Here's a simple and foolproof method to record great acoustic guitar tracks in your home or project studio. It's how I record them every single time. And here are The 4 Rules Of Acoustic Recording: therecordingrevolution.com/201...
i am from Nepal and i recently bought rode nt2a. It is a great microphone i love it i want to learn music production can you help me please ? here's my facebook account please do reply me facebook.com/bhupendrarokamusic
I've been recording for 25 years and I still watch acoustic mic placement videos haha. It's such a dynamic instrument and can be used for so many elements that you can choose different placements each time. I like that you acknowledge that there's no "one" way to do it but this might work for you. Always good stuff Graham!
I cant stop watching these videos! I love it! Thanks for all your help Graham! I really appreciate your insight on music and life and how your so willing to help others stuck in places where you've probably have been stuck in yourself. I can honestly say you've made me see my own approaches to those two aspects in a whole different and better way. THANKYOU!
A technique i find interesting is to aim one microphone at the sound hole and one at the neck, then you can blend both sounds and play with the stereo field all you want.
Hey thanks man! I used this method to record the four acoustic tracks on my album and they came out sounding beautiful. When I record for genres like soft rock, singer-songwriter/easy listening, or even pop, I typically grab a stereo bar, a pair of small diaphragm condensers, and a mic stand (obviously) and have the first condenser pointed at the part of the soundhole closest to the neck, about 1 foot away, and the other condenser would be pointed at the 12th fret. It's a pretty stress-free method that I recently took up, but I must admit that I've gotten hooked on your method! Thanks again!
What I do is probably really strange, but I put a mic close to the sound hole panned hard right and another at about the 12th fret panned hard left. It gives a lot of fretty noises to the left ear and the strummy sounds to the right ear. I think it sounds super cool
I'm here in 2020..Graham this video helped me so much! I'm doing acoustic guitar record on a rock record and your methods help me alot. We have a full studio setup, and even in this setup it's a great help.. I'm subscribing right now!
i follow all of your video for like 3 years now. thanks for all the stuff that u share, your free e book was the first big lesson that i learn and i do until to day in my studio in Indonesia
meanwhile The Boxer from Simon and Garfunkel used 7 mics for the main guitar. "On my guitar, they had me miked with about seven mics. They had a near mic, a distant mic, a neck mic, a mic on the hole. They even miked my breathing. They miked the guitar in back. And they had an ambient mic overhead."
Recorded with this method today. Man it was amazing. I used my Gibson which has a big sound and then the Taylor is super bright, and both sounded really nice! Thank you so much for making this so easy to understand. First time seeing your video, but I'm posting it on my Blog about my journey, and hopefully others will come here and use this technique. Sounds amazing! Thanks again!
My favorite, for a 'warm' acoustic guitar sound: Ribbon mic, level with and a foot straight out from players left shoulder (assuming right handed), pointed between 12th fret and sound hole. This also aligns the edge null of the ribbon mic with the player's face, so breath noise won't be captured...also enabling playing and singing at the same time with good (enough) isolation. Another favorite for a woody but clear sound: Omnidirectional mic (Large diaphragm preferable, but small works fine), 8 inches out from just below the bridge. This captures the body of the guitar (only sounds as good as the instrument), and still gets some good pick-on-strings attack. It works best if you have a dead or good sounding room. Cheers!
To compare: 1:37 - sound hole 2:39 - 12th fret 4:25 - "both" I would really like to compare them easily. If there were an annotation on each example, leading to the next or first one, that would be great. Or if there were simple time codes in the description. In any case, here are some for anyone's convenience. (including mine. lol)
The first one is exactly how Coldplay records acoustics, that and a ton of Nashville engineers will place a mic right on front of the sound hole for a more bluegrass tone. There's always another mic, but they do point them at the sound hole a lot of times.
If there's always another mic, then pointing to the sound hole is OK, as it's just part of the sound. It's like a scooped tone, while pointing to the 12th fret yields a complimentary midrange tone.
