This week I experimented with room miking my guitar amps in stereo. I've watched YouTube videos with engineers showing what guitar amps sound like using condenser mics from 2 feet away, then 4 feet and so on. I liked the sound the best way out to 16 feet, so that's where I placed the microphones in a large room that I have access to. The first microphone is a Gauge 87 large diaphragm condenser mic. The second is a Sennheiser K2-U small diaphragm shotgun condenser mic. They were placed about 10 feet apart, and panned hard left and right.
My guitar is a 1963 Fender Stratocaster with a Lindy Fralin blues humbucking bridge pickup. I ran the guitar through a touch of Boss stereo flanger, then into the amplifiers. My main amp is a Soldano SP-77 tube preamp going into a 2x12" Ampeg closed-back cabinet. The other preamp is made from a Firefly kit, which supposedly sounds like an early 60's Fender Concert (I don't think so, but...). I renamed it the "Rat." That goes into an open-back 1x15" cabinet that I built. Both amps are driven by a Peavey Classic 60/60 stereo tube power amp, set at about 5, or 30 watts a side... The bass is a cheap Chinese P-bass copy. I ran it into the Soldano preamp to give it some "fur," then into a Trace Elliot bass amp. The miking of the bass was the same as for the guitars.
I thought I'd use a guitar-driven lick from part of the intro of Rush's "The Camera Eye." I programmed my Prophet 600 to approximate the opening keyboard sound, but never really got it sounding the same (I'll bet Geddy Lee uses an Oberheim or some other analog synth). Drums are sequenced (obviously), and I didn't spend much time on them because that wasn't the point of the exercise!
Here's what it sounds like: https://soundcloud.com/ernstjohn7-1/camera-eye-intro
Hope you enjoy my little experiment!
Ern
