compressors

[sixtiesman]

This is my first post! Please be gentle!!

I have lurked here in the past and I know there is a LOT of expertise! So....dumb question number one:-

I thought I would try and record acoustic guitar and vocals.
One condenser mic through a compressor.

Resulting vocals OK ....guitar awful...distorted.

Switched compressor off, guitar sounds OK.

I have another condenser mic that I thought I would mic up the guitar with but I am now stopped in my tracks because the guitar would bleed into the vocal mike and distort!

any takers?

 

[Garry Sharp]

I'm a sixties man too!

There's nothing here you can't sort out fairly quickly. Take the compressor out of your recording chain until you have experimented with it a lot on playback. It sounds possible to me that you had the make up gain too high and clipped your recording input. Compression is very flattering to beginners (like me ) and it's easy to overdo it.

Just get your two mics set up and work on getting the best sound you can with nothing in the way. Then use the compressor between your recorder's outputs and your amp and you can happily experiment away.

 

[CoolCat]

vocal and acoustic

what room sound do you have?
blankets pillows, acoustic tile, drywall?
maybe alot of bleed thru due to room acoustics.

i've had the same problem, i started tracking them seperately but you can lose some of the "groove"....

uni-directional mics may help too.

good question...hope to hear some ideas myself!

 

[MarkoPolo]

I f your doing both at the same time
A) its better to be standing while singing and playing

B) sing a little up into the vocal mic not down

C) I would use a small condenser aimed down towards the hole of the guitar as to get less pickup from the vocal

just some starting ideas for you

 

[sixtiesman]

Thanks Guys....

My problem seems to be :-

a compressor setting for vocal plays havoc with a guitar!
I did not know this!

When I tested the one mic I was standing up with the vocal mic in the position described by Markopolo (thanks). There was no other mic but the spill into the vocal was enough to spoil.

I do agree with coolcat (thanks) that doing the voacl and guitar separately is not the same (less groove!!) and yes it's drywall which would make the problem worse.

So Garry's idea of knocking out the compression altogether and putting it in later would seem to be the only answer at the moment!?

I now learn I am using a "channel strip" dbx 286A with onboard compression, so if I switch this off am I wasting any opportunities here or is putting compression in later just as good?

Thanks for the ideas up to now!!!

sixtiesman