@@Texturas75 Exactly. Using a single mic like he is needs to take in all the frequencies to backing it away makes sense. . But having multiple mics pointed at multiple parts of the guitar gets all those frequencies recorded, so you can then adjust levels to taste when blending them.
I've had really good results using two mics. I put one angled toward the 12th fret and one down by the bridge. I use one bright mic and one that's a little darker. I make sure they're the same distance away from the guitar so there are no phase issues. Then after I've recorded my part I pan one hard right and one hard left. It really creates a huge sound that's still bright enough to sit in a mix.
Hey Graham, just wanted to say thanks for these videos. You've been a huge help with my journey into audio engineering, and I really appreciate it. Keep it up man. God bless.
This was perfect! I was just going to start recording acoustic with my NT1.... it's like you read my mind man! Much thanks, and keep up the fantastic work! :D
i found the M/S technique this week and i love it for solo acoustic guitar tracks. you position the first mic with a cardoid pickup pattern at the 12th fret and point it towards the sound hole and once you have found a sound you like you put a second mic with a 8 pickup pattern on the top pointing to the sides. then you take the second mic duplicate it in a daw pan them to each side and flip the faze of one of the second mics and add in the first mic till you like the sound. i also grouped them into a stack and added eq to the stack instead of eq to each of the tree tracks
Nice video Graham, but do these principles only apply to a dreadnought guitar? I have two guitars, an Ovation 1868 which is a shallow body, which obviously sounds thin acoustically (It's made for plugging in onstage!) and a Sigma travel guitar, which is beautiful but again, obviously sounds a bit thin as , well, it's a small bodied travel guitar.....any tips for making them sound "big and full/warm" ? Thanks if you read this :)
Nice job, man. Now, I am intending to record voice and guitar, at the same time. For this, I have I condenser microphone (AT2020) and the guitar are both plugged straightly into a Scarlett 2i2 (XLR, and P10 cable). But, the guitar's sound is just like strange, totally different from what we can hear from it. How do I fix it?
I use the same method as well! Exactly the same, moving the condenser mic back and turning it a bit to face the neck :) One question though: sometimes I have a lot of problem with the noise of the pick, especially when I'm not strumming but picking the strings one by one. The above method helps with that, too, but often it's a big headache for me. Thanks for any suggestions in advance!
+Laszlo Harsanyi I'd say try a different pick. Maybe one made of slicker plastic, or metal, or even one of those made of felt. Or a thinner pick of the same material you're using. Also, check how strongly you are picking the strings, and in what place. Maybe you're hitting them too hard, or too close/far away from the neck. Move your position around a little bit.
Thanks for the tips guys, I will definitely try them out! I never thought about the type of the pick that is for sure, maybe that's the problem! By playing around with the mic I can get rid of the pick noise most of the time, but still it would be good to know the exact source of the problem! Tried playing around with EQ, too, but I think the problem is rooted in the recording technique itself, which you cannot repair with EQ, at least not fully.
@@LaszloHarsanyi_SoundTube Super late, but multiband compressor does the trick. Find the annoying frequency and compress just that so you don't eq the stuff in vain. Same process goes for palm muted heavy guitars (compress the palm muted low mid/bass away when it happens, don't eq away all nice bottom from open chords) and million other things. Just compress the annoying stuff when it occurs, don't cut it away with eq. You can do this in a guitar buss also, not just for the independent tracks. Multiband compression is a tool that gives you opportunity to give other stuff some space with parallel compression too. For example, when bass drum hits, you can snap out some low end and kick attack frequencies out of bass track so you don't end up over emphasizing the low and attack frequency levels with every kick hit. Or you can make some room for snare by snipping some frequencies off the guitar buss and not peaking the mids. Everything builds on top of everything. You need to create a space for every sound you want to be heard. Multiband compressor is a powerful tool for that.
