Your favourite guitarist uses 4 Marshall cabinets to create his/her sound in the studio. How do you recreate this in your bedroom?

If you can record in a pro studio with all the best guitars, guitar amps and sound engineers in the world, go there and stop reading this article. If all you have is your bedroom, here’s how you can create a powerful guitar sound. 

Most guitar amps give the most “juice”, the most “bang for your bucks”, or simply put the most presence, when pushed to a high volume. This means that buying a 100W guitar amp might not be very wise if you need to keep the level down not to enter into any legal dispute with your neighbourgs.

Check out the small range of your favourite brands. Usually, smaller amps will be either solid state, or hybrid (hybrid means the pre-amp part of the amp has a valve and the amp is solid-state). If you can afford it, get a hybrid 10W or 15W from your favourite brand (i personally recommend Marshall “Valvestate” and Vox “Valvetronix”).

Now that you’ve chosen a small amp, you will be able to push up the gain and volume to get the most out of your new beast. I advise you start with 7-8 for the gain and 6-7 for the volume, and tweak your sound from there. Try not to go below 5 for the gain, or you’re lose a lot of the quality of the sound. If it’s too loud, reduce the volume but push up the gain.

What about effects? Some amps have build in effects but you can of course add your own, in the form of multi-effect pedals or single-effect pedals. The choice is yours. Make sure you like the sound coming out of your amp. Generally, if you use many effects and you’re not happy, the best policy is to trim down your effects to one, and perhaps a touch of reverb. Keep it simple - the more effects, the fuzzier it might sound, especially if your playing isn’t 200% tight.

Record direct or with a mic? If you’ve bought a small but good amp, it would be a waste not to use the quality of its speaker. Get yourself a microphone Shure SM57, a mic stand and a compressor (i recommend Foscurite products - they sound better than Berhinger). Put the mic a few inches away from the amp and press record!

You might find that your guitar recording is still “thinner” than what you hear on your favourite records. Let me introduce you to the technique of multi-layering.

Multi-tracking, or double tracking as it is sometimes known, refers to the act of recording the same guitar part more than once in the same way. It is often used for rhythm guitar. A variant of it, or a more advanced application, is to use different sounds, and even different positions for your chords.

As an example, let’s say you play chords in barre E and A positions. You could record one guitar with a very low sound - it might not sound full on its own but there is a very good quality to the sound in the low registry. You might choose to play the chords only on the 3 or 4 lower strings of your guitar. Then, record a guitar with a lot of mid - again, it might not sound great on its own but you are concentrating on the sound quality of the medium spectrum. Play the chords fully on 6 strings. Lastly, push the high on the next guitar part your record, and play the chords only on the 3 higher strings.

Of course, you can vary this technique in any way you want - the example above is only to illustrate how it works. The idea is to create a very powerful sound as the sum of sounds that go well together and don’t overlap each others too much. To vary how you create the sounds, you can use your amp settings, your guitar settings, and even the way you play the chords.

This technique is used by many punk rock bands such as Green Day and The Distillers, and is very effective. I suggest you start with the example above to familiarise yourself with it and hear its possibilities for yourself. Then experiment with different ways of splitting the sounds between the guitars.

The good news is you don’t need many amps and many guitars to achieve a good sound - use what you have and your imagination

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