Compressing Acoustic Guitars, and the dichotomy between what's said and what's done

[DrewPeterson7]

That could be the ultimate issue. They typically aren’t great recording guitars. Taylor’s tend to have a very bright top end with a big scoop in the mids, which is kind of the opposite of what you want in the studio. Whereas, some other big dreadnought (think D-28) models are tubby in the low end. All of these things play into recording acoustic guitars.

A mahogany 000 or OM usually hits the mark in the studio better than other body styles. Good headroom is another factor, which is a deficiency for a lot of Taylor’s. Taylor’s tend to crap out if you play them too hard almost like there is a hard limiter on it. You can dig in to a point but at that point you can play it harder but the sound just gets mushy instead of bigger.

I’m not trying to knock your Taylor, but that’s just the facts. If you came into my shop I could show you exactly why Taylor’s top bracing is deficient when it comes to recording a world class acoustic sound. I freely admit to being a tone snob when it comes to flat top acoustics. I’ve build over 400 of them and have remanufactured over 3000 Harmonys and Kay’s to give them that world class tone.

I just today finished building this Koa wood OM Custom Baxendale Guitar. I’m going to record it over the weekend before I deliver it to the customer. I’ll try to post the recording.

The best sounding/recording guitar in my shop is a 1940’s mahogany H165 that I rebraced like a prewar Martin. See the last photo.


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Please don't take this the wrong way... but you might want to go back and re-read my post you're replying to.

I like how Taylors sound... but I OWN a Martin MC16-GTE, an 0000-sized mahogany bodied acoustic. It's not without issues - I think harder-picked treble notes get a bit harsh and plastic-y - but it DOES record very well, and does still sit better in a rock mix with some moderate compression.

 

[Scott Baxendale]

Please don't take this the wrong way... but you might want to go back and re-read my post you're replying to.

I like how Taylors sound... but I OWN a Martin MC16-GTE, an 0000-sized mahogany bodied acoustic. It's not without issues - I think harder-picked treble notes get a bit harsh and plastic-y - but it DOES record very well, and does still sit better in a rock mix with some moderate compression.

Yeah, I can imagine on the Martin OOOO that the treble would get a little harsh sounding. It’s a little too big of a body to get that clear tight sound that comes from a world class vintage model.

The world class guitars from the 1930’s, such as Martin, Gibson, Larson Brothers, and a few others have a sound that has a definitive hard front end attack on the note when you pick it. It’s a dry, woody tone but when you first hit the string it’s almost like the note jumps out of the guitar really fast. Modern guitars, not so much. The front end of the note is rounder. This also describes the sound difference between Brazilian rosewood and Indian rosewood. When you tap on a rosewood back the Indian has a nice round ring to it, but the Brazilian sounds like you are tapping on a piece of glass.

A lot of this translates directly when recording the guitar. This is also the magic of many of the rebuilds I do. When I take a department store guitar and rebuild it with tuned scalloped 30’s style bracing many of them immediately have this “magic” with its tone. I can get this sound and put it into a new/vintage guitar for a small fraction of the price of buying a real 1930’s premium guitar. The guitar in picture is a 1940’s era all mahogany 15” OM model which will now hold its own against a 1934 Martin OOO-18 which sells north of $30k and we sell this for $2800 with new case and lifetime warranty. In the studio this guitar rules.

 

[b1j]

I haven’t seen much in this thread about why to use compression, just a bit about taming the peaks. That’s fine, I guess. For me, though, nothing says “acoustic guitar” like the quality of the transient. How are the strings met by the player? That’s what needs to be honored. Recently, with both pick-strummed J-45 chords and fingernail-plucked D-18 arpeggios, I’ve been using a basic standard compressor like the stock compressor in Studio Pro. I don’t know the generic name for that kind (VCA?), but it’s the one with the positive-sloped graph and the following controls. Here’s what I found softens the loudness jumps while not crushing the transients:

• Attack 25 - 50 ms (I think this is the money setting)
• Release 125 - 150 ms (allows for a smooth return and can help with sustain)
• Threshold —10 dB
• Ratio 2:1 (I try to play so I don’t need more than this, but I’m not always successful)
• Knee 5 or less

Makeup gain is rarely needed unless there’s a pronounced headroom surplus.

Now, if the overall dynamics are a little out of whack, I can precede the standard compressor with gentle use of an optical LA-2A type. But I always try to preserve the delicateness of the transients.

How did I arrive at this? By crushing (and ruining) transients on some earlier recordings! Thuum, thuum. Artificial and horrible.

 

[Bstrom]

I USE hardware compression going in, parallel compression on the acoustic buss, and light compression on the track at mixdown.

the hardware compression gives me color, and tames just the peaks, makes it much more mixable...
the parallel compression on the buss, lets me dial in the final level of compression, and is the most transparent.

the compression on the individual track, is what i use to get the acoustic to sit in the mix and play nicely.

you could try ONLY the parallel compression, where you can set it up either on the track level or across a buss, and mix in as much or little compression as you need, with total control over the original uncompressed track, with the compressed signal mixing in underneath it.

Excellent starting point and a way to profile different instruments to find their sweetest sound. Thanks!

