Recording Slide. Noisey. Strings?

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pure.fusion

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Hi all,

Need some of your advice again.

I'm recording song at the moment. I've put some slide guitar up front in the mix as the melody for the first part of the song.

I had a condenser mic up close to the guitar to get a descent level and I ended up with a lot of slide noise. I'm using a brass slide.

How can I minimise the noise and get more tone? Strings was the first thing that came to mind. Not knowing a lot about different strings, you may want to suggest some.

Cheers,
FM
 
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Have you tried with a glass slide? This is just a theory based on the fact that I've always found my brass slide to be a little scratchy.
 
I bought a little glass slide to try out - You know the ones that can sit in between the knuckles so you can still bend your finger.

But the glass one seemed to have substantially less sustain than the brass one, so I didn't use it.

It sits on my desk now, staring at me......

Cheers,
FM
 
Just a thought, but you could try positioning the mic differently. If you don't get that same sort of noise just playing it, then it's a mic placement issue.

Personally, I prefer a heavy slide, either brass or ceramic (Mudslides are pretty nice if you can find one). Glass slides tend to rattle too much on the strings for me.
 
Try a full size, thick wall glass slide. The truth is, any acoustic with slide is gonna have some noise--even Tampa Red couldn't get around it.
 
Elixir strings and a glass slide of wine bottle thickness will help.
 
Why try to get rid of something that is a part of what you're doing? Slide guitar is almost always a little sloppy. But if you really wanna get rid of it, you may try a little eq. I dunno.
 
nate_dennis said:
Why try to get rid of something that is a part of what you're doing?
Click to expand...

This. There are two ways of looking at it - one is that you're after a clean, pure slide tone, in which case you want to kill this noise. The other is that you want a raw, funky, gritty, evil sort of slide sound, in which case the noise fuckin' owns. :D

I have no idea how experienced a slide player you are, so if you've been doing this years and this is a pretty novice question, place the blame on my ignorance of your technique and not me being condescending, but how's your behind-the-slid muting technique? You'll always get a bit of noise from the slide on the strings, but especially on an acoustic (I assume this as an acoustic, if you're using a close mic), if you leave the strings un-muted behind the slide you'll get a lot more noises and resonances than if you mute cleanly behind the slide. Again, this is all a matter of taste - I've done some slide stuff where leaving it mostly unmuted gave it this awesome, edgy, biting, bluesy sound that worked awesome for the setting.

Other than that, yeah, a different material might help - glass tends to "warble" a little more than the "sting" you sort of hear from brass. Maybe that's the right sound for the part...
 
Are you trying to play the slide part on all 6 strings ? If so, you might want to economise it down to 2 or 3 strings-enough for a nice full harmony. A condenser mic is probably picking up a lot of extra high end noise as well.
2 to 3 strings are all I usually try to use to keep it cleaner sounding-and you can work this into standard tuning pretty easily.
 
I'd think that if you're playing with an acoustic, you ARE after the noises it produces, if you want a cleaner sound:

record it from a clean electric guitar.

You can do BOTH, and then mix the noises in according to taste??

That in mind, I made myself a really heavy slide from stainless steel, to use with bass. But the mass of the thing produces a pretty clean sound from a guitar too.

Unfortunately, the mirror-polished steel cought the eye of my kid.. haven't seen it since.. :D
 
Sample



Ok. Here is a sample.

Maybe I'm being too picky, but in this part particularly, you can hear a lot of string noise when there is some vibrato going on.

Acceptable level?

I haven't listened to any slide players to date, with the exception of a few songs here and there, say from Guthrie Govan "Slidey Boy" - but this is quite electric and distorted (not to mention well produced), so I can't really get any scope from this.

Any opinion on the amount of noise here? It's a scrap recording of a song in the making, so I can implement changes before I lay down the real track.

Cheers,

FM
 
Sounds about right to me. If you're going for a cleaner sound (less slide/string noise) your best option would be a guitar with really high action and pressing down hard with a heavy slide. I have an old 1950s lap steel that I use when I want that clean, pure, ringing slide tone. For most slide stuff, I tend to either use an Epiphone Flame Kat for electric or an old metal Dobro for that nasty, groinky blues sound.

