Mixing solo fingerstyle guitar
Hi,
Can anyone direct me to some online resources on mixing solo acoustic guitar fingerstyle tracks a la Andy McKee and Antoine Dufour? Most of the mixing resources on acoustic guitar online tend to focus on sitting an acoustic guitar in a band mix, which i more or less already grasp. I am looking for ideas on EQ-ing, stereo placement, and reverb treatment and the like, for solo acoustic guitar pieces. Many thanks. |
I keep meaning to work my way through this recent thread, but I have not had a chance to dedicate the time to it yet. But it seems like it might address your questions well:
http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...d.php?t=237148 |
When it comes purely to mixing, there's not much to it since a solo guitar doesn't have anything to compete with in a mix.
The thread posted above is great for sure, Doug has helped me quite a lot since I joined this site as well. I tend to use a spaced pair of SD condensers, panned hard left and right with a limiter and some light, room esque reverb. The only EQing I do it a high pass set to cut anything below about 100Hz out. |
You want the McKee sound compared to the original CD or something off the internet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4 http://www.filestube.com/ateqgvOnGaj...-Drifting.html For the the second fuller sound first install a guitar pickup. Try emailing the specific guys you like the sound of and see if they will email back some advice. |
Hi All, thanks for the replies!
Hello wcap, I already read through the article that you linked. It was really helpful for me in terms of recording the guitar itself and what effects were added. I really wished to learn more though, like how Doug tweaked the two reverbs that he added to the tracks, the compression settings and how it was panned, hence this post Fichtezc, you're right! There's hardly any mixing per se since we are only dealing with 1-3 tracks. For lack of a better word, I used mixing. I guess what i meant was post-production after the recording stage. For instance, with the tips you mentioned.. i would also like to know that if you pan it hard L and R would it sound like a 'big mono' or would you lose center imaging and sound more distant etc. And also is the high-pass at 100Hz really necessary since we are dealing only with a solo instrument Rick, I am interested in going for both sounds! I understand that most of the youtube vids would tend to factor in their K&K settings into the mix, while the album versions tend to be more mic. I just dropped a message to Antoine Dufour on fb on this as well. Thanks a lot guys. Keep it coming! |
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hi Fich,
by big mono i mean it sounds like the guitar is 10 foot wide as opposed to a stereo field separation. Also when you pan your stereo mics hard L and R, is there anything at the center? Like i said, i'm fairly new to solo acoustic mixing and normally in a band mix the feature instrument or part tends to be center in the stereo field |
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When i'm just using mics there isn't anything in the "middle" but it still sounds like the guitar is dead infront of you. If i'm using my anthem however that's panned to the center and relatively low in the mix. Just to add some clear bass and a different color to fill out the recording. |
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http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...d.php?t=237148 Generally, for solo guitar, it's pretty easy. Get your mics set right, and get a the sound you want, add a little reverb, and you're done. With Andy (and perhaps Antoine, I forget), they blend in a pickup. Andy recorded his last CD at home with 1 mic and 1 pickup, but he didn't mix the result, just handed it off to an engineer. But again, it's pretty straightforward, blend in the pickup to taste, and play around with EQ, reverb, etc, until you hear something you like. |
Hi Doug,
very informative post. I'd like to ask a few questions: 1. You recorded with two pairs of mics. How are you panning them in relation to each other? 2. Also you have two reverbs sent to your tracks. Did you send the shorter reverb into the longer one as well? Also, how else did you vary the parameters of both besides the density of the reverbs? 3. Your video mentioned that you set the compression for both pair of mics to have to noticeable compression. Do you mean that the threshold is high and you kept the compression ratio low? Thanks :) |
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yeah Doug i meant to type NO noticeable compression as well..
