Today, we’re going to be covering an effective and organic technique for getting fuller vocal sounds before beginning your mix, involving running your vocals through a guitar amp and recording that signal alongside your raw sound. 

You will need:

1 guitar amp

3 microphones

1 singer

The Basics 

The concept here is very simple: you’re going to take 2 microphones and place them as close together as possible, facing your vocalist. One of these microphones is going straight to a preamp and then to your interface/chosen recording method. The other is going to a guitar amp with a fuzz tone or some kind of powerful distortion. Then you’re going to mic that amp up with a 3rd mic and send that to another preamp and your interface/chosen recording method. 

That is all you need for this technique; however, there are a few details that will help you hone in on an even better sound. 

The Microphones

Now you can do this with any selection of microphones; however, I have a few recommendations. 

I would recommend your first microphone, going straight to preamp, be some sort of LDC, or just generally the kind of microphone you might typically use alone for a vocal take. This could be an 87 or an NT1 or not a condenser at all, like an SM7b, really, you’re looking for a detailed and clear vocal mic. 

For your second mic, I would recommend a dynamic. Without an external supply, it is going to be hard to get phantom power to a mic that is going straight to an amp, and it is often unwise to sing directly into a ribbon mic, ultimately forcing your hand. 

For your third mic you can take plenty of liberty, but the thing to bear in mind is you don’t want your amp tone competing with the range where you look for intelligibility in a vocal around 2Khz, the idea here is to fill out thinner parts of the vocal more than change the sound so unless you are going for a fuzzier sound you’ll need to use a darker mic or position it accordingly (discussed later) 

The Amplifier 

Now, for this technique, I recommend a small and quite mobile amplifier, preferably with built-in effects or a fuzz pedal before it. An analogue signal path is preferable for phasing reasons, but ultimately, not that impactful. Your goal with the tone is to have vocals that are still clearly vocals and somewhat intelligible, but you want them to sound fried and slightly muffled. I recommend fuzz over traditional overdrive for this, as I feel it gives a more evenly weighted distortion, whereas overdrive can fill out the top end without really bulking up any lower-end information. 

The Positioning 

The big thing you’re going to want to avoid here is bleed. The amp will be outputting a loud and noisy signal, which you don’t want either of your vocal mics picking up; you don’t want distorted vocals in your main mic, and you don’t want your amp feeding back. 

You can easily solve this with distance and direction. If possible, simply put the amp in another room with a long cable, this immediately solves all problems here, but, if you cant do this, making use of the polar patterns of your mics makes this quite easy, simply direct your amp and mics in opposite directions and put some reasonable distance between them and you will be largely ok, you can think of it like setting a stage for an event and keeping FOH out of your mics. 

Coming back to the mic on the amp, think about the kind of sound you’re hoping to get there. Personally, I want a darker sound that doesn’t compete with my main vocal for space around 2K, so I tend to position my amp mic slightly off-axis and a fair bit off the speaker cone just to diminish some of the presence and harshness you can get from these amps.

Other Important Details 

When plugging a mic into an amp, you get a crazy impedance mismatch, combo this up with a distorted tone, and you get a very noisy amp, this is easily solvable, remember you’re not after high end detail or low end rumble so filtering can solve the bulk of this and when you throw in some noise gates you’re practically fine, but it is still something to bear in mind. 

On top of all this, it will be worthwhile to check phase coherence. To put a complex thing briefly, the different methods of transduction in condensers and dynamic mics mean that even with perfectly aligned mics and a fully analogue signal path, stacking multiple dynamics can put you massively out of phase in a way that can only really be fixed with polarity inversion and post-processing alignment tools. Again, there is no guarantee this would affect you, but keep your eyes and ears peeled.