single mic. can it be done ??

Hunt out the album Mojave Dust by Kevin Brown. Acoustic guitar and vocal straight to tape. Not only brilliantly recorded but a great album.
 
Dredge up an old thread because I was posessed this afternoon with trying to create a scratch track for a number a friend and I discussed doing together "sometime" and also wanting to try out the Zoom F8 in a controlled environment (vs. the insanity of an open mic). So, I stuck my SM57 on a short stand on my rollaround cart (usually holds an amp I haven't put back since open mic), plugged it in to the F8 and banged away on my camp guitar and hollered out the words best I could. I did nothing other than make sure the little LEDs were bouncing. It was (based on sleeve length) about 33" away pointing slightly up towards my left shoulder. Noisy because the mic was on the wrong side of the room and the A/C going full blast. Gained it up a bit and compressed it in logic with a hint of reverb. Honestly, it's not the worst recording I've done!



Does this answer the question, well, yes and no. It can be done, but my room is not bad and this is better than a lot of stuff I hear (mostly phone recordings). But would I go press 500 CDs with something like this? Never. (And a better mic would not make it a lot better.) So, can vs should depends on what you're planning to do with the recording. I'd say only in the interest of time, and with enough experience to think it probably would save time for a low-bar kind of project. Otherwise, do it right with 2 mics or 2 tracks, at least.
 
My singer gives me rough demos of just his vocal and an acoustic guitar all the time. He uses a condenser mic from about 3 feet away. It sounds quite good actually.

Can I do anything with it? Not really, it's just to get the meat of the song communicated.

But it 'can' be done and has it's uses.
 
I think that recording Keith posted is important. It's a good recording on technical aspects. Noise? fine. Distortion? None I could detect. Frequency range? Bottom and top end present. Balance and blend? Worked for me.

So from a technical viewpoint, knowing how it was recorded it scores high. The trouble is, it just doesn't sound like we expect from a recording. If you expand to stereo recording in a church or a choir or small ensemble, they do quite badly - noise? often human noises, the occasional sniff, or cough from the live audience, maybe even a faint car driving pass. Distortion? No - clean. Frequency range? Sometimes a bit limited by the building, maybe a little missing from the bottom and a bit dull in areas where the building fought back. Balance and blend - pretty good, and isn't the building nice?

In a church recording we don't consider the problems as faults, but in a contemporary recording we do. Context makes your brain think something is wrong, because it isn't clean, clinical, edited, balanced, tweaked and repaired. Which is more real? That's a great question. The leap from mono to stereo is a great improvement but then things change rapidly.
 
I guess I don't think most singer-songers really deserve better than boombox recording anyway. ;) When I hear a recording of some open mic hero that's all heavily produced and hyper real I can tell that they're trying to make up with "studio quality sound" for a boring performance of boring material.

But if you really want that sound, the ONLY way to actually get it is to record each part separately using appropriate mic techniques for each. If you're not willing to go that far, then you might as well just use one mic or a stereo pair.

I fairly recently did a sort of experiment where I set up a stereo pair and then overdubbed several different instruments. For each one I sat in a different spot depending on where I wanted it to sit in the mix. In fact, for the mandolin part I started out in the kind of spacey intro standing way back and wandering around from right to left, and then for the main part of the song I moved in and took my station slightly behind and to the left of the main rhythm guitar, and then for the solo I stepped up closer and more centered. The idea was that I'd be able to just bring up all the tracks to unity, and it would sound like a band arranged in front of that stereo pair. It actually sounds really good. I mean, given the cheap instruments and my sloppy playing, it's kind of surprisingly good, and it doesn't take much to make it sound almost radio ready.
 
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