Micing acoustic guitar players/singers?

[kludge]

A lot of players who want to sing and play simultaneously also want to dance and wiggle around while playing and singing simultaneously. Consider that when you're obsessing about clean-room sterility between your mics.

The worst part about it is that it becomes very difficult to punch in errors for one bad note here or there, on the guitar or the vocal. But if you can get ENOUGH isolation, you can get it punchable to the point where no one who isn't an obsessive audio engineering nerd looping the punch on headphones will ever notice.

 

[guitar junkie]

I have a two channel preamp and this is how I do it...

First I pick out a good mic for the vocal, and set it up as normal for someone singing...

I then take a LDC mic and place it so that it runs parallel to the neck of the guitar with the diaphram sitting at the middle betwean the sound hole and the neck joint. I then rotate the mic so it at a 45 degree angle from the guitar, point DOWN and away from the singer just a little more.... I then flip the guitar mics "phase'' button on the preamp.

Gain staging is key to making that stuff work well, but you can get a pretty clean sounding recording using that setup, with very little "bleed" in the guitar mic, and only a minor amount in the vocal. I tend to track things pretty much as you are gonna want them to sound in the final mix, rather than shooting for a ''fix it later" deal...

I can post samples if you send me a PM asking for em.

 

[thebigcheese]

Ick.

Unless of course it fits.

Yeah, pickups never sound as good because they don't really give you the whole image. BUT, they are good as a backup when you want to, say, double the acoustic track or fill in the sound a bit. And it's always clean, so you don't have to worry about the vocals.

But don't rely on it. Ugh.

 

[mixsit]

A lot of players who want to sing and play simultaneously also want to dance and wiggle around while playing and singing simultaneously. Consider that when you're obsessing about clean-room sterility between your mics.

The worst part about it is that it becomes very difficult to punch in errors for one bad note here or there, on the guitar or the vocal. But if you can get ENOUGH isolation, you can get it punchable to the point where no one who isn't an obsessive audio engineering nerd looping the punch on headphones will ever notice.

Good points. And with punches' with global (vocal/guitar combo micing) or separate, unless it's in a spot where there is only one or the other going on, seems likely you'd have to punch and replace both.

 

[crazydoc]

Also would like to add that playing and singing at the same time isn't an "unusual" way to record.

Back in the old days, we used to call it "music."