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Yeah, I can imagine on the Martin OOOO that the treble would get a little harsh sounding. It’s a little too big of a body to get that clear tight sound that comes from a world class vintage model.

The world class guitars from the 1930’s, such as Martin, Gibson, Larson Brothers, and a few others have a sound that has a definitive hard front end attack on the note when you pick it. It’s a dry, woody tone but when you first hit the string it’s almost like the note jumps out of the guitar really fast. Modern guitars, not so much. The front end of the note is rounder. This also describes the sound difference between Brazilian rosewood and Indian rosewood. When you tap on a rosewood back the Indian has a nice round ring to it, but the Brazilian sounds like you are tapping on a piece of glass.

A lot of this translates directly when recording the guitar. This is also the magic of many of the rebuilds I do. When I take a department store guitar and rebuild it with tuned scalloped 30’s style bracing many of them immediately have this “magic” with its tone. I can get this sound and put it into a new/vintage guitar for a small fraction of the price of buying a real 1930’s premium guitar. The guitar in picture is a 1940’s era all mahogany 15” OM model which will now hold its own against a 1934 Martin OOO-18 which sells north of $30k and we sell this for $2800 with new case and lifetime warranty. In the studio this guitar rules.

Missed this earlier, somehow - I still don't think I've quite gotten what I'm saying across.

I'm using my Martin for strummed rhythm parts in fairly dense rock mixes. It may not be an all-around killer sounding guitar and I may have areas I'd nitpick it on, but it's a very good sounding guitar, and one of the things that it truly excels on are softly strummed to moderately strummed chordal parts.

the softly strummed parts need very little compression in the mix - I'm just wrapping up tracking so I've only done quick scratch mixes still using VST amp tones - but the busier, moderately strummed stuff, when you're layering that behind an electric guitar, you need it to sit in a pretty tight dynamic range. This has nothing to do with tone and everything to do with arrangement; I'm a pretty even player but sometimes the odd transient pokes out a little and sometimes the part does lend itself to digging in a little more for emphasis. And, even if the performance on its own sounds fine, when you're layering against, say, a moderately distorted electric guitar, that can be the difference between an acoustic adding some sparkle and woodiness to the soundscape, and an acoustic aggressively poking out over the top.

This isn't a vintage or modern thing (and it's also not like this is a brand new guitar; it's hardly vintage, but it IS a '90s Martin so it's probably about 30 years old), it's absolutely a genre specific dynamics control thing. A pre-war Martin might sound a little nicer on the sparse or solo'd parts, and if I had that kind of cash I would be happy to own one, but it wouldn't magically compress itself and sit perfectly evenly behind a PRS into a moderately driven, clean-to-distortion depending on how hard you hit, Rectifier. Getting any guitar to sit in a mix like that is going to take some dynamics shaping.

 

[Scott Baxendale]

would be happy to own one, but it wouldn't magically compress itself and sit perfectly evenly behind a PRS into a moderately driven, clean-to-distortion depending on how hard you hit, Rectifier.

The differences are more dramatic than most folks think.

This track may be entirely different than what you are going for, but on this on I’m using a SM7 with no compression going in on the acoustic guitar which is my OM shaped H162. ( Spruce over Mahogany) there is also no EQ on the acoustic to speak of outside of a high pass filter.

This is still just a rough mix with little compression on the track.

The vocals were recorded through a Manley ELOP with some compression going in.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

That's a very cool sounding track, but no, not really the genre i'm after, and even on my laptop the acoustic (IMO) sounds undercompressed to me. Ran down to the studio setup to double check on speakers that are a little more up to the task, and I still agree - dynamics aren't really controlled in the way I'd want to hear them here. A LA-2A styl;e squishiness with maybe something else quite a bit more aggressive out front lopping off just the more extremwe transients would help the two guitars gel a little more, I think.

This really may be as simple as genre and style, and you just really liking a much less compressed, "spikier" sounding acoustic. Which is cool, but the fact I tend to like rhythm acoustics with a little more compression than you do isn't some failing of modern guitar construction, it's probably more of a stylistic choice, and I remain very happy with how my Martin sounds in a mix for a good 95% of what I do with it.

 

[TulipAcid]

Fascinating thread. As I play mandolin with other mandolinists and sometimes have been recorded by hobbyists in their early explorations, this explains a lot. About why the recordings sucked even though our performance sucked a bit less.

And also why some performances suck because of the pursuit of volume at the expense of tone.

I had to read a primer to better understand compression and dynamic range — found this: https://hub.yamaha.com/audio/music/what-is-dynamic-range-and-why-does-it-matter/

I loved Scott’s discourse about modifying modern acoustic guitars to get that “sound” of their predecessors.

One comment — as I play with many hobbyists in a community band (Minnesota Mandolin Orchestra, which fields about 30 performers at our gigs) I see this often. It’s one thing to play with confidence, another to dig in so hard that one loses the “good sound” in pursuit of volume on an instrument that was made to play in one’s parlor.

If you want to see a range of instruments — from early gibsons to modern made instruments made by independent luthiers, come to one of our performances. Check our schedule on mnmando.org