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Recording Acoustic Guitar
I’ve always been interested in finding new ways to record the ever-elusive acoustic guitar. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll split recording tasks into two broad categories: recording guitar without drums/percussion and recording guitar with drums/percussion.
Recording Without Drums/Percussion: If I’m recording solo guitar music or solo guitar with the addition of one or two other instruments, like “Perfect Strangers” from Consistent Variation or “Pictures of Lulu” from Sticks & Stones, I tend to favor using a matched pair of small-diaphragm condenser mics. I’m not going to get into placement, but suffice to say that you should use one to mic the neck and one to mic the body and just play with placement until it sounds great. As for effects, I always record dry to tape, but monitor with a reverb approximating the final reverb I’ll use in the mix. This is really important since reverb will strongly affect the way you play. In most cases, the mic signals will be panned hard left and right. Occasionally, I’ll also add some pickup signals to the recording, most often the Sunrise. This is useful in situations where you want to emphasize the low end. If you try to do this by adding EQ to the mic signal, it ends up turning the mix into mud by ruining the clarity. Adding lows with the pickup won’t affect the mic signals, and if used sparingly, won’t draw attention to the sound of the pickup. An extreme case of using a variety of different signals in recording a solo guitar piece is the tune “Trance Dance” on Sticks & Stones. For this tune, we put a pair of vintage Neumann 256s on the guitar, sent both the Sunrise and SBT signals to the Trace preamp and then to the console, and then sent the piezo pickup signal to a 200 watt Trace Acoustic amplifier in an isolation room. In that room, we put a pair of Neumann KM-84’s close to the speaker and an AKG 414 in the far end of the room as an ambient mic. All in all, we ended up mixing 7 channels of different signals for one solo guitar part. The result was a sound that was less than natural, but huge. In summary, when recording solo guitar, start with a pair of really good mics and then add pickup signals if you need to in order to get the desired effect.
Recording With Drums/Percussion: The addition of drums and percussion actually makes the whole process of recording acoustic guitar a totally different animal. Since my new album SPEAK! has drums on over half of the tracks, we had to find new ways to record to make the guitar stand out. The biggest problem to contend with is that since acoustic guitar is percussive by nature when played rhythmically, how can you compete with the snare and hi-hat to make the guitar occupy its own space? Here’s how we did it: We cut the Takamine first by taking a signal from each of the three pickups patched through Trace Acoustic preamps (see the Stage Sound and Guitars pages) and giving them each their own board channels. I played the main rhythm part once and panned the piezo and SBT channels hard left. The Sunrise was panned in the center since it represents only low frequencies. Next, I overdubbed an exact replica of the rhythm part again, this time panning the piezo and SBT hard right, with the Sunrise again in the middle. Finally, I overdubbed a third replica of the main rhythm part with my Froggy Bottom miked close with a pair of vintage Neumann 253s. While one would think that all this doubling would create unpleasant phasing effects, the end result is the impression of one giant guitar (check the MP3 download of “Wandering Minds”). You just have to be careful to play the doubled/tripled parts as tightly as possible. From there, if the tune had a separate melody played by guitar, as in the song “Trades”, I simply overdubbed that with the Froggy using microphones only. Using all the parts together allows you to form an absolutely giant rhythm sound which can be EQ’d to oppose the drums so that they compliment each other without canceling each other out. Many people have written me asking if it is possible to achieve a similar result with compression. I would advise against this simply because front-end compression is going to kill the overtones. On SPEAK!, the only guitar compression used is on the 2-track mix to fatten the overall sound. We never used compression as an insert on any guitar channels. When in doubt, double it. If that isn’t enough, double it again. Keep doubling until you can’t hear the snare anymore without turning it up, then you’ll know you’ve’ got enough. — Rob |
