Solo Acoustic Guitar Panning Question

S

savo123

New member
Hey everyone, i'm new here so first off hello! This is my first post but I plan to be a useful contributor where I can.
I'm wondering about panning solo guitar parts, I hear it in a lot of solo recordings where the low stings playing the bass notes will be in one side and the highs playing the melody in the other. I'm not sure if this is a mixing or recording question really, are the parts simply recorded separately, or is it in the mixing?
Thanks for any help you can give!
 
You might be hearing the results of stereo micing. Maybe googling "xy micing acoustic guitar" or something similar and see what comes up. there are several stereo micing techniques, but xy is a good one to start with.
 
Initial caveat: I haven't heard guitar panned that way in recordings myself. Perhaps I just didn't notice it.

I don't see how that would really be possible to do with micing a single performance. The sound - at least the bulk of it - comes from the top, rather than the strings. While it's somewhat the case that different parts of the top emphasize different frequencies, it's not so tidy as low strings here, high strings there.

One way you could do it is with a guitar that has separate pickups for each string, and separate outputs. Some basses have separate piezos for each string, though I don't think piezo pickups for guitars are generally made that way, and (so far as I know) even the basses don't have separate outputs for each string. In any event, if you don't already have such a pickup and electronics, you probably don't want to acquire and install them just for the purpose of panning.

The more obvious (and probably more likely) way to do it is to record the low-string and high-string parts separately. This can also have the side effect of making you sound like a much more technically proficient guitar player than you really are.

Synthesized piano sounds are often panned that way (low to the left, high to the right). I'm not totally sure why, since a real piano - like a real guitar - doesn't work that way: most of the sound comes off the soundboard, without a lot of obvious directionality. It might seem that way when you're sitting at the keyboard yourself, but I think that's more psychological than real. Of course, anyone listening to a piano in any ordinary real-world situation is sufficiently far away that the direct sound from the piano is coming from one place, with left-right-ness only in the natural reverb.
 
I've never heard that either. Are you sure it's only one guitar you're hearing?
 
Thanks for the ideas guys, much appreciated. TripleM i did think about stereo techniques but i just couldn't imagine being able to get such an isolated sound of the lows and the highs with each mic. sjjohnston, i think you might be right with the parts being done separately, starting to sound like the only way, although the pickups with separate outputs sounds interesting. RAMI, I'm pretty certain it is as im sure i've seen live clips of the songs being played by the one guitarist, but it sounds like in the recording they might be done separately to be able to get the left-right thing going.
 
Could have some kind of stereo effect on it? I have had single mic recorded guitars and when put through a bit of stereo reverb or chorus they sound spread across the stereo. This only works if that is what suits the song.

Alan.
 
Or could it be a MIDI instrument? You could probably separate that across tracks pretty easily. I think - I'm no MIDI expert.
 
If you only use one mic, you could achieve that effect quite easily using a stereo imager; the one in Logic Pro will send frequencies above "x" to the right (or left) and frequencies below "x" to the left.
 
Well, yes: and nearly every monitor or speaker does the same thing (in the analog domain) with its crossover, though you'd have to break open the speaker case and move the woofer and tweeter further apart for it to sound like stereo. You can do the same thing with any software or hardware that has high- and low-pass filters and a panner. Going back to the old days, and what's now absurdly simply hardware, I remember trying to create a stereo effect for AM by taking two little transistor radios and cranking the tone controls in opposite directions.

But it isn't the same thing as separating the strings. Most obviously, the fundamental of anything about the 5th fret on one string is higher-pitched than some notes on at least the next highest string. Slightly more subtly, but apparent in practice: harmonics of the lower notes will be higher-frequency than the fundamentals of higher notes, and percussive sounds (string attack and the like) will generally fall with the high frequencies no matter what string they're played on.
 
sjjohnston said:
Initial caveat: I haven't heard guitar panned that way in recordings myself. Perhaps I just didn't notice it.

I don't see how that would really be possible to do with micing a single performance. The sound - at least the bulk of it - comes from the top, rather than the strings. While it's somewhat the case that different parts of the top emphasize different frequencies, it's not so tidy as low strings here, high strings there.

One way you could do it is with a guitar that has separate pickups for each string, and separate outputs. Some basses have separate piezos for each string, though I don't think piezo pickups for guitars are generally made that way, and (so far as I know) even the basses don't have separate outputs for each string. In any event, if you don't already have such a pickup and electronics, you probably don't want to acquire and install them just for the purpose of panning.
Click to expand...

Maybe it is only us old-school Eddie Van Halen fans that will remember this one, but there was the Kramer Ripley:

The Kramer Ripley
 
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