Acoustic guitar and voice without bleed - recording/mixing tips needed

[Heabow]

Hi there!

I'm about to produce a song for a band. For this particular stuff, we finally decided to record only one acoustic guitar and one voice. I want the singer/guitarist to play guitar and sing at the same time to save some 'live feel'.

I think to use an SM7b + an MD421 for the voice and an Oktava MK012 for the guitar. We wanna have a the best possible result for this one. (+ maybe one or two ambiance mics??)

My question is: is there a good technique to record both without too much bleed issue and/or some tips to reduce the bleed at the mixing stage?

Thanks for your help!

 

[mva801]

You're going to get bleed. Don't let it ruin your day. I've had the best luck with using figure 8 mics in this situation. 2 414's do REALLY well if you set them so the null points are canceling out the other source.

I'll also say this: recording in this fashion requires your artist to be ON POINT with where they're singing and how they're playing. You can't autotune really, as that will pull the guitars out of tune. I've tried to record people this way and had it turn out terribly because they had to look at the fretboard closely, and kept fucking moving and pointing their voice directly in the damn guitar mic.

If your artist can keep his/ her head up and sing into the vocal mic without moving around too much, it can work out really well. I did this once where I stuck a KM84 on the guitar, had the guy standing up, and used a Soundelux 251 on the voice. The 251 was sort of angled up toward his voice with the null toward the guitar, and the guitar mic was angled a bit down so the null point was toward his voice. Worked amazingly because he was good at working the mic and playing at the same time.

edit: found a pic

You can kind of see it in that picture, sorry it's the only one I could find. You can see the xlr on the back of the km84 barely, pointing down at an angle. Find a way to get the microphone null points to work the way you want. The Oktava will do great on guitar, I'd just choose one vocal mic. Preferably a figure 8.

 

[egan.]

^^^
That's all great advice. You need to make up your mind on a vocal mic and don't be afraid to make 50 trips to the booth to optimize placement.

 

[Sloan]

 

[Heabow]

Thanks for the tips guys!
I cannot have more mics at the moment but I'm gonna keep that in mind