Steve Rieck: I want to use this podcast today to talk to you guys about recording acoustic guitar and hopefully give you some tips to get a better sound out of your acoustics when you record them. Everybody these days has a recording system at home on your computer, almost everybody does. Even if you have been playing for a long time, this might be a new concept to you. There are definitely a few things that are really going to help you get a better sound when you are recording.
The first thing is probably very obvious, which is putting new strings on your guitar that will automatically bring the most out of your guitar sound. Beyond that it's really about the signal chain from the player to the instrument, the pickup that you are using or the microphone that you are recording it with, into the preamp and the settings on that and then into the computer and then how you mix it too.
So what we are going to talk primarily about today is the microphone and the microphone placement and pickups. Really to that and there are two different ways to get the sound out of the guitar, and that's one with an electronic pickup, that's usually a piezo pickup in an acoustic guitar. If you notice, when I play a chord with that sound, it has sort of a hard sound to it. It sounds fake, basically. Sometimes that's a sound that you actually do want for certain types of mixing, certain types of songs, but it definitely has a little bit of different sound just if you were just to hear a guitar acoustically in a room.
One of the things you can do to get rid of that real mid range E tone that kind of hard sound of the pickup is to roll the mid range down on your E queue. If you have E queue on your guitar, bring the mids down a little bit and bring the bass and the treble up. You can see on the controls on this guitar that I have done just that. I have got the bass and treble up which effectively is bringing down the mids.
A little bit of a thinner sound to it, it's not so -- almost kind of sounds more acoustic that way. The best thing in my opinion that you can do to get a real good acoustic guitar sound is to use a condenser microphone. There are really three different types of microphones on the market, dynamic microphones, condenser microphones and rhythm microphones. For our purposes today we are going to talk about condenser microphones which are by far and way the most commonly used for recording acoustic instruments including guitar.
They come in two varieties, large diaphragm condensers, which look sort of like vocal mikes, which is what they are, and small diaphragm condensers, which is what I have got here. A single small diaphragm condenser mike can run anywhere from $200 and up usually. You pretty much get what you pay for with them. You will probably notice the difference as you get more and more high-end with them.
The basic placement for the microphone for most recording situations is going to be how I have it here. You will notice I have it pointed right at the guitar fretboard where the neck actually joins the body. In this case, it's around the 14th fret. If I were to get that microphone too close to the sound hole, you would really get a lot of booming bass and if you get it too far away you won't get enough bass so you really kind of have to audition it a little bit and hear the way it sounds. You will notice when I play this with the microphone, it has a more natural kind of acoustic sound.
So again the pickup can be really helpful if you are playing live. Obviously, you might not want to sit in front of a microphone the whole time in the live performance. A pickup generally gives the mixing engineer much better way of setting up the sound, more control over the sound and the microphone with microphones that are prone to feedback in lot of situations. But that being said, if you are recording and you really want to get that natural wooden kind of acoustic guitar tone, your best bet is to find a good condenser, small diaphragm condenser microphone. The one I've got here is just sort of a medium range, not a very high price small diaphragm condenser, but it still sounds good.
At that point, it really comes down to two questions, where do you put the mike, how do you place it, and how many microphones do you use? You could use one or two for a more stereo sound; we will talk about two mikes in a minute. But when I play a chord on this, you can instantly hear a more acoustic sounding tone with that. So if you just kind of -- you can really hear that, that has a much more natural kind of acoustic tone.
The placement of the microphone, I am just using a single microphone as I have here. Generally, the place to start is going to be pointing the microphone at the fretboard, maybe an inch or two off the fretboard, essentially, right where the neck joins the body. So you can see, in this case, that's right around the 14th fret, again right where the neck joins the body is kind of the standard.
If you got closer to the sound hole, brought it more towards this area here, you definitely get a lot more bass of the sound, which can be a good or bad thing. If you get way too much bass, it could be really a problem when you are trying to mix it with other instruments. It can really cloud up the sound.
But that being said if it's too far away from the sound hole, obviously you won't get enough bass. If you wanted to maybe pull the microphone out a little bit, maybe a couple of feet out from the guitar rather, you're going to pick more of the acoustic qualities of the room that you're recording in, which can be again a very good or bad thing depending on the room. So that's just something to experiment with.
A couple of other things you could do is, try some radical mike placements, just try maybe over the shoulder of the guitar player as if it's picking up the sound of the guitar from the player's ear perspective or even miking it down towards the bridge, can have a good result. If you're using two mikes you could actually put a second mike, sort of shotgun down the neck, like pointed down the neck at the headstock, for a different sound too.
So if you're recording with two microphones, you have to be aware that you could be out of phase. If you happen to notice that there is a real lack of bass when you put both microphones in together, or if the volume drops a little bit and is that if it's sounding bigger and more stereo that actually gets the opposite effect, your microphones are out of phase in that situation. The best thing to do is just really to play around with the mike placements in different places, and eventually you'll find a place where they are working together.
If you're stereo tracking with two mikes, one of the best things you can do is try to play around the panning of the mike sources in the mix. So you put one sort of in left, one in the right to a certain degree or maybe all the way and that can really give you much broader acoustic sound as well, much more dimensional acoustic sound.
Then the other thing is, literally, double tracking. So if I recorded a part, and then I recorded another part on top of it, had them panned left and right, hard left and hard right, you would notice it really gives a much more stereo kind of effect. Hopefully, those are some tips to help you record your acoustic guitar.
Kim Richey: 'Come Around,' I went with Tim Krekel and it was on the record Glimmer. Starts on E Minor, to D, to the C shape back to D.
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