SHARE

Recording acoustic guitar can bring life and natural character to your songs but getting them to fit into your mix begins at the recording phase. So we’re taking a deep dive into tried and true techniques for acoustic guitar recording that will suit the style of song you’re recording it for.

Transcript

Intro

These tutorials are usually focused on what happens inside Reason, from mixing and production guides to synthesizer sound design techniques. It’s sometimes easy to forget that lots of music making within Reason can happen outside the four corners of Reason’s rack. So I hope you had some organic fair-trade vegan free-range granola for breakfast and dry-cleaned your favorite Jack Johnson T-shirt, because today we’re recording acoustic guitar!

Mono or stereo recording

Recording acoustic guitar can be done in stereo or in mono, which essentially boils down to using one mic or two. Can you use more? Sure. Should you use more? Debatable. Mono recording is more simple than stereo recording, and not only because you just need one mic. So let’s start there.

Microphone types

The single mic method basically comes down to microphone choice and microphone placement. Broadly speaking, there are three types of microphones you can use when recording acoustic guitar: dynamic, condenser, and ribbon microphones. Each type of microphone picks up sound using a different method, and as you might expect, each imparts different characteristics to the sound.

Large vs. small diaphragm condensers

When it comes to the most common type of microphone for acoustic guitar recording, condenser microphones, they further subdivide into what’s called large diaphragm and small diaphragm condensers. One look at them should give you a clue as to which is which. Based on the size of their capsule alone, it might not surprise you to learn that large diaphragm mics tend to have more low frequency response, but it might surprise you to consider that it doesn’t automatically make them better. Just different. There’s a time and a place for both in acoustic guitar recording.

Setting up an audio track

We’ll assume today that you’ve already set up your audio interface back when you launched Reason for the first time, so all we need to do now is create a new Audio Track and choose which input our microphone is plugged into. That’s Input #3 for me.

Why you should avoid the sound hole

But okay, where should we place our mic? Easily the most common mistake I see people make when recording acoustic guitar is to place the mic in front of the sound hole, which seems like an obvious choice but results in recordings that sound like this.

The sound hole on an acoustic guitar isn’t like other sound holes, like the bell of a saxophone, where the small sound of the vibrating reed gets amplified like a megaphone, sweetened, and is therefore the logical place to stick a microphone. A guitar functions a lot more like a speaker cone, where the whole surface vibrates to project the sound. The hole on the acoustic guitar is doing what those bass ports do on your monitors: they channel and project the low frequencies. And just like you wouldn’t put your ear up to a bass port to enjoy music, so too you wouldn’t want to stick a mic in front of a guitar’s bass port.

Three mic positions that work

So besides avoiding the sound hole, where can we place a mic? Well, there are three locations that work every time for me, and I seldom, if ever, stray from them.

Position 1: the upper bout

In position one, we put a microphone near what’s called the “upper bout” of the acoustic guitar. Remember when I said that small diaphragm condensers aren’t inferior to large diaphragms just because their bass response is less? Well, this is a perfect example. I almost always use a small diaphragm condenser mic in this position, due to the close proximity of those low sound hole frequencies. The Blue Hummingbird mic I’m using has a swivel head, which means we can easily experiment with the direction of the mic capsule.

And like most small diaphragm condensers you’ll typically come across, this one has what’s called a “cardioid” pickup pattern. It’s best at picking up sounds that are directly in front of it, so-so at picking up sounds that are on its side, and not so great at things directly behind it. We can use that to our advantage. As we reposition the direction of the mic, so too we dial in its sonic focus. In order to avoid the sound hole’s bass, we can point the capsule slightly away from it for a full but controlled sound. In your own experimentation, you might also want to try placing a dynamic mic in this position for a more mid-focused sound.

Position 2: the lower bout

The second microphone position is to put a microphone near what’s called the guitar’s “lower bout.” For single-microphone techniques, this is one I use less often, because it picks up a lot of body resonance but less high-end sparkle from the strings. However, it’s a great spot if you consciously want to avoid those other parts of the sound in your recording.

And if you like this position, it’s a good place to consider another type of microphone too. Ribbon microphones have the special characteristic of sounding smooth, reacting more slowly to sharp transient attacks. If you want a softer, less hyped sound, compare the difference between our condenser and a ribbon in this position.

Position 3: the 12th fret

The third microphone position is probably my personal favorite technique when I’m recording acoustic guitars for pop music, hip hop beats, or any big arrangement with lots of other instruments. Take a listen, for example, to this song with piano, cello, drums, and bass. If we wanted to add strummed guitar to this arrangement, we’re primarily aiming to capture the wishy-washy texture that acoustic guitar adds to the mix. The low end is already covered by the piano and bass, and in fact, a full-sounding acoustic guitar will actually crowd our mix down there.

So for this style, we’ll place our microphone about one foot away from the guitar’s 12th fret. That’s 30 cm to my friends in the logical countries. This position picks up the tone of the guitar without too much weight in the bottom end. Since I’m safely further away from the sound hole, let’s use a large diaphragm condenser microphone. Let’s just double check we’re in tune and record a take.

Doubling takes

But so far, our acoustic guitar doesn’t sound the way you’d hope it would for this type of song. That’s because productions like this don’t often record just one guitar take. They record multiple stacked takes of guitar, something commonly referred to as “doubling.” Doing so creates thicker, washier textures that we can spread around the stereo field of our mix. It’s also a great way to create a stereo guitar sound when you only have one microphone.

To double our guitar, with our first track already selected in the sequencer, we click the Dub button in the transport to create another audio track already set up to record and ready to go. Our goal is to match the strumming and timing of our first take. We won’t get it identical, but that’s a good thing, because those little variations are what thickens our sound. I’m going to solo just our two guitar channels and the click track so I can better lock in with my first take.

