A guitar sound that works in a song is usually the result of four or five choices made before anyone opens a microphone case. Which guitar. Which pickup. How loud the amp is. Where the amp is standing. What the player is doing with their hands. Microphone selection is real, but it is downstream of all of that, and it cannot undo any of it.
Pick the guitar for the arrangement
Instruments occupy different parts of the spectrum, and the useful question is not which one sounds best on its own but which one leaves room for everything else. A guitar with a strong midrange will fight a vocal in exactly the register where the vocal needs to be understood. A brighter, thinner instrument that sounds unimpressive when soloed can be the one that makes the chorus feel wide, because it stacks without crowding.
This is why solo auditioning is misleading. Listen to candidate guitars against the drums and a rough vocal, at a realistic balance. The one that disappears least when the rest comes up is usually the answer, even if it was not the most impressive on its own.
Amp volume is a tone control
Most amplifiers have a level at which they come alive, and it is rarely the quiet one. A valve amp turned down produces a stiff, undynamic sound that no amount of processing loosens. Turned up, the same circuit gives compression, harmonic content, and a response to picking dynamics that the player will feel and play into.
The practical constraint is that the loud setting may be too loud for the room, or for the people in it. There are honest workarounds — a smaller amp driven hard often beats a large one played politely, and attenuators exist — but be clear about the trade. An attenuator changes the load the amp sees and therefore changes the tone. That may be fine. It is not neutral.
Where the amp stands matters more than the microphone model
An amplifier on the floor, in a corner, against a wall, is a different instrument from the same amplifier on a chair in the middle of the room. Corners reinforce low frequencies. Floors add a reflection that arrives just after the direct sound and colours the midrange. These effects are large — often larger than the difference between two well-regarded microphones.
Before choosing a microphone, walk the room while the player plays. Find the spot where the amp sounds like the record you want. Put the microphone there. If the spot is a metre back, the microphone goes a metre back, and the resulting bleed and room sound are part of the recording rather than a problem with it.
Close mic placement, in two axes
On a speaker cone, two variables cover almost everything. The first is distance from the grille: closer gives more low end through proximity effect and a tighter, more direct sound; further back gives more of the room and a softer transient. The second is position across the cone: at the centre of the dust cap the sound is bright and aggressive, and it darkens progressively toward the edge.
These two axes are enough to find a usable sound on any speaker in a couple of minutes. Move the microphone, listen, move it again. Doing this while the player plays the actual part — not a scale, not a chord they are comfortable with — is the difference between a sound that works and a sound that only worked during setup.
Two microphones, one decision
Adding a second microphone to the same speaker is common and often useful, but it introduces a phase relationship that must be checked rather than assumed. Sum the two, then move one until the low end is at its fullest. If no position gives a satisfying sum, the honest answer is to use one of them. Two microphones that fight each other are worse than either alone.
Doubling is an arrangement choice
A doubled rhythm part panned hard to both sides is a familiar sound, and it works because the two performances differ slightly. Copying one take to both sides does not produce the same effect; it produces a mono part that is louder. If the width is the point, the part has to be played twice.
It is also worth deciding whether the song wants width at all. A single guitar in the centre, committed and well recorded, is an option that gets overlooked because it feels less impressive in isolation. In a dense arrangement it frequently reads as more confident.
Commit
Recording a clean signal and deciding on the amp later is possible, and there are sessions where it is the right call. But it defers a decision that the player is making in real time. A guitarist plays differently into a sound they like. If the sound is provisional, so is the performance, and that is the part that cannot be fixed later.