Recording Tips For Guitarists

Recording music is a totally different beast from playing live. And whether you're going into a big studio or doing it on your own with a laptop and a DAW, there's a few guitar-specific things you can do to make the whole process go faster and sound better.

1. Use new strings - You want your guitar to sound it's best even if you're working with a off-brand copy of Korean knockoff of a Strat.  And new strings are the easiest way to improve things.  They'll give the engineer a good bright sound to work with.  Make sure they're good and stretched out so they don't go out of tune in the middle of the song.  I usually put my new ones on the day before recording.  If you're doing a lot of recording on a regular basis, make sure to change them every one to two weeks.  Otherwise you can end up with different sounding strings on different takes of a song, making it more difficult to edit later.

2. Tune before every take - On a similar note, you should tune your guitar before every take.  I'll admit I'm they guy the engineer is always yelling at tune before takes.  Extra weird when I'm recording at home.  Your guitar probably won't be that out of tune, but keeping it fine tuned will, again, make editing takes much easier later on in the mixing process.

3. Pre-Production - Pre-production is a fancy word for "practice before you get there".  You have some leeway here if you're working in a home studio.  But if you're paying for studio time, you want to get in and get out as fast as possible.  That means having your parts totally down before you step foot in the place.  And that means making sure your bandmates have their act together too.  And I always recommend playing the song live a lot before recording it, if possible.  It will make the arrangement tighter and let any natural changes happen so you can get the best performance possible on tape.  It's like letting the song marinate before cooking it.

I made the mistake once of recording a whole song in the key of G.  Then finding out that I couldn't sing it in the key of G.  We had to record all the pitched instruments again in the key of F.  You can bet that cost me a few extra bucks.  Learn from my boo-boos young padawan.

What about guitar solos?  If you're the type that likes to compose your solos, make sure it's done before getting in the studio.  If you like to let 'er rip of the fly, that's cool too.  But be sure that you've improvised your solo on that song at least 100 times before recording.  If you have to do more than 3 or 4 takes to get a solo you like, you're blowing cash.

4. Leave off non-essential effects until mixing - The cleaner the signal going into the board, the more leeway you have to make changes later during editing and mixing.  You want to have a good basic sound recorded and you can add all the gooey reverb and delay you want later on. 

So, what's considered