So you are panned hard left and right with nothing dead center as well? Is center imaging compensated with stereo reverb? Also, is the LA2 a tube compression emulator that mildly processes the sound despite having no gain reduction on the meter? And thanks, Doug that was helpful. |
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Just re-reading your initial post, and things might be a little clearer if you read up on stereo micing techniques. This is a different approach, recording in stereo, where you're trying to capture the space of a natural sound to some extent, compared to what you seem to be used to - multi-tracking where every sound is mono and you create an artificial sound stage. For solo fingerstyle guitar, the approach is usually more like traditional stereo micing than multi-track techniques, tho it depends on the performer and what kind of sounds they want.
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If I recorded to two mono tracks, I'd have the left one panned hard left and the right track hard right. With most modern DAWs, you can record on a single stereo track and have the equivalent of that on a single track. |
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You could reach out to Rob Poland at Candyrat.
He is the "man behind the scenes" for many of the Candyrat artist videos. Mike |
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http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...d.php?t=238876 Quote:
I've talked to Andy about what he did on his last CD - he recorded with a single mic and a K&K, 2 separate tracks. He sent that to a studio to be mixed, and he doesn't know (or didn't know at the time I last talked to him) what the engineer did as far as the mix. But it's not magic, there are only a few options. |
Hi Doug,
when you record with a stereo setup and you pan extreme L and R you have no signal from your left mic to your right speaker and vice versa. Am i right? |
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But when recording in stereo, really, I all but ignore the pan control. That's not really something that gets involved in a proper stereo recording. You create the image with the mic placement. if you have to adjust the pan control, you set up the mics wrong or set your preamp levels wrong. |
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Technically speaking, "panning" has to do with where you place a mono signal within a stereo or multi-channel soundfield. It's my usual practice to send each mic of a stereo pair to it's own mono channel so that I can have total control of the final stereo width of what was recorded. |
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I was always trained to record stereo as two mono tracks so all this is new to me.
If you record it as a single stereo track, and 'pan' that track, you are essentially making L louder than R and vice versa, yes? As opposed to sending a bit of left's signal to the right? And one of the reasons you do this is to avoid phase issues. Does this sound about right? |
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Of course, that's ok, too. The bottom line is what sounds good. If you get the best sound by putting up two mics, recording them to separate mono tracks and panning them however you want, the results speak for themselves! Do what sounds best. What sounds best to me, so far, is recording a stereo track and getting the sound I want by mic placement. Therefore the need to "pan" simply never comes up. But there's a reason they call recording an "art". You can do anything you like, if you like the results, it's great. You asked about mixing solo guitar, and the examples I posted show how I did it in a couple of cases. It's not the "right" way, it's just what I do, so if you like the results, you might experiment with the same approach. If you don't think it sounds good, avoid my techniques. I do think that the basic approach I use is pretty common among solo fingerstyle guitar recordings, which is why I brought it up. I didn't invent any of this :-) I came up with what I do by studying lots of fingerstyle recordings, talking to lots of recording engineers and other guitarists, and so on. I hope it's helpful, but if it doesn't make sense to you, that's ok, too. There are tons of ways to do things, if it sounds good, thats what counts. |
Just to follow up on the stereo mic placement, here's a few places that might be worth a quick read:
general stuff: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997...reomiking.html http://www.deltamedia.com/resource/s...echniques.html http://www.xowave.com/doc/recording/mic-pair.shtml more guitar-oriented: http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/...can-use-today/ http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug0...cacgtr0801.asp http://www.homestudiocorner.com/stereo-mic-techniques/ http://www.uaudio.com/blog/stereo-mi...oustic-guitar/ |
Awesome links! Thanks for sharing.
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but i've slept, reread and rewatched, and i now understand that both mics are in stereo and are blended, and one side of each mic can be heard on the left and right channels, and there is no way to hear each mic separately. i hope i explained this well enough to not cause further confusion. thanks for the information and sorry for panning the thread hard left. :) |
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You can take the same approach with a pickup - going back the original "how do I sound like Andy McKee" question, record with mics, and also record a pickup. You can record the pickup on a mono track, so you can actually make good use of that pan control :-) Blend with the mics to taste. |
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