Reach Inside

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    So I thought I'd have another shot at mixing acoustic guitar, with a little nod to some of the 70's guitarist I'm a fan of.

  • Thanks waraba the acoustic is recorded with a single Tascam stick mic, it’s part of a pair but I’ve started to record acoustic in mono to simplify things. I have it a foot or two away from the guitar pointing towards the twelfth fret. The room is extremely untreated and even has a tile floor, which can work for certain sounds but usually works against me when I mic anything.

  • The room is extremely untreated and even has a tile floor, which can work for certain sounds but usually works against me when I mic anything.

    Same here in my home studio. Not easy to manage and especially complicated on acoustic guitars. All other stuff, vocals etc. can still be handled even in that situation. Luckily I do have access to a well treated room in a studio which makes super big difference on the acoustic guitars when you want to use mic instead of DI. But in comparison it is day and night...


    But you still did very well on this one Per. I really like your approach and the continuous flow of stuff you work on :thumbup:8)

  • Yeah deadman42 I'd love to be able to spend time and money to treat this room. I think it would probably make the biggest difference out of anything but it's also the most expensive and time consuming thing to do and hardest because right now I'm a total neophyte so even knowing what should be done is a whole other question

  • So, I've been wanting to do this for a while and I recently borrowed a really nice guitar from a friend so this is the first time I can do a mic test in my space. Plus I now have three very different mics to test with, a SDC stick mic that requires phantom power, the classic and passive SM58 (so more omni than the 57), and a very nice LDC by Shure the KSM44 set to figure 8 mode (with the back basically blocked off).


    All recorded at around 16 inches from the guitar, aiming at the 12th to 14th frets.


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    There's more details in the description on soundcloud as well as comments explaining what's going on in what section.


    The sounds are completely untreated in any way, no compression, no verb, I haven't even volume matched in the DAW. Just eyeballed the levels from the Apollo's console on the mic press that are in neutral state (no plugins).

    I think that with what I own these sounds are about as good as I can currently get it in this space. Especially you can see how a high end guitar (Martin 000-28 modern deluxe) behaves.

    Let me know your thoughts guys. I have my own and I think it was a good test to do because it helped inform me a little more.

  • Nice experiment , I guess you should try with two mikes as well , one on the 12 fret and one in front of the guitar hole, maybe a bit further for some ambiance sounds, but with an untreated room it might be difficult.


    I've also used a mix of integrated piezzo and 12th fret SM7B but with post processing , comp , eq , verb ... with some nice but not what I had in my mind yet :(


    It's probably the most difficult stuff to record and the room factor is huge, as with vocals , the KPA gave us the habit not to care about the room and we're far from these pro results with traditional technique.


    it looks so easy and natural for lady Joni M :


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    When we did our Album with Lee , we used a simple rode NT1 usb over the 12th fret on a vintage yamaha , sounds nice to me :

    https://thealienbrothers.bandcamp.com/track/the-real-world


    I reckon it easier for me to use the piezzo + jack to KPA on my own folk , at least for demos with baldinger preamp from the official pack.

  • Thanks Monkey_Man !


    waraba Yeah Joni really should have been where Bob is these days in the collective conscience with writing and performing skills like that but they didn’t want to promote her as heavily and they allowed other people to steal her songs like Judy. Maybe that made her bitter but of course having mean words to say about even Mozart is self sabotage and won’t endear you when the time comes.


    Anyhow back to recording , I’m not sure what mic is being used but it looks like another Martin doing guitar duty. The guitar is kinda secondary though when you can sing like that. Same thing I noticed with Gordon Lightfoot, often the guitar recording itself is really technically bad, distortions, boomy, room sounds etc, but because the songs and voices are phenomenal everyone goes “That’s a great guitar right there”. I guess the overall character of the guitar still comes through too despite less than ideal tracking and they are playing nice instruments and regardless of imperfection it works for the mix.


    I’ve tried piezo and combinations a few times but just have difficulty dialing out the quack and making it feel less plastic, it’s the right sound for some things but right now I’m on a kick for natural acoustic sounds. I’ve had a lot of difficulty with stereo micing, it sounds fabulous in stereo but then when you bring it to mono you always get these little phasey effects even when you align the tracks perfectly in the DAW. I know there are some plugins out there designed to fix that like Vocalign but I don’t own them and it feels like yet another rabbit hole to go down when my gut says the less processing you can do the better it seems to sound.