4 Easy Ways To Record Acoustic Guitar
The acoustic guitar is a pure instrument. The sound it produces is self-contained, and relies on you as the player to influence it. This can be done with different string types, picks, but most of all, the room.
There are loads of tricks for getting different acoustic guitar sounds on your recording, and in this tutorial we’ll show you just a few of them.
The good news is that you can get brilliant-sounding acoustic tracks with just one microphone, some careful room selection and mic placement. Here’s how it’s done.
The one mic method
Acoustic guitars are dynamic instruments, capable of outputting a range of levels and frequency responses.
For this reason, the most common way of capturing Best microphone for acoustic guitar is to use a condenser. But before you position the mic, have a listen to the guitar in the room.
Your environment can have a great effect on the sound
Your environment can have a great effect on the sound; empty spaces with lots of hard reflective surfaces (a bathroom, for instance) will give you a bright, lively sound, whereas a room with carpet, sofas and curtains will soak up a lot of the reflections, giving you a dryer, punchier acoustic tone.
An acoustic can be played anywhere, so experiment with different rooms to see which gets you the sound you prefer.
Position the mic about 30cm in front of your acoustic, aimed at the join between the body and the neck. Positioning the mic here will keep it out of the way of your picking hand, and will avoid too much muddy low-end from the sound hole.
Stereo setup 1
Capturing your guitar in stereo can give you a huge, wide-sounding acoustic part for your tune, and it’s really quite easy to do!
When you record in stereo, it’s best if you can use a pair of identical microphones, so that the signal picked up by each will be equal. For this method, we’re going to use an X/Y placement. This is where the capsules are crossed over, so that they’re an equal distance from the source to minimize phase.
Once again, position them around the 14th fret of your acoustic. Pan them left and right, and bask in the super-wide stereo effect!
Stereo setup 2
The second way of recording in stereo is using a spaced pair.
It’s similar to the X/Y idea, except for this time we’ll physically move the microphones apart to achieve an even wider sound than before. Place one pure instrument microphone between the bridge and the sound hole, and aim the other at the fretboard.
Once again, you’ll want to pan these tracks left and right respectively when mixing to achieve a spacey, stereo effect.
You will need: Two condenser microphones, two microphone inputs, two tracks.
Overheads
The acoustic guitar is an organic sound, and there’s an argument that it should be captured more ambiently. After all, you don’t stick your head down by the body of the guitar when listening to someone play!
A good method for achieving a very natural acoustic sound is to try positioning a pair of microphones at the player’s head height as shown. This way, you’ll be recording ‘what they hear’ rather than an artificially close sound.
Pickup/mic blend
If your acoustic has a pickup on it, you can get two contrasting tones from one take by blending the sound of your pickup with the ambience of a microphone.
It’s easy to do – simply plug your guitar into your interface’s instrument input (we’d suggest keeping your preamp’s EQ ‘flat’ so you can tweak the tonality later), then record the mic signal on a separate track using the one mic method above. You might want to play with the distance of the microphone, just to get the sounds to compliment each other as well as possible.
Once you’re done, try panning the tracks, or running the pickup track through amp/speaker modelling to create some extra texture.
If your guitar doesn’t have a pickup, but you’re looking to fit one, take a look at our guide to the best acoustic guitar pickups on the market.
How to record an electric guitar amp
While many of us will record our electric guitars straight into a DAW and use guitar amp and effects modelling to create the sounds we want, there’s just something about recording a proper guitar amp in a live room, particularly a full-fat valve amp.
As with recording an acoustic, however, mincing up an amp is a process that requires a bit of knowledge. A fair bit of trail and error to get the ideal sound. Here’s how to set your amp up for recording. Get your mics set up to capture that sound in the best possible way.
Getting record ready Start with your guitar
A great guitar sound starts at the business end of your signal path. With your guitar set up with fresh strings that are played in. You’ve got the first link in the chain sorted.
Get your sound
Before you get started with microphones, fine-tune your pedal and amp settings to get them the best they can be to your ears in the room.
Try moving your amp to different positions in the room – or even a different room if possible – and see where it sounds best. Set your drive, EQ and overall level to a place where you feel comfortable, then move on to the mic.
Speaker easy
As we just mentioned, if you’re getting a great sound in the room, the only job the mic has to do is capture it. But the position of your mic in relation to your speaker can radically change the sound.
Put simply, depending on where you position the mic, you can change the sound it’s capturing from bright to dark. The brightest tone is found dead-centre of the speaker – right on the dust cap. As you move the microphone to the edge of the speaker, you’ll find the sound gets progressively darker.
Distance will also play a key role in your resulting tone – placing the mic very close to the speaker. It will capture the amp’s sound in detail, with a lot of attack and definition. With this type of setup you’re recording the sound of the speaker, with hardly any room sound.
The further you move the microphone away from the speaker. The more you’ll capture the room reflections, adding ambience and depth to your sound.