Mic for studio - singing and acoustic playing

octatonic · June 2018

viz said:

Ok good stuff, so final question, if we get a condenser to sing into, will it pick up the guitar from below?

Yes it will, but it won't be ideal.
Either use the condenser as a room mic to pick up both acoustic guitar and vocals, or get two mics.

The more mics you use, the more attention you need to pay to phase coherence.

viz · June 2018

Ok perf, thanks.

robinbowes · June 2018

Another way of looking at it is the old sound engineers' maxim: SISO*

In other words, make sure you are producing the best sound you can, then record it.

If your environment sounds awful then your recording will too. If you sound great acoustically then your recorded sound should also be great.

Good mics and mic technique (positioning, phase, etc) will make a difference but you can't polish a turd.

R.

* Shit In, Shit Out.

viz · June 2018

robinbowes said:

but you can't polish a turd.

R.

But you can try.

http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/120/show-us-your-pedalboard/p145

Cirrus · June 2018

octatonic said:

Dynamics have proximity effect being more noticeable.

Unless it's an RE20

Re; recording a singing acoustic guitar player, you really have to make a choice;

- One mic to capture both parts of the performance, in which case you need a good sounding room and a player who can balance themselves. You'll want to pull the mic back far enough to capture voice and guitar, so a more sensitive condenser is a good choice for that. You won't be able to do much with the track afterwards since the two parts are baked together beyond subtle compression and broad tone shaping.

- Two mics, one on voice and one on guitar. This is hard to do well. The mics will by necessity need to be close, which means they'll each pick up spill from the bit they're not meant to hear. This will sound phasey and not as solid/real as the one mic method. Your two ways round that are either getting the mics as close together as possible so phase differences are minimised, or getting each mic as close to its source as possible so the ratio of wanted sound to unwanted sound is minimised.

I think if I was doing it this way, I'd use my aforementioned trusty RE20 (or SM7 if I was being trendy) right up on my mouth, pointing slightly upwards to get the guitar off axis and hence attenuated, then a condenser with a fig.8 pattern on the acoustic, and try to get the singer's head into the side null to minimise vocal in the guitar mic. The guitar mic would either be right behind the RE20 facing down to the guitar, or moved down in front of the guitar as close as I could get it without it sounding bad - the former would minimise phase differences, the latter would minimise the volume of the phasey spill.

The AT4050 is pretty reasonable second hand and has switchable polar patterns.

The third choice - play guitar then overdub vocals - would be the preferred solution if you want control of the mix later. But it's a bit of a cop-out, right?

octatonic · June 2018

Cirrus said:

octatonic said:

Dynamics have proximity effect being more noticeable.

Unless it's an RE20

True.
There is a bit but it isn't very noticeable.
Great mic.

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Mic for studio - singing and acoustic playing

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