Ok, at this point, we'll assume that you have the tools and that you are now ready for showtime! I have received a great deal of positive feedback from other guitarists about the quality of my recordings (my newer ones at least!) and have even received the ultimate compliment: that my tone is awesome. So let me describe my process.

I have the benefit of having 2 separate rooms to dedicate to my recording. This allows me to keep my speaker cab in a separate room from my 'studio'. As I sit and play my guitar, I prefer to hear it the way it will end up on a CD. That means I have to listen to myself coming out of the monitor speakers. The below diagram shows how I do this pictorially, indicating how the various connections are made amongst the components:

Recording Setup

So basically, I just sit at my computer while I play and record. Though my speakercab is blasting away in the adjacent room, I am hearing myself through the monitor speakers. My amp is within arm's reach so I can adjust the tone controls and hear the changes through the monitor speakers. With my particular amp (the amazing sounding Diezel Einstein) I disconnected the built-in speaker and ran speaker cables to my cabinet.

If you don't have the luxury of having 2 rooms, have no worries. Just keep everything in one room. You will have to wait until you are done recording to hear how it sounds, but that certainly isn't going to get in the way of getting good tone. Of course if you want to play along to something while recording (backing tracks, etc) then you will need headphones. Otherwise whatever it is you are playing along to will get recorded and can lead to some nasty feedback problems...

Ok, let's get into some details.

Here are my tips for getting a good guitar sound:

1. Amp tone: I generally keep the tone controls fairly balanced (i.e. all around 12:00). I know we guitarists love to crank the bass but if you are also recording bass and drums then that added low end in the guitar is going to cause a very mushy sounding overall low end (i.e. because the guitar's low end will now be combining with the low ends of the bass and drums). Also, a lot of guitarists like to lower their mids (so called scooped mids). This might sound fine by itself, but when mixed with vocals, drums, etc it may sound very thin. By keeping the mid and treble around 12:00, you will end up with a tone that sits nicely in a mix. One other important point to make about tone is that guitarists in the studio generally achieve their best tone when cranking their amps. This is especially true of tube amps, whose tonal characteristics change drastically (for the better) when the amp's master volume is cranked.
2. Mic placement: If you have your mic pointing directly at the center of a speaker, it will genreally have a very buzzy tone (i.e. very trebly). To get a more even tone, you can either keep the mic facing perpendicular to the speaker but move it away from the center (towards the edge of the speaker), which reduces the treble and increases the low end, or you can angle it so that it is not perpendicular, which likewise reduces the treble and increases the low end. I find that either angling the mic at around 45 degrees or keeping it facing perpendicular but placing it around the half way opint between the speaker center and the speaker edge yields the most even sounding results. Experimenting with various placements is similar to experimenting with EQ because the effect is very similar, so find what suits your tastes. I personally like to record everything in as balanced a manner as possible (amp tone and mic placement) and then apply processing (EQ) on the computer (using high quality software of course!).

   Angular placement of mic

   Angling speakers upwards

   You will notice above that I angle my speaker cap upwards. This probably isn't that important since I have the mic so close to the speakers, but this is a fairly common practice. It helps prevent the soundwaves from bouncing off the ground and instead allows the sound waves to spread out more before hitting surfaces.
3. Recording Rhythm: Record so called double takes. This means record the same part at least twice. The end result is a much fuller sound compared to recording one take. In your software of choice make separate tracks and pan one towards the left and one towards the right. If you have just one mic, you can either use the same mic in the same position or use a different position for each take. Maybe do one take with the mic pointed more towards the center and one take with it angled away. In other words, be sure to have the right and left takes sounding very different. In my case, I use two mics and do one take with one mic and another take with the other mic. I purposefully use two mics that have different characteristics. Though not shown above, I use a Royer R121 and a Shure SM57. Sometimes I will change the amp's gain between takes. Anything you can do that makes the takes sound different will have a positive effect.
4. Recording Lead: Instead of recording double takes for lead, I just record one take but record with two mics simultaneously (This works best with a speaker cabinet with at least two speakers, but even if you have just one speaker you can apply the advice in this section.). In the software, I have two separate tracks, as I do with the rhythm part, and pan one towards the right and the other towards the left. I find this produces a more complex tone as compared to recording just a mono lead track. The end effect is similar to recording from 2 amps at the same time. Instead of using two amps with different tones, we can use two mics with different tonal qualities, we can further use mic placement to vary the tone and to achieve yet more variation between the tracks we can use a stereo power amp if our amp affords us that luxury! So you see, there are a vast number of ways to richen your lead (and rhythm) tone by applying these simple techniques!

Warning: When recording with multiple mics (or multiple takes with one mic where the placement is changing) you need to be aware of an issue called phase. Phase is way beyond the scope of this tutorial, but one genreal rule of thumb is that the distance between the two mics should be roughly 3 times greater than the distance from the mic to the speaker. This is known as the "3-to-1" rule and is explained here.

Summary

Believe it or not, that is all recording guitar amounts to, in a general sense (I didn't touch upon room acoustics, which is a topic well beyond the scope of this article...). Once you have recorded yourself into the computer, you can use your software's plugins to apply EQ, etc. I generally apply some EQ to cut the low end slightly, but other than that I don't do any processing (other than adding reverb and delay). Perhaps my simple method is preventing me from getting the polished tones of pros but until I can afford sound engineers, I think my method is getting me very acceptable results and I am confident you will have success with the simple method I have presented!