Mic Description Update
Since sending that mic description, our co-engineer, Brandon Duncan reminded me of a few details I managed to omit or actually, forget. So here's the updated description:
"The mics we used were a Neumann KM-86 on Alec's acoustic guitar while he were singing into a vintage Neumann M-49. The KM-86 had no processing on it during recording, although I may have used a Distressor compressor during the mix. The M-49 was recorded with a bit of UREI LA-3A compression and something like a 90 cycle high-pass filter. I probably added a bit of a 10 or 12k shelf on the SSL E-series EQ when we mixed. All pretty simple, really.
The M-49 was set to its figure-eight pattern and—as you can see from the photo—was angled up about 40 or 45 degrees to try to reject as much of the acoustic guitar as possible, utilizing the figure-eight pattern’s 45º null characteristic. For the same reason, the KM-86—also set to figure-eight—was angled down toward Alec's acoustic guitar, rejecting a good deal of his voice. While not giving us perfect isolation between the voice and guitar, it gave us quite enough separation to effectively balance the two elements without any problem.
For Val McCallum’s guitar, we used a vintage AKG C-12 sporting a cardioid pattern, recorded without processing. I used a bit of Distressor set to a 3:1 compression ratio in the mix.”
Sorry about that!
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