Since guitar is my primary instrument, I end up recording it frequently. And lately, I’ve been capturing most of my electric-guitar parts direct and adding the bulk of the tone later with modeling plug-ins. I do this because I don’t want to interrupt my creative flow by setting up a mic and messing around with the amp and the effects until I’ve found the perfect tone–it’s so much easier just to grab my guitar, plug it in, and record. But also, I like having the flexibility to experiment with the tone later on, like when I’m mixing. I know that sonic purists will probably say that I’m never going to get as good a tone as I would on a miked tube amp, but I think, for many sounds, I can get pretty darn close. Distorted tones, especially, can be recreated convincingly by modeling plug-ins such as Native Instruments Guitar Rig 2, IK Multimedia Amplitube 2, or Line 6 Amp Farm (to name a few). Perhaps it won’t sound exactly like a specific vintage amp, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good tone unto itself. I recently had a producer-engineer I know remark how much he liked the guitar tones on my recent CD, and he was surprised to hear that weren’t captured from miked amps, but from DI guitars through modeling plug-ins.

I have nothing against amp miking. In fact, I’ll sometimes mic my amp when I’m trying to record clean tones, which I don’t think modeling processors can nail nearly as accurately. But for the distorted and crunchy stuff, I almost always find it easier and quicker to go DI. I would like to experiment with reamplification, which is taking a DI sound after it’s been recorded, and running it through a miked amp and re-recording it. That seems like a “best-of-both-worlds” scenario to me: the convenience and immediacy of DI recording, with the promise of real tube-amp tone later. Right now I don’t have a device such as John Cuniberti’s Reamp or the Radial X-Amp, which would easily allow me to convert the line-level output of my audio interface to the correct signal level and impedance to be plugged into my amp. I hope to get one soon, though.

For non-clean tones there’s yet another way to go, which combines both the direct and miked approaches. That is to record your basic part clean through a miked amp, and then add modeling effects later. The logic behind this method is that it gives you that “real-amp-through-a-speaker” tone as a basis, and then but gives you the flexibility of adding the modeled distortion or crunch after the fact. I haven’t tried that yet, but plan to.

So for those of you out there who record guitar, what’s your feeling on this issue? Do you get useable tones using modeling devices? Do you prefer to mic an amp? Do you do a little of both? I’d be curious to hear your comments, suggestions, and ideas.