Guitars recording production in this credits music
I really like the big guitars sound in this music - No Country For Old Men end credits
Anyone know or can speculate on the recording techniques (mics etc), and production used for this type of sound?
I'm thinking there's more than one guitar playing the same thing, maybe each stereo mic'd? Then a lot of the heaviness comes from the (acoustic?) bass guitar. Do you think there's any sub bass added or they've just captured the bass guitar's low end really well?
Posted Jan 11, 2019, 11:53 AM UTC · edited
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there's definitely a bass as well as the guitars. you can hear the guitars are panned left and right, but the bass is in the middle. sounds like upright bass to me.
the first baritone guitar motif sounds like it's being sent through a delay at dotted 8th notes with no feedback (real guitar on the right, fully wet delay on the left). it sounds like a double because the delayed note comes at the same time as the real guitar note on the right, but you can hear that it's a delayed signal because the melody is always a bit behind on the left. reverb added to both channels as well probably. the high melodic part is definitely one single performance, not doubled. you could record that one in stereo to get more depth.
to capture this kind of sound you want a high quality condensor, or possibly a good ribbon microphone would work well too. I wouldn't stereo mic every performance, especially if you're panning anyway. the main higher melodic part could be recorded stereo or mono depending on how you're using spacial effects.
So you think the guitar was just recorded once, and then delayed, rather than recorded twice? Interesting. I'll have to experiment with this when I next have time.
If you were to record the same guitar part twice to overlay and pan it, would you always do them in mono then?
yep definitely seems like a delay - you can hear that the motif is one note behind on the left side, when it goes down at the end of the phrase, and also tonally there's a lot less high end on the left one, which is typical of something like a roland tape echo (but no idea if that's actually what they used).
with doubles I generally wouldn't stereo mic, unless you really know what you're doing with the mix. it can get messy when you add lots of stuff, so having a mono signal that's panned hard can work a bit more easily, especially if you're adding a stereo reverb to both parts anyway.