This is a dry space, and

this is a wet space. There are advantages and

disadvantages to both. In a dry space the reflections
from the walls and the ceilings and
the floor are less of an issue. This puts the focus a little bit
more on the direct signal and gives you more options later on. In a recording
studio, you figure that you
can always dial in some ambients later. You can add some reverb, you can add some
delay and in a wet space,
there's a lot more reflections. Coming off the wall,
the ceiling, the floor. And they tend to soften things up
a little bit, but they also tend to cloud the signal as well and
make things a little less intelligible. Let's talk a little about
microphone placement. The closer that you get to
the microphone the less of the room or the ambiance of the space
you're going to get. Also, the closer you get, the more
present the instrument is going to sound. So let's start out by doing some
extremely close micing, and so you can hear what that's
going to sound like. And you'll just be hearing this mic now. [MUSIC] So when
you're close micing a guitar,
first off, you want to really experiment
with getting on in there. Get really close. Just within a couple inches. You will
get a lot of presence. Now that may not be a great sound for
your particular guitar, you're particular mic or
the song that you're doing. But it's something to experiment
with because you get a lot of presence that way. You gotta really kind of pay
attention
to the mic so that you don't hit it, and then you've also gotta stay about
the same amount of space away from it. That's really close micing and
it tends to give you a lot of presence. Now I've backed off
the mic just a little bit. I have between six inches and
a foot between me and the mic. And that's going to give a little less
presence, a little more ambience. A little more air in the signal. [MUSIC] It
doesn't seem like I'm that
far away from the mic now, but this is pretty far away if you're trying
to record a guitar with a microphone. And you're going to find that we get
a lot more ambiance in the room here, and a little less presence and
more room tone or room noise, as well. But it can also be a more pleasing sound
in some ways because we do get that extra bit of reverb and reflection. [MUSIC] So
keep in mind that you can always add
reverb, but you can't take it away. If you have reverb in the signal, you
have room tone in the signal, it's there. If you're closer to the mic, you can
always make it seem like you're
further away by adding reverb later, but you're not going to be able to
take reverb out of the signal. So, if you have a doubt
about how much reverb is, is right, you may want to get
a little closer to the mic, just because you can always fix that
alter it a little bit in post production. But you can't take reverb
away once it's in the signal.