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Originally Posted by DarkestDreaming
1. You recorded with two pairs of mics. How are you panning them in relation to each other?
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I always record in stereo, with each mic in a pair going to each side of the stereo track, so the mics end up being panned hard left and right. If I don't like the stereo image, I change the mic position or location. Panning inwards tends to produce tonal changes from phase cancellation (even if the mics are closely phase aligned) and ends up losing the richness of the original signal, at least to my ears. I think of the mics as capturing the sound stage I want, rather than doing something artificial in the mix. Now, if you record with a pickup and mic the way Andy McKee has, you'll need to experiment with panning, because that's an artificial setup. There is no natural stereo image there, so you'll have to create the mix you want from the sources you have. There're lots of ways you might combine a pickup and mic(s), all depends on what sound you want.
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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?
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No, they're independent. The short one is just an ambience patch, so it doesn't even sound much like reverb, it just adds some "room sound". As far as settings, you can see the settings I used in the video. Both started with presets, and I may have tweaked the reverb time, predelay, etc to taste, I don't recall. This is mostly a matter of twisting the knobs on whatever reverb you have until you hear something you like :-) You can usually come close by cycling thru presets until you hear something you like, then tweak from there.
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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?
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I think I said, or meant to say, "NO" noticeable compression. The LA2 compressor I used is a very simple plugin (mimicing a very simple classic hardware unit). You don't really control the compression ratio, or other things you have with some more sophisticated compressors. So I'm just setting the threshold so that I basically never see the meter move, tho in reality, it is having a very slight effect. If I were using a compressor with more controls, I'd at least start with the ratio very low as well. For solo guitar, if you can hear compression, it's probably going to sound bad. One could argue you should never use it at all. But I like the slight smoothing effect of the LA2, and of course my mastering engineer also used some compression, with his Thermionics Culture mastering compressor. No idea what settings he used, but again, I think it was pretty subtle.