Thanks for checking out my stuff - always makes my day to hear a compliment! Anyway, you got me thinking about recording guitar parts so I checked around a bit with some engineers and also asked a friend of mine who owns a 'high end' studio (he recorded The Cranberries, Snow Patrol and Colin Farrel among others).
Basically the concensus was that the high end studios do a bit of both (dry and wet recording of guitar parts), depending on the situation. Recording with reverb, chorus, flanger or delay is 'mostly' avoided because things can be messed up when doubling tracks because of phase like shifts and sweeps that don't match up. Also, those effects cause problems if any editing is required. They do of course advise that wah is done live to get the proper feel and any additional dirtying of the signal eg overdrive on fron of distortion etc.
Some parts demand effects to be played properly anyway such as types of feedback and loops or certain passages done with a tap delay etc. Also, when I said 'dry' earlier I did mean with distortion - that is a given and must be captured directly the first time around unless you are reamping a separate channel - then you would DI a clean 'straight from the pickup' take before the signal hits the preamp of the actual amp. Aso, they said that most (not all) performances that require effects eg, delay and reverb for a lead part are done using multiple mics, with one take going though the effects on the board to give the wet sound to the performers cans to help them play the part they want to 'feel'. Also, whenever possible they always take a clean DI for backup of everything, it also allows them to reamp through different amps for multi layering and completely new tones while still benefiting from the interaction between the pickups and the original amped sound (feedback and subtle harmonis etc).
Anyway, all very interesting, I would love to have a lot of free time to experiment with all of the various techniques - just coming back to say that we are both right and that the actual method of capturing the tone has a lot to do with the music type and the actual performance part itself. :)
