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close micing a guitar amp with akg c 414's


justbass4

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High, I just bought two akg c 414's and I want to use them in conjuction with some sm 57's for micing a guitar cab. I've heard that using both a condenser mic and a dynamic is good. so, my concern is damaging the mic. I look on youtube and a lot of the demos have condencers mics right up on the amp grill. I thought this was bad for mics such as these. so, my question, if anyone knows, is, how close can I or should I, put the mic to the amp. Oh, and I don't use loud amps. I'll be using a 1 watt rock block through a 4x10s cab. I'll also be using mahaffay songworks 1/4 watt combo. I'll be micing both the combo and cab (it can drive a cab and use it's own speaker). the 1 watt rock block is pretty loud though believe it or not.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Condenser mics are not as wimpy as a lot of people make out and yes you can use them almost up against the grill of your cab if you want to. Most have some sort of pad built in and you might need to use that. I would suggest a better use of a condenser mic is to close mic the cab with a SM57 then take some time and walk around your music room to see where "your sound" sounds best to you. Put your condenser mic (or mics) right there on a stand at ear level and record your playing to two (or more if possible) seperate tracks. You might just find that you don't need the SM57 at all. That's because you don't perform with your ear against the speaker grill so how would that be your sound.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest BentonC

I've used the 414's right up on speakers before, and they held up just fine. I'm sure if you contacted the manufacturer they would advize against it for liability reasons just in case anything were to happen though.

 

I find that I agree with jonnyg more often than not (of course, it always depends upon the situation). I don't think that the condensers always work that well right up on the speaker- just doesn't always sound natural to me. Of course- I always give it a shot though, sometimes great things happen with experimentation.

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  • 1 month later...

just to add some more stuff about recording in general, a cool trick that i like doing on certain projects is to use a pair of condensors like those 414's as room mic's along with close miking the cabinet and when you start mixing, squash the heck out of the signals of the room mics with a limiter and bring up the makeup gain, then bring up the faders on those 2 tracks until it sounds good. Ive found that by doing this you bring up alot of the rooms reverb without having to add reverb. This also works well with drums to bring out more of the rooms tone. Its kinda cool sometimes

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