How do you choose which guitar(s) or configurations to use on recordings?

pintspiller

I've used Lockdown to refresh/learn home-recording. I guess a lot of us have. In particular, I've been going through some of the things I had written and recorded on 4-track tapes when I was aged from 22 - 28.

Practically everything I recorded in those days was on my Gordon-Smith Gypsy. In the first few weeks of Lockdown that was the guitar I used, but I have mostly used my Gibson SG since.

Today I decided to record both guitars on the same track, which has me in a quandry. How do I decide which plays what? Is it a matter of playing everything on each guitar and just choosing A or B? 

Is this like choosing which is your favourite child?

chrisj1602

I think you’re right in trying both guitars and picking A or B, or have A and B double tracked.

Hattigol

Whichever looks coolest 

Musicwolf

Sometimes one particular guitar is right for a part but a lot of times it doesn't matter.  I try to use different guitars within a song not just to give variety to the sounds but also because different guitars alter, ever so slightly, the way that I play.  When one person is playing all the parts things can get a bit ‘samey’ so anything that mixes things up a bit is worth trying.  If you know that you are going to use one particular guitar for a certain part, such as a solo, then use a different guitar on the rhythm.  Using two different guitars to double track parts can also work.

Mark1960

Go with which sounds best

pintspiller

Thanks for the replies. I must say that I'd never really thought about it before. The guitar I was playing has generally been the one I've been lifting anytime I've recorded something.

My SG was a guitar I never really got on with. It came with mini-humbuckers and just never seemed to have the beef that my Gordon-Smith had, even when I replaced the bridge humbucker for a Seymourized Mini-humbucker. it wasn't until I sold the minis and stuck a cheap P90 into the bridge position a little over ten years ago that I actually started warming to the guitar.

Just moments prior to making this post, I had recorded three parts with the same amp on the SG and with the GS in humbucker and split modes. I actually found that hard-panning of GS in humbucker and the SG with P90 was a fantastic double-track of rhythm guitars! I'm still undecided about the coil-tapped sound, but maybe I'll find a sound best-suited on another day.

The last time I tried double-tracking with two sounds was the GS with MT2 and GS with SD1 which I quite liked DI'd into the DAW a long time ago. I've since moved the MT2 on and, having used a Torpedo Captor from just prior to Lockdown, have gotten back into using an amplifier's gain rather than sculpting with pedals (although my recording today was of a demo I had recorded about 25 years ago were my sound at the time was from using a Pearl Octaver [long sold so I'm using an Eco T-Cube Oct-1, which apparently is a clone]) into a maxed-out clean channel on a Laney AOR.

The Laney has long-since gone (the proceeds were used to fund the purchase of a four-speed CD-writer!) and I either use my DSL1 or a Carlsbro CS/TC.

LastMantra

Generally I use my The Paul for rhythm and my Strat for lead. The Paul has a thick warm tone which is chunky and fills things out and the strat is brighter and pokes through better. I have two acoustics that are very much the same. 

PolarityMan

LP bridge pickup is the default position then use something else only if im looking for something specific..like if i want something twangier Ill use a coil split on my brian moore or for smoother leads I'll use neck pickup etc but 90%, LP bridge pickup. 

spark240

For recording I mostly use my PRS 513 or lately the Yamaha 720 ...Just the type of music I guess.

   Tend to record a L/R thing with the 2 different guitars .

stratman3142

I have a sound in mind to start with.

If it's neck or bridge single coil I'll choose my Telecaster Professional.
If it's classic rock or a looser blues humbucker feel I'll choose my Les Paul
If it's more focused rock or heavy humbucker feel I'll choose my PRS 2
For general purpose and whammy bar stuff I'll use my HSS Strat, which I use mostly.

But often I'll try a guitar then run through the others.

skay

@pintspiller ; but then comes the quandary of what guitar are you going to use for the music video?

flying_pie

I keep it simple by only owning two guitars. If I need humbuckers then I use my humbucker guitar, and if I need single coils then I use the single coil one.

pintspiller

@skay ; the bigger quandary is whether to wear my leather chaps when the helicopter shoots the video as I play on the edge of a cliff or not

Cirrus

It's an intersection of a few things for most people, I think;

- How the guitar makes you play

- How the guitar sounds when you play the way it makes you play

- Whether that sound works for the song

Quick example; today I was working on a song where I used one guitar because it's got a particularly nice clean sound, and feeds back easily when overdriven - and I wanted a semi-hollow kind of vibe for most of the track.

But in the chorus, I wanted to also have a more focused sound that held together better with distortion to thicken things out - with the amount of gain I wanted, the first guitar had too much loose low end and took up too much space in the mix. So I switched to a solid body with humbuckers.

Then single coils... obviously they have that twangy clean sound, which doesn't have as much midrange, so they leave space in the mix rather than filling things in. And they have a sharper attack so if you dig in you can get aggressive, percussive sounds. Usually the song, and the guitar part, will tell you what it wants and that leads back to my first point.