around and mix multiple guit tracks to get some cool effects. Sometimes I like to double a guit track, nudge one a 32nd to get that cool phase echo and then pan it left or right, say 30-35%. Sometimes I'll pan even further and play with the volume as well. You just have to take care with the overall balance to make sure your guit tracks don't get too buried or subtle. If you've got a real quiet, atmospheric break, with just a synth/keys and percussion coming through, you can drop way down and do some cool stuff. Let the keys and other instruments become the prominent focus with the guitar in the background.

you are describing two completely different things.

headroom

distant micing techniques.

headroom is a function of how 'hot' you allow your peaks to go on individual tracks, and on the 2-buss.

you can either lower your input to the track, so that peaks are well below -10 or so....

or you can apply either/or/and compression and limiting to "LIMIT" the peaks to a pre-determined point, all while increasing the overall MEAT of the music, normally referred to as RMS levels.




the sound of 'distant guitars' is purely a subjective recording choice.

put a mic out in the room, instead of on the grille cloth of the cabinet, and voila.

or, a million combinations.

i like to take my Palmer Junction, and hit a track dry and totally in your face.
then i mix in a room mic, panned off to the side, or blended together and summed to a track, to get all the different guitar sounds i use (i'm all over the map with it)

creative use of delays, and especially hard panned delays with different decay rates, is a wonderful method of getting some 'big' and flavorful guitar tracks, for pushing and pulling and sweeping across the soundstage.

bitflipper


Avoid tall hats and platform shoes. Don't sit on a pillow while driving.

Hehe...

A really nice preamp makes a huge difference once you reach a certain production development.  A good tranformer design and run the guitar signal through a bunch of nice electronics before recording.  It gives that last 10% of the sound that proves elusive when you listen to commercial releases.

Start saving.

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Hi Severed In what part of the signal chain are you looking at headroom advice? Are you thinking about the analog devices that you might be feeding your signals through before you reach the DAW or are you thinking about headroom in the DAW itself?

I can help with advice relating to creating headroom in the DAW itself. AT is referring to the signal chain prior to the DAW. There are techniques for maintaining headroom within a DAW and you don't have to bring a single clip light on while you are doing it as well. If you are bringing on any clip lights inside your DAW you are simply operating way too high within your DAW and it is totally unnecessary.

Leave the proper amount of nose room and headroom in front of and above the person you're shooting. If you start pushing a little bit too hard, it starts squawking like a chicken.