Thank you, this response is super helpful.
I don't think I really understand gain, or why having more clean gain would affect the mellowness I'm going for and not just make the signal louder. I have the Behringer UMC404HD which I think is a pretty budget interface. Are there limitations in this interface that can't be overcome without getting a better one? Or could I put a preamp before it, or something like a cloudlifter...? I'm new at all this but have been doing a lot of research.
Thanks again for your help.
Gain can be a misleading word when it comes to certain aspects of recording a source.
"Gain" to an electric guitar player and their amp is a bit different than the gain from turning up a mic preamp....but not much!! Really.
Volume should not be confused with Gain.
So when I say to you that you will need a mic preamp (your interface probably has mic pres) that will supply "clean gain" I'm talking about how much signal you can send from the mic to the software without any distortion or addition of harmonics or noise. This is how you can clearly reproduce the mellowness of the sound you describe.
As Rob said, "
"to capture detail from a naturally lacking it instrument means as clean a preamp as you can get."
Where we part in opinion is about the cloudlifter type of addition to a signal. While I don't use "Cloudlifter" brand, I do have a couple of Cathedral Pipes Durham line amps that are wonderful in certain situations. They do sound better than the Cloudlifter while being the same sort of thing. But thats me.
The Behringer interface you have is probably okay as far as having noiseless gain. When Uli bought Midas I figured he'd eventually put those preamps in most things. They are pretty good and have been for years.
A very good mic like the ones I described will do just fine in your interface. Of course YOU are the part that needs to understand about mic placement in order to achieve your goals for your recordings. Since you seem like a person who is willing to research things I suggest you study mic placement and the effect of patterns on sources. The thrree mics I described all have patterns.....you can consider ANY ribbon mic to be a figure of eight pattern with some tending towards omni with side leakage. The architecture of a ribbon will always have front and back with the quality of the build determining how much escapes at the sides.
Why is this important? When you capture a source that is emanating from an acoustic instrument, there are frequencies being projecting in all directions simultaneously but at different times of arrival at your mic. The trick will be to find the veritable sweetspot and put the mic there. With mics with patterns, it's also possible to use the environment you are in to enhance the capture of the instrument. Almost thinking like it's a tone control.
The better quality the mic and it's components the less electronic "smearing" you'll get from the gear and you'll have a purer representation of what you are hearing. The same thing goes for ANY component in the signal chain. And this is usually when folks will step up and talk about how good they get with their lower budget gear and they won't be wrong.
I just find its easier to suss things out when you can put up a Bock or a Neumann, or an AKG. The old engineers saying "Mic don't lie" is true.