Recording acoustic guitar singer/songwriter recording stuff...

[DesolationAngel]

So, I posted about a buddy's new album–"The End of Ours" by Alec Lytle & Them Rounders–in the general discussion sub forum but realized that it had information in there that might be interesting to people trying to record either acoustic guitar or acoustic guitars and vocals.

The album was engineered/mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig who are two of the very best in the business–Clearmountain has mixed for the Stones, Springsteen, Bowie, Roxy Music etc and Ludwig has mastered for Led Zep, Hendrix, Queen, Rush, Clapton among many others.

So I asked my buddy if he'd be happy sharing details of how he was recorded for the album, he asked Bob Clearmountain and he replied with:

"The mics we used were a Neumann KM-86 on Alec's acoustic guitar while he was 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 cardioid 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. For the same reason, the KM-86—also set to cardioid—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."

Anyway, thought that might be interesting to people here... if you want more details–including pictures–on the guitars used (spoiler: a '59 Martin) and links to the album, you can read the other thread here.

[DesolationAngel]

So... Bob updated the information on the other thread, after talking with his second...

"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-eught patten’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."

And added;

"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.”"

[rick-slo]

Very minimal processing = nice clean, clear recording if the acoustic space was good.

[KevWind]

Interesting, and given who was involved likely the room was quite good.
So Clearmountain used analog gear for processing. Do you happen to know if this was a hybrid system or was it straight analog to tape ?

[DesolationAngel]

Originally Posted by KevWind

Interesting, and given who was involved likely the room was quite good.
So Clearmountain used analog gear for processing. Do you happen to know if this was a hybrid system or was it straight analog to tape ?

You could ask him, he joined in on the thread in other sub-forum...