Separating vox&guitar for a *live* take

[lo beam]

This topic may have been covered before, I dunno. But here goes - how do you acheive a degree of isolation between ac. guitar & vox if the singer is playing live.
Some sort of baffle cutting off the vocal mic from the guitar mic, I'm thinking.
Any tasty recipes?

[tmix]

You can use baffles to a limited degree, but it tends to change the sound of the instrument due to funny reflections, plus they can inhibit line of sight for the guitarist.
I still think the best way to simultaneously record a singer / guitarist is with 2 condensor mics that have a figure 8 pattern.

Many multi patterned mics have this feature, you aim the side of the guitar mic (where the null in the pattern exists) toward the mouth of the singer, and aim the side (null spot) of the vocal mic toward the body of the guitar. This is obviously an oversimplification, but hopefully you get the idea.

You can get a pretty hefty amount of isolation that way.

Tom

[knightfly]

What Tom said. That's why a lot of "sing + guitar" tracks get used as a scratch track to be separately redone.

You can also accomplish Tom's micing method with some of the super or hypercardioid mics - some of them have restricted enough side pickup to do that. You still have to watch the rear pickup, some of the super and hyper patterns have almost as big a node at the rear as a figure 8.

I only brought this up because more people already have that type of mic than would have the (usually) more expensive multi-pattern (or ribbon) mics... Steve