Poor quality recordings

The difference will be negligible. It might shave off a tiny tiny bit of high end. Pop filters are meant for stopping bursts of air from reaching the diaphragm of the microphone. I don't think there would be any arguments that you would leave it off except when recording vocals.

In the video, I don't hear any real trickery going on. The acoustic guitar sounds mono and centered, close-miked, with a bit of compression on it. It's a good-sounding guitar in the first place. Relatively new strings and set up pretty well. There's probably some EQ on the guitar to get rid of some low end, since it's a pretty large dreadnaught and it doesn't sound boomy.

Both voices sound centered and compressed as well, and there is some subtle reverb on the vocal and even subtler reverb on the acoustic. I think that the reverb is providing the only stereo content in the song.

Thanks Tadpui. I might change strings on mine, It's a pretty decent Ibanez acoustic electric V74ECE-OPN, it has a nice sound but I need to be able to capture it better to have it sit well in my mix and sound natural instead of distorted. How should I set my compression on guitar and vocals? Do I turn the gain up in the plug-in? How do I know if I'm going over the top? In the video I posted, their sound is very full and even right across, there's enough bass and depth to make it sound good (but not too much), there's no hissing. Mine sounds thin, I think that's one of the big problems I have.
 
Thanks Tadpui. I might change strings on mine, It's a pretty decent Ibanez acoustic electric V74ECE-OPN, it has a nice sound but I need to be able to capture it better to have it sit well in my mix and sound natural instead of distorted. How should I set my compression on guitar and vocals? Do I turn the gain up in the plug-in? How do I know if I'm going over the top?

Compression is a whole world of its own. For now, I'd focus on that distortion and getting a clean capture in the first place. Do a little research on the concepts of gain staging and headroom.

I'd suggest sticking with a single mic and a mono track for now, and just learn the ins-and-outs of getting a good, balanced, clean signal. You can do just about anything with a track that's well-recorded in the first place. With your mic, experiment and see which placements yield the most satisfying results.

It sounds like you were on the right track, with a single mic somewhere near where the neck meets the body of the guitar, 8-12 inches away. Try a little closer, a little farther away, a little more towards the neck, a little more towards the body, angled this way and that. Somewhere in there is going to be a solid, balanced acoustic guitar tone. It may not be exciting or "wide" (yet), but it'll be a solid base to build upon.
 
Thanks Tadpui

How would you guys approach electric guitar + vocals instead of acoustic guitar for a spacious sound? I don't mean heavy music, but just simple easy going songs with a basic tone. I figured since the only way to record is direct, it would be a bit easier because you don't have to worry about mic placement like you do with acoustic.
 
Thanks Tadpui

How would you guys approach electric guitar + vocals instead of acoustic guitar for a spacious sound? I don't mean heavy music, but just simple easy going songs with a basic tone. I figured since the only way to record is direct, it would be a bit easier because you don't have to worry about mic placement like you do with acoustic.

With an electric going direct, I'd do a lot of experimenting with amp simulations to try to get a nice tone. Then I'd put the guitar in a nice space with a reverb (again a lot of experimenting to find the right one for the song). To me, a direct electric tone doesn't sound too good in a bare arrangement. Whatever you do, if you want a spacious sound, you have to put your guitar in a space.
 
With an electric going direct, I'd do a lot of experimenting with amp simulations to try to get a nice tone. Then I'd put the guitar in a nice space with a reverb (again a lot of experimenting to find the right one for the song). To me, a direct electric tone doesn't sound too good in a bare arrangement. Whatever you do, if you want a spacious sound, you have to put your guitar in a space.

Therein lies my question - how do i make this space for spaciness? Is reverb my best bet? And I'm guessing mono would be my only option since Its only one channel, unless i record two separate but same guitar tracks
 
Space is implied by the timing, amount, length and intensity of ambient/reflected sound. This means using either delays, reverbs or a combination of both. I am a big fan of recording acoustic guitars in smaller, less reflective areas to get the tone and using delay to both define the size of the virtual space and Haas effect(spread of guitar/width), with reverb early reflections to help define the overall "liveness" of the virtual space. The same delay/verb concept works for DI guitar or anything else, though i find it is almost universally more efficient to use aux tracks for delay and verb so that they can be shaped with eq and compression and automated so that the volume can be changed for different parts of the song, allowing for clean arrangement. Mono is not necessary when using an aux-just send the mono track to both sides of a stereo aux track with eq, delay and reverb.
 
Reverb and delay can affect "depth" (front to back) perception on a mono track.........but........to get the "width" you desire you would normally need at least a single stereo track (recorded with two mics or two different direct input sources) or two separate mono tracks panned left and right and recorded with width in mind (mics) or using stereo effects to widen the sound.

Two separately recorded guitar tracks of the same "material" (like vocal doubling) is something you might like for a result.
 
Hey guys, bringing this one back from the dead

I came across this little tutorial for the scarlet interface, and looking at the video she plugs the guitar directly and still gets fairly good sound from it. I also have the exact same mic as shown there that I use to now record guitar and vocal tracks. I'd be happy even if I got this kind of quality.

YouTube
 
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Hey guys, bringing this one back from the dead

I came across this little tutorial for the scarlet interface, and looking at the video she plugs the guitar directly and still gets fairly good sound from it. I also have the exact same mic as shown there that I use to now record guitar and vocal tracks. I'd be happy even if I got this kind of quality. ...
Guitar pickups have their place - on stage - I know some use them to record but I'm not a fan. However, IMO they do sound better with finger style, or in this vid's case, finger strummed guitar. It's when you start using the guitar for picked rhythm that the quacking starts.

And, anytime someone is singing in a really good voice, the importance of the guitar track diminishes greatly, so you can get away with things that might not work otherwise, too. I think I can record a better guitar track than that, but if I balanced one my vocals against it at the relative volume hers is in this video (i.e., vs the guitar), folks would be running from the room :).

The video seems to skip over connecting the guitar! I can't tell in the actual shots of her playing/singing what's plugged in but the closeup shows two XLR cables going into the 2i2. Pretty shifty how they ignore that part. (Oh, and don't do what they say and connect "speaker cables" to the line outputs on the back.)

I guess since the F'rite kit they're demoing only includes a single mic, the guitar has to be plugged in, but they could have been more up front about how that's done!
 
I have an Ibanez acoustic/electric that has a balanced as well as a standard TS output. Perhaps that's what is being used. I would not be surprised if the mic is picking up most of the guitar used though. I have only used the balanced out once just to see what it sounds like(not good really) and I had to turn the output of the guitar and the input of the 2i2 as far down as is shown in the video just to keep from overloading the converters. I would guess that some major EQ was going on also.
 
Hey guys, thanks for the comments. I just recorded a new cover few days ago, it's a Queen Medley, but here I'll focus on Bohemian rhapsody snippet of my video. Here is the finalized product, Compressed with EQ with some delay and reverb.
YouTube

Here is just the guitar for the Bohemian rhapsody part of the song (first 40 seconds or so) and you can hear how it's really muffled.
Vocaroo | Voice message

And in the final link is the extreme EQ'ing I did to get rid of the muffling. Full high frequency boost (probably not good but I guess I had to), and still not happy with the sound after all that.
Guitar-Compressed — imgbb.com

(NOTE: the video is not a live performance, it's just me miming, the guitar was actually recorded about 30cm away from the mic aiming where the neck meets the soundhole - as recommended)

So either; there's something wrong with my mic OR I'm still doing something wrong.

ALSO NOTE: You can tell how sad I look in the video because this recording business is driving me nuts now.
 
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