what are some techniques to record ambience in a guitar recording. also for recording drums?

Well with drums you'll have a couple of overhead mics, and you can have a room mic as well, which is set back from the kit, and picks up the entire kit in the room.

For guitar, you wiil mic the speaker and then put a mic a few feet back to help pick up some of the room. Generally a large diaphram condenser is going to be the best bet for getting room sound with the guitar and drums, but experiment if you have several mic's at your dispossal.

Record each mic to it's own track and then you can mix the room mic in until you find a nice combination.

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It's as easy as putting a microphone in the room. Generally, I prefer omni directional condenser mics for room ambience. Of course, a good sounding room is also important.

For micing drums my usual setup is the following, when I'm working in a bigger studio.

Close mics on the drums. (2 kick, 2 snare, toms)

then my overheads are usually two figure 8 mics in blumelin configuration about waist level in front of the kit about 4 -5 feet.

My Ambient mics are omni condensers about 20 feet out front left and front right. If I have a hard floor, I put them on the floor. If it's a carpeted floor, I'll raise them up a bit.


For guitars I put one or two close mics and then a condenser or ribbon mic about 3 to 10 feet back. A lot of the time I only end up using one mic, or one close mic and just a TOUCH of ambience.

Recently, though, I've been much more on a one mic, one source trend, and move the mic to tune the sound. I might cheat and use two mics on the drums, though.

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ben adrian
Now Doing Amp Repair in San Francisco
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would a MXL 991 work for ambience?

Yes, I'm sure it would.

I'm not trying to sound difficult, but really ANY mic can work for room ambience. Some work better than others and traditionally people like condensers for ambient mics as the tend to be the most accurate. However, I've used 57s pointed at a corner, weird thrift sore mics, pretty much every thing at one time or another to pick up room ambience or non-direct sound.

To me, that's the most fun thing about recording, trying random things and seeing what works for me. I try to never think of recording as a paint by numbers thing.

Good luck!

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ben adrian
Now Doing Amp Repair in San Francisco
ben@feedbackloop.net
the gear

thank you.

two small diapham condensers in a coinsidence patten about 4-5 feet away from the sourse gets a great "3D" Room sound.

loads of dynamic pickup, natural reverb, and rich sound

the room you record in also has a lot to do with it.
Try hard uncarpeted floors, no/few windows, high ceiling, some sort of sound insulation/damping to stop unwanted messy reverb and echo.

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Send the track to a stereo reverb. My room sounds like crap and yours probably does too

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Could you get decent ambience by putting an amp in a bathroom, having a close mic for the 'standard' sound, and an ambient mic further back?

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Just remember the phrase "You can't polish a turd"

Unless you're recording in a room where you think the ambiance is amazing then it's probably a better idea to run it through a reverb unit/vst and play about with the settings. If this doesn't take your fancy then just play around with different mic placements around the room. You'll find that different spots of the room will have a different character, like one spot will have a lot of resonance and it will sound quite dark, and another will sound quite bright and so on.

Basically just don't be afraid to experiment

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