irish acoustic guitar tunes

[Trichter]

Hello all!
Lately I played a few irish/english folk songs on acoustic guitar and decided to give it a try recording.

Attached are two songs:
Greensleeves
... pure acoustic guitar, from my Ovation Celebrity in a Line6 pod go, adding some reverb, delay and an effect called "ubiquitous vibe" . Recorded on a DP24-SD, adding a little compression.

Ballyhoura Mountains
For this I recorded 4 tracks in total. Drums and base from a Digitech band creator; rhythm guitar ("dark" EQ setting and lots of reverb to put it more in the background) and lead picking guitar.

I plan on recording some more tracks, but would like to get some feedback first on how to improve.
Thanks in advance!
Cheers!
Trichter

 

[keith.rogers]

The guitar sounds like it was possibly recorded too hot and is clipping. And, it's noisy, so if you can't use a microphone to record acoustic guitar (my preference, regardless of the guitar), then I would suggest starting by plugging the guitar in directly to the Tascam, making sure it's plugged in where it expects a guitar-level signal. (There's a switch on the back - looks like the last input/"H") Then set the fader (slider) for the track you've assigned that input to at 0, or a little lower, perhaps, and turn the Input TRIM so the assigned track is not going much above -10dB. The full mix needs to stay below 0dB.

Once you have levels set so there's no clipping, and you have eliminated noise sources, possibly a bad cable or just physical/technical things, and really have that optimized, you can consider whether it's necessary to add additional things in the signal path, like that POD device. If it gets noisy or clips with something else added, you'll have to figure out what is causing that, and if it's a setting you can dial in to fix the problem, or it's equipment.

 

[Trichter]

Thanks for the response.
I will give it a try and record it with the guitar directly plugged into the Tascam. Maybe less is more

In the Greensleeves song I noticed that I probably did the mastering in the wrong order. I normalized before applying a compressor, what could lead to clipping. During recording I noticed no clipping.

Also, the piezo pickups record alot of my finger noise on the strings (have no better word for that ). Is there a trick to reduce this?

 

[keith.rogers]

Thanks for the response.
I will give it a try and record it with the guitar directly plugged into the Tascam. Maybe less is more

In the Greensleeves song I noticed that I probably did the mastering in the wrong order. I normalized before applying a compressor, what could lead to clipping. During recording I noticed no clipping.

Also, the piezo pickups record alot of my finger noise on the strings (have no better word for that ). Is there a trick to reduce this?

I would not "normalize" unless you can control it, like say to a peak of -10dB, before adding FX. There's a guy on YT (whose name is not coming to me right now - Gilder?) that suggests working on a "static" mix, using only gain/faders/pan, i.e., no FX, to get the first pass on the mix. You may have to split some tracks to separately adjust levels on some portions, e.g., for a louder chorus, whatever, to do this, but it should hold together without FX. Then you can start adding your EQ, compression, reverb, whatever.

Compression is going to lift the quieter parts, relative to the whole, so those small technical kinds of noises just get louder. It's why I'd say get a microphone, even if you still need to use the pickup, then you can possibly EQ out some of the noisier parts coming in that way. But, you might need to just pay more attention to how you are picking to try and soften those noises.

Recording yourself is the great "Revelator" when it comes to being objective about what's working or not. And, that's the puzzle that keeps many of us banging our heads on the wall - is it the recording method (direct vs. mic, mic placement, hardware, etc.?), mixing? performance? arrangement? on and on... Keep banging away

 

[Trichter]

It turns out that plugging the guitar directly into the Tascam improves the sound alot. Thanks for the tipp!
After some research in the web I found out why the PodGo screwed up the sound.
Apparently, the built-in amp/cabinet simulations are optimized for electric guitars only and work not so well with acoustic guitar input.
After figuring this out, I recorded a pure version of Greensleeves without any FX, a version with some reverb and finally a third version with reverb and compression.

Would be great to get some feedback/tipps on the sound.
Which version do you prefer?

 

[rob aylestone]

Def not version 3 - the compressed one - it seems to rob it of life, make it sound processed and accidentally catches some notes making them 'dead'. Through choice - probably version 2 with the reverb works for me.

 

[Trichter]

So here is another Irish guitar tune. This time only some reverb and a tiny bit of EQ (used the built-in 3-band-EQ of the pickups).
Hope you like it.