I record acoustic guitars some. Actually, what you've got would probably work fine in a full mix. I mean, it's not gonna' "wow" anybody, but that's not its job in a full mix. Sounds like every "goo goo dolls" acoustic recording.
If you were recording singer/songwriter type stuff, where you've basically got an acoustic and a vocal and maybe a bass, I think you'd need to make some adjustments. You already know the most important link in the chain is the first one, and I'm not talking about the mic, I'm talking about the guitar, so I won't harp on that. But you CAN do a lot with a lot less these days. I think NL5 put it best...the quality of budget recordings have gone way the hell up, but you can still spend 95% of you money getting that last 10% of sound if you want to.
When I first started trying to record acoustic guitars, I read a lot of advice about stereo mic'ing and putting mics like 2 feet away from the guitar, etc. I'm sure that's awesome advice if you've got a fantastic recording space, but most of us are recording in rooms that are more suited to sleeping than recording. So (and this is just me) I recommend close mic'ing for several reasons.
1. You take a lot of the room out of the mix, and for most of us, that's a good thing;
2. You've got more of the audio spectrum to work with. From what I can tell, there's zero low end in that guitar - again, fine for a full mix, but thin for anything else. If you record closely, you'll have more low end, but you'll still have the high end...it just may be masked a bit, so taking some of the low end out fixes a ton of ills. I think it's better to subtract some low end rather than trying to boost an inadequate amount of low end. And let's face it, while yes, it's important to get the sound right at the source, EQ is a necessity the vast majority of the time just because you don't necessarily KNOW what the guitar needs to sound like until you get all the elements of the tune together. So give yourself something to work with.
Finally, I've used that 990 before...once. I'm not a mic snob, I don't think, but I found it VERY VERY difficult to get a desirable sound out of an acoustic with that mic. It's pretty hyped in the top end, and once you do ANYTHING to the track in terms of EQ or compression, it just emphasizes the flaws in the mic. I'm going to reiterate that I'm not a mic snob by telling you that you can honestly get a better, more usable, more versatile
acoustic guitar sound by mic'ing it with an SM 58 than with that MXL.
I type too much. I like recording acoustic guitars.
