Hi, this is Bryan Castle with servethesong.net. Today, I’m going to show you how to mic and record an acoustic guitar and mix some pro tools. As you can see, I have my microphones already set up here so let’s get started.
I’m going to grab the acoustic. So, I’m using a pair of Octavo condenser mics. These are not the most expensive mics that you find at the store but they do the job and they sound pretty good for acoustic guitar. They are an excellent choice for home recordings set up. This is a technique that I’ve gone back to in many times. It’s kind of my go to choice when I’m trying to lay down tracks quickly. And get things up and running quickly without spending a lot of time getting sounds. This is just going to work for me.
So, here I have my pair of microphones set up and in XY configuration. The diaphragms of the mics are at a 90 degree angle from each other. And I’m setting them up right at the 12 fret of the guitar. I’m going to experiment maybe try going down the note, the neck a little bit closer to the body. I’ve found that right around here, 11th or 12th fret is a sweet spot for the recording. I try to keep it about five to six inches away from the fret board and I want to make sure that I’m not kind of going all over the place here. And if you do that, it would definitely come through in a recording so you want to stay stable.
So I have the pro tools set up already fired up here. As you can see, I’ve got one stereo audio track for guitar and another track for the click. And I’m just going to throw the headphones here so I can hear the click while we record and this is just a short chord progression that I have been playing around with recently so here we go.
[Demonstration]
I’ve got my stereo recording that the XY configuration picked up a left and right channel here. Now what I like to do is I like to double up the guitars so I’m going to create another stereo track. And we’re going to name this guitar right. So now, we’re going to record our second track and this is going to be exactly the same as the first track.
[Demonstration]
So, try panning one guitar part, hard right and the guitar part hard left. See how that sounds by the way, it’s the guitar left. That way when we add more tracks later things are pretty clear.
[Demonstration]
So we have a nice full bodied stereo acoustic guitar recording. And this is ready to go as far as you know, maybe adding a little bit of compression, maybe queuing a little bit and it really depends on the other instruments that we’re going add into this song. And I’ll save all that fun stuff for another time. So, I hope this was helpful and for more articles, tips and videos, visit servethesong.net.
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