Recording Acoustic Guitar

Get a new mic. Neither of those are any good for acoustic guitar. You want a condenser. I personally prefer small diaphragm condensers, but others prefer large diaphragm condensers. What you (probably) want is a cardioid condenser, either a large or small diaphragm. I have been happy lately with the Oktava MC-012. It is not as nice as a DPA 4011, but it works well.

The most common mic placement would be with the mic aimed at the neck/body joint, about 6-12 inches from the guitar. You can experiment with the exact placement from there.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I'll agree with light here, but as far as making the most of what you've got:

do you have 2 SM57s? here are some options:
point one at the bridge, and one at the neck and pan them hard left and right.

make an X/Y pair by pointing both the mics at eachother, like the point of a triangle, forming a 45 degree angle, and set this up a few feet in front of the guitar. same deal with the panning, except switch the left microphone to hard right, etc

if you have a 52 and a 57 instead, use the 52 on the bridge and the 57 on the neck.

do you have a piezo pickup on the guitar? you might think of adding that to the mix, just slightly.

another popular technique is using one microphone, and panning it to the left, then setting up a sample delay of 100 or so samples and panning that hard right.
 
Freeform said:
make an X/Y pair by pointing both the mics at eachother, like the point of a triangle, forming a 45 degree angle, and set this up a few feet in front of the guitar. same deal with the panning, except switch the left microphone to hard right, etc


Except that is not X/Y. X/Y pairs are aimed at 90 to 130 degrees. I like 110 degrees, myself.

http://www.dpamicrophones.com/eng_pub/MicUni/131.html


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Han said:
The ORTF placement will give a more natural stereo image.

Well, I do not often use stereo micing on anything, and particularly not on acoustic guitar. I almost always use ORTF on pianos, but I do not know that ANY stereo micing pattern sounds "natural".


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
i was just experimenting today and came up with a cool new (to me) mic placement for acoustic

Rode NTK - about 5 feet straight out in front of the sound hole
Rode NT5 - in front of sound hole aimed about 45 degrees toward the butt of the guitar and eqed out the lows below 150 hz.

it sounded really good and fairly natural. the SDC gave some good high end definition, and the LDC added good 'natural' sounding ambiance as well as a smooth low end. i left both tracks centered so they came out as one sound.
 
I keep going back to the small-diaphragm/large diaphragm combination. SD on the neck and LD at the bridge. MXL603 is hard to beat for a cheap small diaphragm - great with the NTK. If you can only afford one mic, get a 603 and do some doubling of the acoustic parts. (Play the same part on two tracks.) That can sound very good. Play one in standard tuning and then capo up a bit and play it in a higher register. Sounds awesome if done right.
 
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