I never put my guitar cabinets in an iso-booth. Try putting the SM57 right up to the grill, centered on the speaker? What kind of microphone preamplifier's and/or console are you using? If you want a more open sound through your microphone preamplifier, try engaging the pad followed by boosting the microphone preamplifier trim level? This is not totally applicable to mixers made by Mackie, since their microphone preamplifier is of a fixed gain variety and only use op-amp buffers after the preamplifier to boost or attenuate level giving their microphone preamplifier a more consistent sound regardless of gain staging.

You may also want to try and take a direct output from the guitar in to an active direct box of the guitar to a track of your multi-channel recorder. With that, you can "reamp" the guitar track by feeding the direct guitar recorder track to the new amplifier, miking that and recording that on another channel of your multi-track recorder.

Now you're cooking with gas!
Ms. Remy Ann David

First off, are you getting the sound you want out of the amp? That's half the battle right there. If it is "simply" a matter of capturing that, then I
would try to use as big a room as possible, especially if the guitarist is "chugging" through a cranked 4x12 cab. That kind of tone needs to
"breathe", and an iso booth will kill that every time. Now, if you are not able to do that due to loudness constraints (neighbors, family, etc) a compromise can sometimes be to make a "tent" out of heavy blankets and mic boom stands around the cab to contain the sound pressure levels a bit while still giving it some "air".

Jim "Iso Lonely I Could Cry" Moonbaby

While we're at it. Lets assume that I was recording in a bigger room that is not treated acoustically at all and might sound horrible. Is throwing up a condencer mic to capture the ambience going to be pretty useless, even damaging? I know, I know....see what your ears think....but I have to purchase another boom if I am going to do this and would rather not spend the money if its just going to be useless.

Even if you think the room sounds horrible, it can still work in your favor. I have done a lot of on location work where I have come upon this same dilemma. I will try to make it work in my favor most of the time. Just because you want to Mike the room doesn't mean that you need to purchase another boom stand. In fact you can get an excellent sound from a desk stand sitting on the floor. In fact the closer you can get a microphone capsule to a large surface plane, it helps to eliminate some of the acoustic problems. Ah-La boundary and/or PZM like. I have frequently used PZMs as room microphones. I have also crunched the heck outta of my room microphones with compression. I think you'll find that no matter how awful you think certain acoustic situations are you can frequently take a negative and turn it into a positive by working it. Right now I'm doing some rock-and-roll recording in an old dairy barn! It's made out of cinderblock walls, cement floor, wood ceiling, with a makeshift stage. The room Mike's sound great! Thankfully, the cows are gone.

Moooooo!
Ms. Remy Ann David
(I guess I should lose some weight?)

eonblue wrote: I have read a good bit of lit. regarding recording electric guitars but I still have a couple of questions.

How important is it to put the cab in iso when you are using an SM57 close to the grill?

My chain is Diezel -> SM57(bout 3 inches off the grill) -> Sebatron Thorax -> Kinda crappy A/D converters.

Something is killing all the presence of the guitar sound.....it sounds pushed back and just kinda dull overall as if its missing something in the upper mids or highs. I moved the mic everywhere and that was the best position I found. Also I cranked different combination of trebel mids and presence on the amp but that just seemed to make it fizzy. Im looking for something with a very biting edge on it which is easily available from the source, but just isnt making it to the DAW. Any ideas? Would a clip help?

There are a lot of variables, you should post a sample.