In this free video tutorial, James Ivey and Engineer Producer Mike Exeter discuss how to incorporate stereo room microphones into your guitar recordings to create an ambient stereo effect.

Creating Ambience

In this third video in the series Mike shows how to create an interesting non-conventional guitar tone for a droning melodic line in the verse section of the track. The guitar cab will still have the “fake stereo” arrangement (that you can see in the images below) using a pair of WA 84 small diaphragm pencil condensers but this direct signal will be low in the mix compared to the wide spaced stereo pair of large diaphragm condensers.

The main body of the stereo image is coming from a wide spaced pair of Warm Audio 47 style mics. As we don’t have a matched pair of mics to hand, we are using a Warm Audio WA 47 Junior FET condenser behind the guitar cabinet about 3m in the air which is panned hard right while we have a Warm Audio WA 47 Tube condenser off to the left again about 3m in the air panned hard left.

You can also check out the audio files below which demonstrate first the direct signal coming from the pair of WA 84s summed to mono, then the second file adds the stereo rooms mics. The effect is far from subtle.

Check out the video below for a full introduction and a final mix of the track.

The Gizmotron 2.0

In the video Jakob (the session guitar player) is using a re-designed Gizmotron 2.0 actuator to almost bow the strings rather than pick or pluck them. It creates a very interesting almost haunting tone when mixed with some guitar effects and the Warm Audio room mics.

You can find out more about the amazing sounding Gizmotron 2.0 in this video or by visiting the Gizmotron website.