Phase Alignment for Guitars - How to Record a Guitar Amp with fa Plug-Ins - #faTutorial [6]

Wanna record your guitar amp but something doesn't sound quite right? Maybe you're dealing with phase issues. In this tutorial, you'll gonna learn how to record guitars with proper phase alignment to get an amazing sound!

Read on website: forward-audio.com/recording-electric-guitar-amp…

Phase Alignment is absolutely crucial when recording guitars with multiple mics! Audio Engineers often use a lot of mics on guitar cabinets to get a full & rich sound. This is kind of similar to what's done in electronic music styles when multiple layers of synthesizer sounds are mixed together.

Every mic & every speaker has its own sound. Finding good combinations of speaker & mic is the holy grail of every guitar recording. It's the 10% that distinct a good guitar recording from an absolutely outstanding guitar recording. Learning how to nail this is one of the most important lessons for every audio engineer.

In the example I'm showing you today we are using a Marshall 1960A cabinet, which is an absolutely classic choice and maybe the most used guitar cabinet in the world. The audio example is a clean / funky guitar sound. Keep in mind that this is just an example. It works for Jazz, Funk, Rock or Heavy Metal as well.

One of the most important lessons to learn is the following: The term 'Phase Alignment' is often misleading. It would be more precise to call it 'Time Alignment'. Every time you use more than one mic there is most probably a difference between the time of arrival of the sound between the mics. This results in serious frequency cancellations, which are often called 'Phase Cancellations' or also the infamous 'Comb Filter Effect'.

The best solution to solve this problem is to apply a digital delay (called Sample Delay) to perfectly adjust the timing. This is a tedious process because you really have to nail the setting and this can take a long time when done manually. Fortunately, in today's world Audio Plug-ins can help us out with this problems. Automatic Phase Alignment Plug-ins like 'faGuitarAlign' shown in these tutorial can carefully estimate the correct time delay and adjust it even with sub-sample precision.

Furthermore, I'm showing you how to align your DI signal to your mic tracks to get a vibrant sound with a tight attack and why Time Alignment on Room mics can be used to alter the room impression!

I hope you find this tutorial helpful. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment below.

If you wanna dive even deeper into this topic I'm recommending this video of Glenn Fricker from Spectre Sound Studios:
youtube.com/watch?v=jfEh79A0b0U

See you in the next video!
Daniel