Mixing an Acoustic Guitar, pointers?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Burge
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Burge

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Hello all, I'm fairly new to the home-studio recording community - this being officially my first forum post ever pertaining to recording music and all that is entailed.

My question is, does anyone have any tips when it comes to what plug-ins to use or how to EQ an acoustic.

I'm new to everything, so here's my specs: I am using Logic Studio 9 for software, I have a MOTU Ultralite 3 as my interface, a Martin DM with a pickup I had installed a few years back (I forget what brand/model), in a small room with significant amounts of sound absorbent material surrounding the recording area.

I have a solid unprocessed recording. Now, so far I have read and browsed about mixing an acoustic guitar and I have a compressor and an EQ set. I've seen that a filter might be necessary but have no idea how to begin to work one, and have tried figuring it to no avail.

With all that said... could someone please help me with this, any tops would be greatly appreciated. :) Thanks
 
spaced pair, LDC for the hole, about the 12th fret use a pencil condenser...pan about 30, 60...i use a neumann tlm 103 and an sm81..works nice.
 
To start I recommend getting a good sound with one mic, generally around the 12th fret. Then add the second, but I don't often use two, one can be just fine. Keep it simple to start with. Compression can run the gambit from heavy to just a touch to tame the peaks to none. EQ is mostly in the mic placement, sometimes a little off around 700 hz, a high pass around 60, and a slight boost around 12k. This is just a starting place.

I'd start with getting 90% of the sound you want with just the mic placement. Then add light eq. Then figure out how you want to compress ( light to start with). Then add moderate reverb. It's a long process and acoustic guitar is one of the hardest things to get good. And a ton of it is your personal preference.
 
With acoustic guitars you can get away with removing a lot of low end (up to 100hz or so) without sacrificing the percieved tone of the guitar if the mix is sufficiently busy and this clears out a lot of room for bass guitar and kick.. however if the song is focused on the acoustic as a main instrument you may want to leave more bottom in.

Also I find that a nice short reverb (mostly early reflections) can add depth and space without adding mud

good luck
 
I agree that sound should be close to polished when tracking. I personally like to record my Taylor in X/Y stereo with a DI to add a bit of attack. From there EQing and compressing is dependent on the context of the track you're working on.
 
random effect said:
With acoustic guitars you can get away with removing a lot of low end (up to 100hz or so) without sacrificing the percieved tone of the guitar if the mix is sufficiently busy and this clears out a lot of room for bass guitar and kick.. however if the song is focused on the acoustic as a main instrument you may want to leave more bottom in.

Also I find that a nice short reverb (mostly early reflections) can add depth and space without adding mud

good luck
Click to expand...

Well said.
 
You shouldn't need to perform any drastic eq changes if your mic placement is good. If anything, maybe just a 1.5db hi-shelf beginning at like 2.5k to get the sound of the strings being strummed to cut through a little more. In other words, keep it simple. If things get out of hand, re-track it until you're satisfied.
 
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