A fundamental recording question

[Loquenau]

Something Thomas Larsson mentioned about the Axe going direct not having the spatialization, verus mic-ing cabs, got me to thinking....thinking absently for a while....and just now I went back and listened to a live recording guy did of me and another guitarist back in the 90s.....on a cassette 4-track mixer/recorder, and a couple mics....effects were from the guitar amps.....no post-processing.

Each guitar sounds 'loud' and heavy in the space, yet neither dominating. Indeed, there is a 'space', and each guitar is a 3-dimensional entity. The apparent volume doesn't drop with the stopping of one or the other, etc - just like you would find with acoustic instruments.

How did he do this? And how can I do this as simply?

 

[kev]

The fundamentals are simple....

record in a real space moving real air with a real speaker and mic.

Of course there are techniques to fundamentals that must be learned to achieve the best results.

 

[GiRa]

on a cassette 4-track mixer/recorder, and a couple mics....effects were from the guitar amps.....no post-processing.

Each guitar sounds 'loud' and heavy in the space, yet neither dominating. Indeed, there is a 'space', and each guitar is a 3-dimensional entity. The apparent volume doesn't drop with the stopping of one or the other, etc - just like you would find with acoustic instruments.

To me it's the mic bleeding when a guitar is not playing and the (unavoidable) compression of the tape recorder.

 

[Rook]

How did he do this? And how can I do this as simply?

Stick a couple of mics in front of a couple of cabs?

My guess is what you are hearing and liking is the sense of a shared space or room. You might try tracking the guitar parts fairly dry (little to no reverb) and setting up a reverb on an aux bus. When mixing, I usually like to have a fairly close "room" style reverb and something big and lush on another bus. Send a little bit of each guitar (and the lead vocals, and probly some of the drum tracks) to this same room verb to give the feeling of sharing a room.

Also if you have lots of guitars, you might want to send them all to a stereo group track (or whatever your DAW calls it) and "squash" them just a little bit with a compressor to "stick them together"

Just some ideas...