I've been working on my mic placement skills for over six years, and I still just don't get it. If I follow conventional advice and place the SM57 on the dust cap edge of a V30, I get a lot of high end that often sounds spiky, depending on settings, and always sounds thin, as I'm capturing a lot of high end relative to other frequencies in that position. The center position (center of dust cap) presents similar challenges, but with even more of all the stuff I don't want (fizzy high end dominating the frequencies). If I move the mic further out towards the surround, things get beefier and better, where things finally start to resemble something like what I'm hearing in the room, but I also lose presence the further out from the center I go and the resulting sound is thicker in the midrange but muffled/cloudy. The further out I place the mic, the more the mids and low mids sound like what I'm hearing in the room, but the overall sound is too dark. Basically, no matter what I do, I end up with a less-than-professional result (I am going for something like the guitars on Piece of Mind). I wonder what your guys's thoughts on this are. Why is recording natural sounding guitars, more like they sound in the room, such a big challenge? Do you have any advice?
