Greg_L wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2017 7:59 am
.../snip
So, going over it, you've got a...
Tele (bright guitar)
Vox modeling combo that should be capable of doing something useful, set clean-ish and bright
SM57 dead center on the speaker (bright mic and bright mic placement)
No pedals or effects mucking up the guitar signal
With this setup you should be damaging ear drums with high end. So where is your clarity going? My next thought is that maybe this is just the way it is, unless there is something else going on that you haven't mentioned. An unlikely but possible variable is that you have the mic in a "hole". Usually the center of the speaker is searingly bright. But sometimes there is a hole in the sound coming from the middle of a speaker. Think of it like a fan. A fan blows air, but as you get close to the center hub, there's no air coming from that close, centered spot. Move just off-center, or move back a little, and whoosh, air blowing. A speaker can act the same way. Close and center is sometimes a little "sound hole" and it can sound dark and unclear.
So basically what I'd suggest next is to move the mic just off center now. Keep everything the same, everything, but move the mic to maybe like where the dustcap of the speaker meets the cone. That little seam. Mic it. No further off center than that. See if that wakes up the high end.
As I mentioned a bit earlier today, I tried an experiment where I recorded a bar or two into a looper, the recorded that loop over and over where all i changed was the mic position. On the grille, dead center, straight in - record. Move mic to the dustcap/cone seam, on the grille, straight in - record another loop. Move it back to 1", dead center, straight in - record. Etc. All in all I took 4 passes across the face of the amp at these distances (grille/0", 1", 2-4" (I wasn't actually measuring with a tape measure), ~6") and at these positions (dead center, left on dustcap/cone seam, left edge of speaker). Recorded the same 4-ish seconds of audio from 12 different mic positions. And then did it again, but with the mic either pointed "in" (to the left) or "out" (to the right). Prior to doing that I set the amp for each of the 3 sounds I was trying to achieve, then left the amp and mic gain settings alone for the infinite number of takes. Great time...I bet the fam loved listening to me!
From those 36x3 takes, I sliced up the takes and did rough level-matching of each one (by ear and by looking at the meters in the DAW). Then I listened to the takes in each group, slowly weeding out the worst sounding ones, trying to find the ones that were the clearest sounding.
The whittled-down takes are here in mix form:
http://eastofcleveland.com/m/se_idea_3b ... s_noFx.mp3 (I was going to attach the individual stems, but the uploader apparently doesn't allow *.wav files, and I'm feeling too lazy to dig them up again and convert them to mp3s; ping me if you really want to hear them) The actual "best" mic positions for me were:
- AC15 model, high guitar part: 2" from grille, dead center, straight in
- AC15 model, medium guitar part: 2" from grille, dead center, straight in
- Twin model, low guitar part: ~4" from grille, dead center, mic angled in to the right 35-ish degrees
I learned there isn't a "hole in the sound" generated by my amp, or if there is, it's very small, right in the dead center position at less than 1" distance. In general, the center mic positions produced more high frequencies than the positions away from the center.
Looking at the clips and watching an eq graph as these clips play, I can see the 3k cliff the sound falls off, but by tweaking the mic position, I could eek out a bit more between 3-5k. Not a lot, mind you.
Anyway, I think this is the best I can do with the current set-up. I think it's a little better. (Previous best, from a few posts back was:
http://eastofcleveland.com/m/se_idea_no ... noVerb.mp3 .) But it's not brilliant, crispy-shiny sounding. You can only squeeze so much blood from a stone, right? Maybe this set-up, with more aggressive EQ applied in the DAW, will work for now, until I can upgrade the amp (and maybe the guitar).
