Originally Posted by: PValentiOnly guitarists with bad tone or ones that don't know how to properly operate their effects get recorded sans effects and have them added after the fact.

Come on man, this is a ridiculous statement.

You can record anyway you want and there is no proper way to do anything. I've been to plenty of studios and the engineers have all without exception wanted dry takes with nothing more than noise supression and compression. And yes, I can play guitar and no my tone is not bad (to my ear anyway!).

Post effects make a lot of sense because you are not making any destructive changes to the core tone - anything can be undone and changed - this is very important if you take a mix home and decide a week later that the flanger actually sounds a bit 80's. You can remix it in a matter of minutes/hours as opposed to setting up everything all over again to rerecord something that could end up being a large part.

I'm obviously not an engineer but I suggest you read the following book which was reccommended to me by some of the engineers over at homerecording.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Recording-Guitarist-Jon-Chappell/dp/0793587042
The author debates recording with and without effects, and although there is never only one correct way to record he does make a very strong case for recording sans fx.