Speaking of which, I recorded some slide tracks yesterday and took a look at the slide I recommended earlier, It's not a Mudslide, but a Moonshine Slide.
 
Yep. The sample is recorded with a resonator guitar (wooden body). My other acoustics sounded quite ordinary for slide when mic-ed up.

LDS, thanks for the info. I wouldn't mind trying for a cleaner sound, but as I mentioned before, I got a lot less sustain with my little glass slide. I'll try one of the big suckers.

Cheers,
FM
 
Right,

FYI, the big thick glass slide does the job. No sustain issues at all. Slightly different tone, less string noise when you vibrato that sucker.

Some may think the glass takes away from the whole slide acoustic thing and that the extra noise of brass should be in there.

Thanks all.

Cheers,
FM
 
Too much slide noise can be due to too much compression. If you are listening to your slide performance on a recording playback and have compression on it...turn the compression off.
That being said...
It's usually due to poor techique. You not only have to mute with your left hands fingers behind the slide you also have to mute with your right hands fingers while your picking the strings.

All great slide players have mastered the art of muting strings with both hands while they play. If you want one note at a time to sound you will have to mute the other five strings.
 
Poor technique = definitely.

I'm such a slide noob. This will be week 3. But I have progressed past the stage of being able to mute the non active strings - well, at least enough to be up to the standard of a home recording.

Compression = lots.

Just couldn't seem to get any even volume output without compression. There was always a sharp peak when I plucked a note and a very quiet "tail". Compression was the only way I could see to bring it all out evenly.

I was up quite close to the guitar with the mic.

You talk like you know how to do this jimistone. Is there a better way to record this slide?

Cheers,
FM
 
pure.fusion said:
Poor technique = definitely.

I'm such a slide noob. This will be week 3. But I have progressed past the stage of being able to mute the non active strings - well, at least enough to be up to the standard of a home recording.

Compression = lots.

Just couldn't seem to get any even volume output without compression. There was always a sharp peak when I plucked a note and a very quiet "tail". Compression was the only way I could see to bring it all out evenly.

I was up quite close to the guitar with the mic.

You talk like you know how to do this jimistone. Is there a better way to record this slide?

Cheers,
FM
Click to expand...

I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as others who frequent this sight on engineering a recording. Most of what I know I learned here or by trial and error. I have labored over a slide part though...much the same as you.

I usually put a sure SM58 on my amp speaker pointed toward the outside edge of the speaker...I also put a LDC mic above and in front of the amp (a couple of feet away...more than that and you have to deal with out of phase issues if you use both tracks). That gives me 2 tracks of guitar that have somewhat different sounds. Sometimes I will use an overdrive pedal sometimes I wont...depends on what sound I'm after.

I had the amp volume down and alot of compression on my first few tries and got alot of unwanted slide noise...like you did.

This is what worked for me:
I figured out that the massive compression was the greatest contributor to the noise. The recording was even....the noise was just as loud as the notes :D.
So, after I got rid of the compression I had to crank the amp volume on up to get the sustain right.
Then with the amp volume way on up there and the sustain and tone sounding killer...I had to really work on my slide technique to get it right.

You see...with the amp volume turned up enough to make the "tails" sing forever you have to have very good touch with your picking hand on how hard to pick the string. You also need to be very good at muting because the volume makes everything that isn't muted ring out.

So, I say get rid of the compresser on the front end...crank your amp way on up...and work on your slide technique.

Compress the recording on in the mix if you need to tame dynamics. (if you develope the right touch you wont need to or want to compress very much in the mix)
 
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Well, you can pretty much disreguard everything in that last post ...except... the touch and muting part and getting rid of the compression... since you're playing acoustic and I was talking about electric:o
Sorry.

On acoustic it's ALL technique since there is no amp.

On recording acoustic I have had the best luck using a LDC mic raised all the way up to the ceiling of my vocal booth...directly over my head
 
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