I have always been a fan of that Texas Blues sound started by Albert Collins and later by Billy Gibbons and Stevie Ray Vaughan. SRV's engineer on his early work really captured that sound perfectly. It sounds like your at a live show with big guitar all around. I'm not looking to copy it, just get some of that big guitar sound into our recordings.

When we record we cut scratch tracks as group to get the live feel and then dub in our parts individually with just the other 2 instruments and vocals sent to the headphone mix.

In order to get the tone, I need to turn the amp way up because the tone comes from power amp distortion not preamp distortion. 1 amp panned down the middle just isn't big enough plus it just competes with the vocals, bass, kick and snare that way. I have tried two different techniques to capture that sound with some success. The first was to apply stereo reverb to the guitar parts which are miced from one amp. This gets me the wide soundfield I'm looking for but the reverb tends to suck some of the tone out of the guitar, not totally but I loose some definition. The other way is to send the guitar to two amps at the same time and add just a little reverb when mixing then pan the two amp tracks about 10 and 2'o clock. This yeilds a BIG sound with all of the tone still intact. The downside to this approach is that it is ungodly loud, I mean really really LOUD even with cans on. We use a Boogie DC3 a Marshall JCM600 and a Blackface Super Reverb in different combinations. One of these amps is plenty loud in our small '25 X '25 space let alone two going full bore. I live in a neighborhood so this approach isn't always popular. When Micing just one amp I close mic the cab with an SM57 and use either an NT-1 or an MD421 a few feet back. I am going to try adding more reverb to one mic and less to the other to try and maintain some more definition with the one amp approach.

My question is has anyone had success with another approach? Is their something I'm missing or maybe not doing right using one amp. Any tips or techniques you might have used successfully would be greatly appreciated by myself and my neighbors.