An Interesting Way To Record My PRS Acoustic.

[László]

I'll admit I've been kind of lazy when it comes to recording my acoustic guitar for ad projects for a long time. It came down to, "put up a mono mic and have at it." And then fix things in the mix.

Of course, that's not the best way to go about one's passion, so I've been on the opposite path recently, When it comes to acoustic guitar - in my opinion - nothing beats real-deal stereo mic technique. And by that I don't mean putting one mic at the 12th fret and the other somewhere near the sound hole. That's not stereo miking, it's dual-mono. And that's fine, if that's what one desires. But I've been going the extra mile lately.

This is a true stereo technique called NOS, developed in the Netherlands by the Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, the Dutch Broadcast Foundation. I find that it works really well with a big sounding guitar like the Tonare, and the recording sounds a lot more like the guitar in the room than miking the guitar with even the best mono mic paths. The resulting sound is very natural, and very detailed.

Best of all, it's very simple to set up.

Basically, the mics are set up at a 90 degree angle, with the capsules 30 cm apart. That's it! Use a stereo mic bar and a cloth tape measure to check the distance between the capsules.

You want to be far back enough from the microphones that you get the instrument centered, but not so far back that it sounds thin or you get too much room sound. I find that about two feet is ideal in my room with this guitar, but of course every situation will vary. It's easy to experiment with distance if you have a chair with wheels, of course, just roll closer to the mics for more detail, and farther from them for more of a room sound.

Some stereo techniques take advantage of a difference in time between the mics to create the stereo image, some a difference in level between the mics to create the image. The NOS technique actually combines both.

Here's a picture of how the setup looks. In this instance I'm using a pair of relatively inexpensive Blue Hummingbird condensers, nothing fancy (though I do find that these mics are a killer bargain and work very well for stereo).



Unfortunately, I've been working on an ad project with this setup that I can't yet post clips of, sorry about that. But if you do a little experimenting I think you'll find that this is a great way to go, and certainly sounds every bit as good as X-Y, ORTF, or spaced pair if not better.

 

[sergiodeblanc]

I'll admit I've been kind of lazy when it comes to recording my acoustic guitar for ad projects for a long time. It came down to, "put up a mono mic and have at it." And then fix things in the mix.

Oh..sh!t.

Putting up a single mic for acoustic made me feel like I was achieving in life... At least I wasn't piezo-ing it, right? :redface:

 

[veinbuster]

Thanks for answering the question I've been meaning to ask.

 

[goat-n-gitter]

That sounds like it would be a great method for tracks where the acoustic guitar is heavily featured, if you get my drift. I use a lot of acoustics in my originals, but I tend to double track in stereo, sometimes with 2 dissimilar guitars. On the few tracks that I've done a single stereo acoustic, I was doing what you described as dual mono. I would think the subtlety of that sort of true stereo recording would be a little lost in a dense band mix.

Tom

 

[László]

That sounds like it would be a great method for tracks where the acoustic guitar is heavily featured, if you get my drift. I use a lot of acoustics in my originals, but I tend to double track in stereo, sometimes with 2 dissimilar guitars. On the few tracks that I've done a single stereo acoustic, I was doing what you described as dual mono. I would think the subtlety of that sort of true stereo recording would be a little lost in a dense band mix.

Tom

Tom, I'll bet you would pick out the best sounding mic for recording an acoustic guitar even for a dense mix. The results achieved with the NOS technique are no more subtle than picking out the right mono mic would be, in fact, it makes the guitar the star, instead of the mic, because of the three dimensionality of the result.

My style is very dense, often involving acoustic and electric guitars, piano, bass, drums, synths, and sometimes orchestral parts. Obviously every choice in making music (including the engineering part) depends on one's creative intention, however, I like to mix stereo stems of all instruments except bass, vocal and kick drum if possible, electric guitar being the wild card I'll usually go dual-mono with (blending a ribbon mic with a 57). However room mics like you'd do with a drum kit in stereo sound really good on certain electric guitars, and are underrated. They're easy to blend as a separate stereo pair just as they are with drums. I have often incorporated stereo electric guitar room mics in my work, and even mid-side processing for them.

You'd be surprised that a true stereo recording done right doesn't mean having a huge instrument across both speakers. You can get that, of course, just push the mics further apart and go for a wide spaced pair. However this technique produces something that sounds like the size of a guitar, and you can pan it, or narrow the stereo field with the pan controls, etc. But the key is to follow the technique with the mics at exactly 90 degrees, and the spacing of the capsules exactly 30 cm. Vary that, and you might find something interesting, but it won't be the NOS technique I'm advocating here.

You get a richer representation of the instrument in true stereo. It's easy enough to carve up later with EQ, compression, etc.

Of course, I'm not unique in using stereo mic techniques; Al Schmitt, who has won more engineering Grammys than anyone in the world says he uses stereo mics on nearly everything. I think a variety of techniques are worth exploring, re-examining, etc., if for no other reason than having fun in the studio! :angelus: