Start With the Room, Not the Gear

Before you spend a penny on microphones, spend an afternoon on your room. A £2,000 microphone in an untreated box room will sound worse than a £90 one in a space that's been thoughtfully tamed. The enemy is reflection: bare walls, hard floors and windows bouncing your guitar back into the mic a few milliseconds late, smearing the detail you're trying to capture.

You don't need acoustic foam panels to make a real difference. Try these cheap fixes first:

• Move away from parallel walls. Position yourself so you're not equidistant between two flat surfaces. Angling your setup by 30 degrees breaks up the worst flutter echoes.
• Soften the surfaces nearest the mic. A duvet over a clothes horse, a thick rug underfoot, and heavy curtains drawn across the window will absorb the harshest early reflections.
• Fill the shelves. Books, records and cardboard boxes make surprisingly effective diffusers. An empty room is a loud room.
• Avoid the bathroom, the kitchen and the hallway. Tiled and glass-heavy spaces flatter nobody.

For acoustic guitar, a modest amount of natural room character is lovely. For close-miked electric, you want the room as dead as you can reasonably make it, because the amp is doing all the talking.

Microphone Choices and Placement for Acoustic

A single small-diaphragm condenser is the classic starting point, and plenty of home recordings have been built entirely around one. Large-diaphragm condensers work too, though they tend to flatter the low end and can get boomy on a dreadnought.

Placement is where the tone lives. Start with the mic 20 to 30cm from the guitar, aimed at the 12th fret, angled slightly towards the soundhole. That position captures a balance of body and string detail. Then experiment:

• Towards the neck for more sparkle and finger noise, less weight.
• Towards the bridge for a tighter, more percussive attack.
• Over the player's shoulder, looking down at the guitar, for a warmer, less clinical picture.
• Off-axis — rotate the mic 20 to 30 degrees away from the soundhole — to tame a boomy instrument without reaching for EQ.

If you have two mics, a spaced pair (one at the 12th fret, one over the shoulder) gives you options at mixdown. Check for phase issues by flipping the polarity on one channel and listening for the thinner, hollow result — if the combined sound gets weaker when summed, nudge one mic a few centimetres until it doesn't.

Electric Guitar: Amp, DI or Both

Nothing beats a mic'd valve amp, but a home-friendly setup is easier than you think. Keep the amp quiet, around conversation level, and place a dynamic mic 2 to 5cm from the grille cloth, aimed between the centre of the cone and the edge. Centre is bright and aggressive; the edge is warmer and rounder. Mark the spot with tape once you find it.

Recording both a mic and a DI signal at the same time is the single best habit you can build. The DI gives you a clean, silent track you can reamp later or process with an amp sim when the neighbours are asleep.

• Close-mic plus room mic: a second mic a metre or so back adds depth if the room sounds decent.
• Watch the bass. Moving the mic just 10cm further from the speaker changes the low-end response noticeably.
• Turn the amp down, not the interface up. Pushing a small amp hard at low volume gets you saturated tone without a noise complaint.

Dialling In Your Audio Interface

Set your interface to 24-bit and 48kHz unless you have a specific reason to go higher. Then set gain properly, which means peaking around -12 to -6 dBFS on the loudest strums or chords. Digital clipping is unforgiving, and headroom costs you nothing.

• Engage phantom power (+48V) only for condenser mics, never for dynamics or ribbons.
• Use the pad if a hot humbucker or loud amp is overloading the input even at minimum gain.
• Enable the high-pass filter at 80 to 100Hz on acoustic and electric tracks — it clears rumble, foot taps and handling noise.
• Kill the direct monitoring mix or set it to taste so you're not hearing a slap-back delay of your own playing.
• Check for hum. Move away from laptop power supplies, dimmer switches and fluorescent lights before you blame the guitar.

Set your DAW's buffer to 128 or 256 samples while tracking, then raise it to 512 or 1024 when mixing to stop dropouts.

Tracking Habits That Save You Later

Record a few seconds of silence before every take. That room-tone sample is gold when you need to clean up a breath or a squeaky plectrum later. Always record a proper count-in and a couple of bars of the part before the section you actually want.

Tune between every take — a guitar can drift half a cent as it warms up, and pitch problems are tedious to fix afterwards. Play each part three times if you can: two solid takes and a safety. Comping from three is far quicker than endless punch-ins.

Finally, listen back on as many systems as you can — headphones, laptop speakers, the car. If the guitar sounds good in all of them, you've captured something honest. That's all any home recording really needs to be.