Tracking an electric-acoustic guitar

[elmatto]

I've been attempting to record some tracks with an electric-acoustic guitar, with not so great results, and I was hoping the more experienced minds here could offer a few tips on how how to make this the best I can get out of it. The guitar I'm using (Fender Stratacoustic) is hardly the best instrument, it's a thin fiberglass body, so that's a big strike against me from the beginning. When I mic it with my Rode NT1-A (the only mic I have available), it's impossible to get anything but a boxy-muted kind of sound out of it. The idea I've been working with is to record the mic and the DI together so that I could use the DI track for the tone, and mix in the mic'd track for the 'air' and precussive elements. I know it's hard to expect to get the beautiful sparkly acoustic tone I'd love to achieve, but does anyone know of any tips or tricks to try and salvage the best I can get out of this? Sadly, "buy new gear" is not an option Thanks!

 

[SentencedToBurn]

hmm. i wouldnt know how to blend a DI of an acoustic into a mix. Ive tried once and it was terrible. Electric-Acoustics are great for live but are terrible for recording. Where are you micing it???

 

[elmatto]

I've tried many positions/angles - not so much to get the best tone, but to get the least boxy-sounding one. Where I usually end up is with the mic about 6 inches from the neck, at about the 12-14th fret, slightly turned towards the body. This allows me to get as much string response as I can, but only just enough tone from the soundhole to not get too boomy.

 

[ahjteam]

Go into a nice and big good sounding room that rings a little and is not totally dead (wooden rooms are nice) or even outdoors on a non-windy day and then place the mic about a foot away from the neck pointing at the 12th fret, but not towards the soundhole. Use (preferrably closed) headphones and finetune the mic placement. Something like this:

I used this method with this band: http://www.myspace.com/noisynewt (listen to the verse of "to the frozen") and this band (album coming out soon, no clips available yet): http://www.myspace.com/insaneaffection

 

[elmatto]

I'll definitely give that a try. Anything to sweeten up and eliminate the boxy-ness of the mic'd track is a huge plus. And I got these responses within an hour of posting? That's why I come here, you guys rock. Thanks!

 

[egan.]

This was an LDC about a foot from the neck/body joint angled slightly toward the sound hole. Sorry if the chorus is distracting.
FWIW I have actually mixed in a di underneath a mic sound to get more presence. It can work, but if the guitar sounds bad chances are the pickup won't be very good either.

 

[Suicide_As_Alibi]

Personally I put a mic more-or-less the same as the picture ^up there^, but I point in more at the sound-hole (not straight at it, but more so than in that photo) - as long as you're not directly in front of it, it doesn't normally get too boomy or boxy. I find pointing it almost straight onto the neck sounds really thin, and you lose some of the warmth that makes acoustics so great - I use a thin-bodied acoustic, so I can't afford to lose any of that Also if the mic is pointed straight at the neck, if you play the frets directly in front of it the sound changes as your hand is in the way - you end up with all your nice high leads parts sounding more muffled than the rhythm parts.

I bought an electro for the sole purpose of being able to use the DI but they sound terrible full-stop, recorded AND live. If you do use it, it'll take a metric shit-tonne of EQ to make it usable; high-pass, low-pass, notch out all the pick noise, on mine I need to take out a really annoying resonance I get around 130Hz that wrecks everything... and even then I can never get it to blend with the mic'ed sound.

If you've got another mic, use it. The the two other places I put normally put them are over the guitar body above your picking hand (about a foot or so away) - a lot of people refer to it as over-the-shoulder, though I normally have it closer than that implies - and one I'm liking at the moment is using one of those short guitar-cab mic stands on the floor just in front of my feet, pointing up and aimed just under the sound hole. That one actually gets a nice DI-style sparkly sound but I find it much more useful.

Steve

 

[elmatto]

Thanks for all the tips, it certainly helped. Reconfiguring the room, trying different mic placements, slapping the hell out of it with the eq, etc. - I managed to get a more passable sound, although I'll still be working on it. Which brings me to my next question (and I probably should have started another thread...)

I'm usually fairly liberal when it comes to tracking multiple takes and comping the best results of individual takes onto the master track - especially with DI instruments/bass/etc. This being the first mic'd accoustic tracking I've done, I found this not to work out so well. As I know you're all well aware, even so much as a centimeter of movement of the mic on an accoustic guitar changes the tone a fair bit, so are there any tricks to smoothing out comp'd takes where the mic might not have been in the EXACT same position between takes? Or do you guys generally tell the guitarist "This had better be a perfect take, 'cause there ain't gonna be no punch-ins"?

Thanks again for all the replies, you've been a great help.

 

[ahjteam]

slapping the hell out of it with the eq

I have been forced to work with people with classical music education background a few times in my life and basing on my experience a) I either got a really bad bunch to work with or b) majority of them are really tight asses, can't sing or play without music sheets and thus lack creativity and I would really rather not work with them ever when it comes to recording music, eventho their musicianship is really superior compared to almost any pop, rock and metal musicians or c) I was having a really bad week.

With acoustic instruments all processing is in a totally different game than with amplified music. Acoustic music is pretty much the only reason why those 192khz samplerates are used, because you want the music to sound as undistorted as possible when captured, when amplified music is pretty much based on distortion, so it doesn't matter as much there. What I've learned is that you should try to get it sound as good as possible without any post-processing after microphone if possible, and this concerns amplified music too.

A highpass filter is usually acceptable because it only takes the rumble away, but it should be engaged already from the mic or the preamp because then you get more headroom to record.

I don't know what kind of mix this acoustic guitar is going to come, because that pretty much mostly dominates what kind of processing must be done, so I assumed it will be only guitars or only guitars and vocals, not a full band mix.

Summa summarum: The less processing, the better.


But I'll give you a free tip at the end: Air is a really fucking good analog processor, it has a really smooth compressor and EQ and it also adds a touch of reverb and delay, but like all analog stuff, its pretty noisy too sometimes. But the good thing about is that atleast it's free.

 

[scorpio01169]

check this out http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/1401/ and if you go to the company's website they have some audio sample of this unit on and off

 

[elmatto]

Wow, what a world of difference. Haven't had a chance to try out the hardware mentioned above, but I did try playing around with a harmonic exciter plugin (Izotope Ozone) in Pro Tools. Like night and day. What previously sounded like it was coming out of a telephone speaker now has all the fullness and high end sparkle that I was looking for, and it actually sounds very natural. I know I mentioned 'buy new gear' was not an option, but I'll make an exception for this Of course, I have to temper myself to not go overboard with it, but this is far and away the most dramatic difference I've ever experienced from a sigular element. And as I was taken to task above for the 'slapping the hell out of it wth EQ', you'll be happy to know that I was able to rip all of that out. A little bit of the harmonic exciter, a nudge on the EQ in a couple of spots, and some slight compression did the trick. It doesn't even sound like the same guitar, and I was also able to drop the DI track. Thanks again so much for all the help, you guys are awesome!