My 3 Track Home Recording Rig...

M

Martin Maniac

New member
Hi, I'm new to this forum....I wanted to share with you my home recording rig I recently put together. It starts out with an Auralex MudGuard mic shield with a moving blanket clamped on it. It has three mics, a Shure SM7b with a CloudLifter CL-1 signal booster for vocals, and two Neumann TLM 102's mounted on a 12" stereo bar for stereo guitar recordings. There's a piece of foam that goes horizontally to separate the vocals from the guitar. This comes in very handy for mixing. You can either bury the vocals or bring them upfront or anywhere in between. All three mics go into a Focusrite USB interface then into Sonar Platinum.It sounds great and my initial test recordings came out really good. Here's a pic.....

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I would think you could get that same guitar sound with just one of the 102s. To keep guitar separate from vocals when recording, record them separately. :)
 
That's the problem, I don't want to record the vocals and guitar separately. In my songs the vocals and guitar tend to play off each other, playing them separately would lose the vibe.

The guitar mics are mounted on a 12" stereo bar, with one mic on the 12th fret of the neck and the other on the sound hole. There's a slight difference between the two that I like when it comes to mixing.
 
Hey Martin,
That foam isn't really going to help with isolation.
You'd get better results losing it and just using the microphone polar patterns and distance to your advantage.

You could try putting the 7b as close to your mouth as possible and consider angling it upwards rather than downwards.
Try having the guitar mics or mic above the guitar a bit and angled down at a 45 degree (ish) so that your mouth is in their pattern null.

That's going to be way more effective than putting foam between the mics. Sound isn't travelling between the mics.


Keep in mind, though, you don't have to get rid of bleed.
It's part of the sound and not necessarily a bad thing.

Edit: Yeah...A single mic will never sound the same as a stereo recording.
 
I want to get rid of as much bleed as possible, hence the foam. Yes it does make a difference I can see it in the mixing phase. Yes angling the vocal mi up is something I do when recording vocals, at the time of this picture I had just tried recording the guitar with all three mics. I just hadn't put the vocal mic back into position.

I tried recording just the guitar with all three mics without the horizontal foam and yes the guitar came thru all the mics.

I was trying to get a certain specific sound and the rig worked !! Stereo guitar with a vocals right up front and center, so you can make out the words easily. It's just what I wanted.
 
Hey,
If it works, or you think it works, that's cool but the microphones don't make any noise so isolating them from each other isn't going to do anything.

Maybe the picture doesn't show it well but from the angle it looks like your mouth would still have direct line of sight to all mics, as would the guitar.
 
I dunno...in that sample, the guitar tone has a banjo-ish quality to it, maybe you've got some phasy thing going on with the mics or somehthing...and there's no vocals, so it's hard to tell what value that foam rig is providing.

Keep in mind that the foam only removes very high frequencies...it actually provides very little "isolation".
Also...sound doesn't "see" the foam boundary. IOW...when play, the above mic still pics up the guitar and when you sing, the bottom mics pick up the vocals.

If you really feel you're getting THE sound you want, then great, you are all set...but I've never seen that kind of rig used before as an effective means of capturing both guitar and vocals at the same time.

Home recording always provides an interesting level of "innovation". :)
 
Ya it's pretty deep when you get right up to the mic. Granted though you don't get 100% isolation, but it's good enough where you can bring up the vocals in the mix, and that's what I was shooting for. The SM7b and the Cloudlifter CL-1 are a very powerful combination that sounds awesome on my test recordings. It really puts out a very strong signal onto the track, it brings the whole recording to life.
 
One could say why reinvent the wheel. But then again a lot of today's 'standard' accepted recording techniques were yesterday's experiments.

Hey, if it works it works.

This brings back a story from the producer Don Was.
When working with Melissa Ethridge, she would sing while recording her guitar part. No vocal mic, as she wasn't tracking vocals yet, but the guitar mics would still pick up the vocal bleed.

When doing the actual vocal she also would strum along with her acoustic. Again, bleed into the mic, but this time the guitar.

Thankfully she was skilled enough in nailing her parts so that the bleed was a direct copy of the new part being tracked.

It sounds like you're doing both parts at the same time. Tracking vocals and guitar in one pass. Right?

Well if it works for you, more power to you.
:D
 
I've wanted to do something like this for a very long time, because my vocals would always come out buried. Now I can bring them right out front.

Yes on this test track I did the vocals and guitar parts at the same time and mixed it to get the vocals out front. I'm still getting to know these mics, so I have lots of more tests to do, but I'm very happy with the progress I'm making.
 