I totally did the second example you had on here. Although, in many of my songs, the acoustic is the main texture and I didn't realize how much tone I was losing. Thanks so much
Recently I recorded an acoustic track using two condenser mics (Rode NT2000) in an A-B configuration with one facing the sound hole and another facing the 10th/12th fret, both about a foot back. I produces such a wide, full yet bright tone when I panned he the tracks hard to opposite sides! The best tone I've achieved!
the problem is to have a good acoustic of the room because more you take away the microphone and more you will hear this acoustic ... So the most important is to have a good acoustic which is impossible to have in a non-treated room
Sounds great Graham!The fun thing looking at all the excellent comments is, we can see there are endless ways to create tones and textures, yours is simply one that works well, is easy and is um... Foolproof!
wow, the first two recordings i thought "those sound fine, one is heavy one is light, just choose whichever" then the final recording came along and i was mind blown! Thank you!
Hey I use the same one and my acoustic always sounds super super weird. Some of the noise from the string just cuts off and just sounds super bad. Any tips?
Hi Graham, Thank you for such a straight forward and informative tutorial. I’m just starting to look into recording my acoustic guitar and found your video massively helpful! Subscribed!
Thank you for this. I'm just about to start recording my first record and was looking for the best way to record my acoustic guitar and this is the winner for mice placement. Very helpful!
thanks Graham. I'm learning a lot from your videos. the answer to my prayers. a musician who's learning about recording and about to set up my first home studio. subscribed.
It's great to watch someone else's methods! I use the NT1-A too, but in the past I've used that in combination with an SM57. I put the SM57 about where you showed on your second example demo, and then put the NT1-A further away in the room. You are getting an awesome sound with your method of backing it up a bit and angling it! I'm definitely going to try that out! Thanks!
Great tips Graham! I own a Martin and I found a way which works really well using my Rode NT1-a, a Shure sm7b and the line from the guitar...You can pan hard left the line and put some reverb and also pan hard right the Rode and put some delay on it,with the shure sm7b being the only 'raw' in the center and it will create great atmosphere!
That's exactly how I've recorded acoustic guitars for one of my band's song, angled mike "in-front" the guitar hole, I think you've shared that tip before because I had it in mind... I did one more thing that you don't like actually, I've used the piezo signal from the guitar but just to catch some mid-high frequency "attack" transitories, not the crispness itself but the attack of the pick... I think it worked 'cause blendind both signals gave me some satisfactory result, I liked a lot... Again, thanks for the tip!
This video popped up right when I was trying to record my acoustic guitar. I didn't even search it or anything it was just there but this helped me a lot.
Nice! I saw Rick Beato doing exactly the opposite too, aiming at the edge of the soundhole but positioned at the 12-14 fret. So fun to try all the different methods!
Thanks man!!! It really worked out i was having some difficulties recording acoustic guitars because it was or to much beefy or to thin but with this method i really get the sound i want thanks again !!
Thanks so much for helping us home recording artists out Graham! I am so grateful for this content. Really helpful. Going to try this method out this afternoon! :)
This video definitely helped. I can hear the difference with the ear phones I'm using. I've been searching for great new ways to improve my sound. I've been using my PC webcam - and gone are those days. When I come back out of hiding, I want to sound drastically different. Your videos have been helping! -SV
Great tip man. I loved your point about 'how we usually hear it'. So many times I've fallen into the trap thinking I can capture a sound best by micing it as close as possible, which I've discovered is a fallacy. I starting to approach concepts regarding recording with my 'ears' and 'how' we hear sound. Crazy, right?. Who would have thought it!?! Anyway, thanks for the vid. Your tutorials always help spur me on for better executed, more sonnically realistic recordings. Keep up the good work. It's a huge help.
Great Video! it gets you to think a bit more than what a beginner would normally do, those are simple things, almost all of us know how mics work, but we usually don't put what we know in action because we're so focus on the plugins, mixing way, etc. Thank very much Brother.From the Dominican Republic.