Right away you can hear our guitar is thicker sounding, and if we pan one of these tracks to the left and the other to the right in our mixer, we’ve got a great wide stereo texture. How far you go in doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling stacked takes is up to you.

Nashville tuning

For this style of song and production, I really want my guitars to be smooth and shiny, so I’m going to record more duplicates of my part. But to really add sheen to my sound, I’m going to do a special trick known as “Nashville tuning.” Despite its name, it’s not really a tuning trick so much as a string trick. We’re going to re-string this guitar with just half the strings from a pack of 12-string acoustic guitar strings.

In case you’re not a guitarist yourself, I’ll explain. Twelve-string guitars have two strings for every one on a typical six-string guitar. The low E string has a companion E string one octave higher. The A string has a higher octave A as well, as do the D and G strings, respectively. The upper strings, B and E, are the same octave as their companion, but there’s two of them nonetheless. If we string a six-string guitar with only the companion strings, we get a guitar that’s mostly tuned a full octave higher than normal. And doubling our part this way results in a beautiful top end sheen to our sound.

Grouping the guitars

We’ll select all four guitar channels in the mixer and send them to their own group channel fader. Listen to how our guitars sit in our arrangement now when we unsolo the channels. We’ve got the qualities we want for this style of song in a nice stereo image, and all using one mic and a couple of packs of strings.

But what if we wanted to feature the organic sound of guitar more prominently, the way a singer-songwriter or soloist might want to? Let’s record another song idea where the acoustic guitar is the featured sound and not just a texture behind production. If our goal is to capture the character of an acoustic guitar being played in front of the listener, we might want to consider not just single-microphone techniques but stereo techniques involving two microphones.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of our previous mono microphone techniques, stereo mic technique is pretty straightforward. In fact, most stereo mic placements are really just a combination of two mono microphone placements.

The coincident pair

For example, we can use two small diaphragm microphones to fool our ears into perceiving stereo space. I’ll create two audio tracks, select my audio inputs on each one, activate them both for recording, and right away I’ll pan each audio track right and left so that I hear my sound in stereo while recording.

Using that cardioid pickup pattern to our advantage, if instead of one microphone off the 12th fret of the guitar we place two, we can angle them in both directions, so that one is listening left and the other one towards the right. This technique is known as a “coincident” pair, since the directionality of each mic coincides as they survey the stereo sound field in front of them.

The phase pitfall

The only pitfall with stereo recording techniques that one needs to be aware of is phase. We’ve covered phase cancellation in our mono mixing tutorial, and we won’t go into it in depth today, except to say that phase cancellation can occur when two microphones are used and the sound waves they’re picking up arrive to them at different portions of the waveform’s cycle.

This coincident mic placement we’re using mitigates those phase artifacts by the fact that the capsules are so close together that sound waves arrive to them at nearly the same time. You might find, however, that coincident micing like this doesn’t give you as wide a stereo image as you’d like.

The spaced pair

For a wider stereo image, we use what’s called a “spaced pair” technique. Remember when I said that stereo mic placements are often just a combination of two single mic placements? Well, the spaced pair technique is a great example of that. If we place one microphone down in that lower bout position and one microphone off the 12th fret, we end up with a nice stereo image, and one which nicely captures the tonal variations of an acoustic guitar from body to neck.

The 3:1 rule

Since the distance between the microphones is greater than with coincident pairs, the risk of phase artifacts is increased, but two simple guidelines can help with that. One: use stereo pairs of the same microphone model. Combining one type of mic on the lower bout with another type on the neck will mean that those sound waves are picked up differently.

Number two: observe the 3:1 rule, which simply states that the distance between the microphones should be three times their distance from the guitar. So if my two microphones are about 24 inches, or 60 cm, apart, then I would place them about eight inches, or 20 cm, away from the guitar.

In my own recording experience, this is the most common stereo technique I use, so let’s go ahead and record a part and build out a song. Stereo acoustic guitar recording like this can make the listener feel like they’re sitting in front of the guitar. It’s an intimate effect, perfect when acoustic guitar is the featured instrument.

Rhythm guitar accompaniment

But if I were to record acoustic rhythm guitar to accompany this, I wouldn’t necessarily want another up-front stereo featured guitar to compete with the one I’ve got. In that case, I’d fall back on those single-mic techniques to create supportive but not competitive guitar accompaniment. I don’t even need to necessarily move mics around. I’ll select only the neck position microphone and click the Dub button, and I’m set up, record enabled, and ready to record a rhythm part.

After that take, we’ll go ahead and double that rhythm guitar just like we did for our other song, and pan them left and right. Before we go too far, it’s probably a good idea to label our tracks, so we don’t wonder down the road what “Audio Track 2 Dub 2” was.

Building out the song

From here, we’re free to add as much or as little to this idea as we like. I’ve gone ahead and added some drums from the LoopLoft’s Art of Brushes ReFill, and I’ve recorded a bass guitar. Since this is a pretty organic-feeling song, I’ve even gone ahead and added the Satin tape emulation plugin by u-he to our master bus, to give us a little analog compression and saturation to the vibe. I’ll play us out with the result.

Wrap-up

I hope you’ve gotten some ideas today for how you can use acoustic guitars in your production, whether or not you play acoustic yourself or just call in a favor with a friend. Knowing which technique is right at which time is the key to getting good acoustic sounds in your mix. Experiment with different microphone types and placements to see what works with your guitar, in your room, and for your song. And last but definitely not least, don’t forget about the performance. The best-sounding bad performance won’t get you anywhere. So good luck, and we’ll see you again soon.