Recording guitar and vocals with ribbon mics.

cheifitj

New member
Anyone have good luck with recording an acoustic guitar and vocals at the same time, from the same player? How do you cut down on the bleed? I'm thinking one mic for the vocal, one mic for the guitar, plus the guitar DI. I have heard of using ribbon mics for this purpose as they can have less pick up if placed the correct way, but they are all so expensive.
Any good recos on Ribbon mics that aren't big $$.

-Jon
 
R144 isn't too bad. Any mic with a figure 8 pattern will work. I have had success with a CAD M179, and the ribbon, recording vocals and acoustic at same time.
 
Oh, you will want a clean preamp with lots of gain to use a ribbon. Not so with the condenser (M179).
 
I do it a lot, if the player / singer is standing I use a small condenser (Sennheiser ME40) on the guitar and the large condenser (model depends on the singer) on vocals. If they are sitting then I may use a ribbon to help with the rejection.

The trick is that you have to check the phasing between the 2 mics, and ensure that the sound is good to start with both mics up ad the balance (voc / guitar) is set as there will always be some bleed between the mics.

I do also record the guitar DI, what I do is that if there is a guitar effect I want to use, say a little chorus or verb, and I don't want the vocal to have this effect (from the vocal spill in the guitar mic) I feed the DI signal to the effect not the guitar mic. Sometimes the DI only goes to the effect with no straight DI in the mix.

Alan.
 
R144 isn't too bad. Any mic with a figure 8 pattern will work. I have had success with a CAD M179, and the ribbon, recording vocals and acoustic at same time.

I've got the R144 and I've found that it isn't the best for vocals if you're going for a modern sound, too much mid lows, I would always end up having to cut the lows and boost the highs more than I should have to. For acoustic guitar, it does the same thing. Just my experience with it.
 
Just finished with two C-179's in fig-8. He was sitting no less -generally that means even less distance between the guitar and voice. The mics were about as close together as they were from the source, still very good isolation on the vocal, decent on the guitar.

..I coulda woulda shoulda maybe used a pop filter on the top mic. 10 songs, about a dozen notches to do in the gain automation.
 
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