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Old 10-25-2020, 01:13 PM
FrankHudson FrankHudson is offline
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Location: Minneapolis, MN
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I hesitate to respond, even though I do what you're doing fairly regularly for a few years, because I have no reason to believe I'm doing it the "right way.*" With luck you'll get better, more experienced responses.

Just as you indicate, I think recording acoustic guitar in a mix is a different task that recording a voice and guitar piece or an instrumental solo guitar track. I often record the acoustic guitar with two mics anyway, but they are often miss-matched mics meant to give me choices other than EQ to change the sound of the guitar. It's not uncommon for me to drop the second mic from the mix as I evaluate the mix, typically leaving a single LDC aimed at the body/neck joint maybe 10" or so away. Some mixes have several other instruments, but the acoustic guitar is the main harmonic information, then I think keeping a wider, "stereo" effect from two mics can work.

In a full band mix I tend to go "dry" with the acoustic guitar. The kind of thing that a lot of solo guitarists or singer/guitarists here like in a guitar sound I avoid. Light on the reverb or delay (just enough so the guitar doesn't sound like it was DI'ed). And I tend to favor smaller bodies and guitars that don't have lush overtones or great sustain. Electric bass players and left hand keyboards can fill in a lot the low end that solo guitars like in their dreadnaughts. And since I'm often working with piano or piano-ish keyboards I don't need my acoustic guitar to have "piano like sustain" when there's a piano doing that in the mix.

What would really improve my final product and something that for reasons of time and skill I don't do enough is to record guitar and vocal as separate tracks (EDIT: I meant separate passes, not just two mics going into individual tracks, which'll bleed), Listeners connect with the vocal, everything else is decoration and setting. I'm not a good vocalist, so anything less than my best vocal track harms the final mix even more so. And it's near impossible to keep the guitar and vocal from bleeding into each others' tracks, which means that you can't really place, EQ, spot fix etc with the vocal and guitar tracked together. Yes, great singers and better guitarists can produce great recordings where they track both together, but even though you don't mention this, it's something to consider. Whatever you do: optimize the vocal. The rest is secondary. Yes, I'm usually near center with the main vocal.

Some people have a regular recipe for placement in a mix. Some like to spread it out more including 100% pans. I've listened to some generic ideas of stereo placement and personally I generally don't like the wide spreads, but maybe I'm not doing it right or my tastes are just different. I try to separate by moderate panning instruments in like registers whose parts overlap, but even a 40% or 50% spread is most often far enough to my taste. EQ can also help in a busy mix. The lovely thing about modern DAWs with automation curves and such is that you can easily "season to taste" as you're learning what you like or if you don't feel a mix is working.

Another way to help figure out what you like or what to aim for is to listen to commercial recordings that you think are working and analyze how they pan the tracks.

Another thing you don't mention, but can be worth considering (I'm always telling my own self to consider it more too) is that just because you have a lot of tracks and ideas to be expressed in those tracks doesn't mean you need to have them running through the whole song. Even having something as fundamental as drums or bass "play rests" or drop out and rejoin for a section can really bring an arrangement and mix to life.

Maybe some of this helps. Others here will probably have further and likely better advice.

.


*Yes, I also believe that art has huge subjective components, so that there can't be a universal "right way" -- but I also believe that a better technician would produce recording that I would immediately think are better than the ones I engineer myself.
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Guitars: 20th Century Seagull S6-12, S6 Folk, Seagull M6; '00 Guild JF30-12, '01 Martin 00-15, '16 Martin 000-17, '07 Parkwood PW510, Epiphone Biscuit resonator, Merlin Dulcimer, and various electric guitars, basses....

Last edited by FrankHudson; 10-25-2020 at 04:38 PM.
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