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what do you mean by "detuned cab"? are we talking about the guitar being tuned-down? or something to do with port tuning? also, could you link to the cab you're getting?

Just tune the cabinet to standard.

I looked this up, it means taking half the speakers out which supposedly makes the cab' sound bassier? Sounds feasible I suppose like having a really big port in the cab... I suppose you'd want to have a room mic' set further away from the cab' that could pick up the bassier end of the spectrum, and then have a dynamic guitary type mic' on the speaker? (that's what I'd do but what the hey!)

Firstly some judicious HPF (high pass filtering) and compression won't go astray. Remember that the best guitar equaliser is mic position, don't be scared to experiment with distance and angles of mics. I'd personally start with a Shure SM 57 and an AKG 414 in reasonably close and at 90 degrees to each other, using a preamp with a sweepable HPF for each mic, a pair of UREI 1176 limiters and bus the two mics to a single track once you have settled on position and phase.The name of the game is keeping things fairly even, otherwise you will find notes and tonalities jumping all over the shop. Guitar speakers tend to cut off the lower frequencies fairly fast, and without the mechanical loading/compression of all 4 speakers in the cabinet, you will find the box's response curve to high gain guitar sounds to be quite unpredictable. Let us know how you fare.

Rodabod, it's a tried and tested technique that works well on a lot of different guitar amps. You have heard it many times before, I'm sure there is one, or perhaps even two Australian bands you have heard that were recorded with this technique. As far as presuming that 1176's will work on an amp we haven't yet heard, they worked just fine on all the amps I have heard :=) Try it, you might love the result.In conjunction to the mono summed bus of the close XY use a pair of separate medium field room mics for the stereo field if you are chasing the wide thing. Spread em wide and they will sound wide.As far as wide stereo goes, there are a couple of factors at play, being phase, tonality, delay and reverberation components. It was once commonplace to use a 2nd guitar amp with a delay of 10 to 40 milliseconds to get width, others have miked combos front and back to achieve some width. Some engineers add some pitch shifting to one or both sides. These days every trick in the box is used as well (eg Sony Inflator etc)

audioboffin wrote:I'd personally start with a Shure SM 57 and an AKG 414 in reasonably close and at 90 degrees to each other, using a preamp with a sweepable HPF for each mic, a pair of UREI 1176 limiters and bus the two mics to a single track once you have settled on position and phase.Apart from the fact that I'm not sure why you'd presume a pair of 1176s would be suitable for a guitar amp we've never heard, what's the idea behind arranging the mics as an x/y if it's going to be bussed? I can understand lining up the distances of the capsules for phase, but the x/y thing, no.

That is confusing. If you are going to buss them to 1 track all you have to do is make sure the mics are the same distance from the speaker in order to keep them in phase. Then they aren't 45 degrees off axis to the source. I don't see how placing them in X/Y solves or improves anything.

japmn wrote:I don't see how placing them in X/Y solves or improves anything.Actually, in Australia they place mics in a Y/X pattern since sound travels in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere due to the earth's rotation. So it works, just not in 'merica.

japmn wrote:That is confusing. If you are going to buss them to 1 track all you have to do is make sure the mics are the same distance from the speaker in order to keep them in phase. Then they aren't 45 degrees off axis to the source. I don't see how placing them in X/Y solves or improves anything.Then you definitely need to have a listen to the tonalities, they definitely aren't confusing. Just measuring distances doesn't get as close as actually listening, or using a gadget called an IBP will give similar results with 2 channel sources. Without an IBP flip one mic out of phase and tweak the positioning until you get maximum null, then re-invert. There are a lot of positional variables, and some of them work really well.This technique was pioneered by an Australian producer engineer, but his work has sold well elsewhere, so the technique should translate to other continents :=)

scott wrote:As far as micing detuned cabs, I would try microphones and move them around until the recorded sound sounded good. i'm gonna go ahead and second this.