I took down all the previous test tracks because they sucked. Here's a new test track with just the 2-Neumann TLM-102's. New strings on the guitar, new XLR cables...different settings on the interface...sounds much better....

MP3 Player SoundClick
 
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Back to what everyone stated, if it works, it works. And we leave it at that.

Vocals being buried, well lots of things can bury the vocals, like not mixing correctly. Once thing I have learned is, I don't have to record so hot like they did in the analog days. Lots of reasons they did that, but today, you don't have to. Once recorded, new people think it is too low. Once again, because they don't understand how to get the total volume up.

The main reason most say to record vocals and guitar separate, if you can't get both perfect in the same take, then it becomes more difficult to get a good recording. Once you have the bleed, doing a retake over a track with vocals and guitar is really difficult. But if you are really good at both singing and playing, then you are golden.

Me, I am not good enough with either to get a single perfect take in one shot with guitar and vocals. I compose a song, can't remember the words, phrasing, then trying to play as well. Too much going on for me. I do sing when playing to myself when getting the guitar tracked, then come in and lay vocals. It took many months before I could get comfortable playing separate from singing, but eventually I got there.

Your method is not bad, just a PITA if you need to do any edits, re-tracks, etc. cause, you are going to get bleed, that is the short and long of it.

As you move forward in recording, you may find what is hard now, easier on you in the recording process in the future. Just keep that in mind for future reference.

Just remember, most of us are doing the same thing you are doing, so we are just trying to help you with the learning curve. That's why we are here.
 
Eric LeClair said:
I'm new to too - especially when it comes to recording instruments. Why would you need 3 microphones?
Click to expand...
Well I want three mics for mixing. One for vocals and two on the guitar with about 12" separation. This gives me two distinct guitar sounds which I can blend during the mixing process. One mic is positioned at the 12th fret of the guitar, while the other is positioned by the sound hole of the guitar. It replicates sticking your head right in front of the guitar and gives a very realistic sound. The vocal mic gives me the option of bringing the vocals upfront or leave them buried. In my songs, the lyrics play a very important part and I want the lyrics upfront so people can make them out and get the jist of the song. After listening to a few test recordings, I've decided to keep this rig and have set up a permanent recording station in my living room, because it works very nicely. For just instrumental recordings, all I need is the two TLM 102's and they do a very good job. The SM7b does a great job on vocals. I played a test track for my brother and now he wants to hire me to record a reading of his book he's written. He liked the sound of the vocal test track that much. He noticed that there was no room noise or hiss on my recording, his recordings have hiss and it's been driving him nuts. He likes my setup much better.
 
DM60 said:
Back to what everyone stated, if it works, it works. And we leave it at that.

Vocals being buried, well lots of things can bury the vocals, like not mixing correctly. Once thing I have learned is, I don't have to record so hot like they did in the analog days. Lots of reasons they did that, but today, you don't have to. Once recorded, new people think it is too low. Once again, because they don't understand how to get the total volume up.

The main reason most say to record vocals and guitar separate, if you can't get both perfect in the same take, then it becomes more difficult to get a good recording. Once you have the bleed, doing a retake over a track with vocals and guitar is really difficult. But if you are really good at both singing and playing, then you are golden.

Me, I am not good enough with either to get a single perfect take in one shot with guitar and vocals. I compose a song, can't remember the words, phrasing, then trying to play as well. Too much going on for me. I do sing when playing to myself when getting the guitar tracked, then come in and lay vocals. It took many months before I could get comfortable playing separate from singing, but eventually I got there.

Your method is not bad, just a PITA if you need to do any edits, re-tracks, etc. cause, you are going to get bleed, that is the short and long of it.

As you move forward in recording, you may find what is hard now, easier on you in the recording process in the future. Just keep that in mind for future reference.

Just remember, most of us are doing the same thing you are doing, so we are just trying to help you with the learning curve. That's why we are here.
Click to expand...

Well for me it's easier to play and sing at the same time, because that's what I do when I'm playing out live. I've practiced my songs playing and singing so that's what's natural for me. Keeping my mouth shut while laying down a guitar track would feel unnatural for me. As far as doing re-tracks goes, I start playing a song and if I feel I can do a better job a second or third take, I just stop and start over then edit out the takes I didn't like, and keep the section I do like. This takes about 20 seconds in Sonar. I keep the "tape rolling" until I get a satisfactory take.
 
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