Quote:
Originally Posted by sdelsolray
Eric (mixerman) has little, if any, experience with production of solo fingerstyle acoustic or classical guitar recordings. His recording of acoustic guitar is limited to ensemble work, where the AG is a minor component of a larger mix.
Still, Eric's points about mono are valuable.
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Please. Surely, I don't record a lot of finger style guitar, but there's nothing complicated about capturing a solo instrument, no matter what it is. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason to capture an acoustic guitar stereo is because you think the recording is more important than the music and the performance. It's not.
From Zen and the Art of Recording: "Sound travels based on the laws of physics, and an instrument has to emit a sound in a room. There is no musical instrument, no matter how foreign, that I couldn’t record well. It would cause me no consternation whatsoever to be presented with an alien instrument so complex in nature that I would have to literally surround it with microphones in order to capture it in balance. I’ve already learned how to record an instrument like this. It’s called drums."
All I'm saying is that if you put two mics in close proximity to a source that isn't 100% stationary, you're going to get the ill effects of those two mics negatively interacting from a shifting player. These maladies would include comb filtering, frequency cancellations, and shifts within the stereo image, which can be distracting to the listener and weaken the capture of the performance.
I've recorded a great deal of acoustic/vocal tracks, including many with Ben Harper, that do indeed include these sorts of maladies, because it was more important to record Ben singing as he played than it was for a pristine and fully coherent recording. The vocal mic interacts with the guitar mic negatively, but it doesn't matter because of how amazing he performs when he sings as he plays. But if you're recording a solo acoustic guitar, there is absolutely no gain that would make the phase coherency issues worthwhile. You could have more effectively captured the instrument with a single point of collection. If the performer is great, the mic will capture it.
The stereo nature of a guitar would come from the reverb or the chamber.
Like I said in my first response, you do whatever you like for your art. It's your art. All I do is explain my rationale for my decisions, and then those who read my advice can experiment and decide for themselves. But to suggest that I don't have the experience to be delivering that advice because of a particular style of playing is absolutely ludicrous on the face of it. I'm not performing the instrument. I'm capturing the sound that the performer gets out of the instrument within a room. So, really, style has nothing to do with it from the perspective of a pure capture.
Enjoy,
Mixerman