Recording Acoustic Guitar - Middle / Side

cobaltaudio

cobaltaudio

New member
Hi all!
Recently I've had a lot of questions on recording acoustic guitar in stereo, so I thought I'd share a technique some of you may already know well, but is probably new to many - recording guitar with 'middle and side'.
It can be a tiny bit fiddly, but it can also sound really sweet.
Here's a walkthrough of how to set the rig up, and a few of the pros and cons: M/S acoustic guitar

I hope it helps and you find it interesting!
 
i'm a huge fan of M/S recording of acoustic guitar. a lot of the stuff i've been working on recently has been acoustic guitar lead and M/S gives such a beautiful, rich, big guitar sound. i've found it can sometimes be to "big" in fuller mixes but for folky stuff or singer/songwriter stuff it's great.

as a side note, is that your walkthrough? if so, how are you finding the sE X1R?
 
I have a question: If you have a figure-8 ribbon mic, how would you turn that signal into a stereo track in a DAW? Is there an option to make a stereo track from one mic?
 
guitarguy101 said:
I have a question: If you have a figure-8 ribbon mic, how would you turn that signal into a stereo track in a DAW? Is there an option to make a stereo track from one mic?
Click to expand...

the way i did it for a while was simply to create a new track and copy the "side" channel onto it and then carry on as normal with panning as polarity inversion. the only danger is if you slip/it's not a perfect copy when it comes to inverting the polarity of one of the sides it sounds odd. alternatively, there are some M/S decoder plugins where you just need a mono mid and mono side track. for example, in Logic, the "direction mixer" plugin can act as a M/S decoder; you pan the mono mid channel hard left, the mono side channel hard right, send them both to the same stereo bus, put the "direction mixer" on the bus and in the plugin set the input to M/S rather than L/R
 
Justsomeguy said:
i'm a huge fan of M/S recording of acoustic guitar. a lot of the stuff i've been working on recently has been acoustic guitar lead and M/S gives such a beautiful, rich, big guitar sound. i've found it can sometimes be to "big" in fuller mixes but for folky stuff or singer/songwriter stuff it's great.

as a side note, is that your walkthrough? if so, how are you finding the sE X1R?
Click to expand...

The great thing is though, that if it's too big - you just bring down the side channel, and it gets proportionally narrower without losing the tone!
glad you enjoyed the guide, and yes - the x1R, how are we finding it? Funny you should ask, have had it since this sE x1R review and haven't looked back since!
 
guitarguy101 said:
I have a question: If you have a figure-8 ribbon mic, how would you turn that signal into a stereo track in a DAW? Is there an option to make a stereo track from one mic?
Click to expand...

Justsomeguy said:
the way i did it for a while was simply to create a new track and copy the "side" channel onto it and then carry on as normal with panning as polarity inversion. the only danger is if you slip/it's not a perfect copy when it comes to inverting the polarity of one of the sides it sounds odd. alternatively, there are some M/S decoder plugins where you just need a mono mid and mono side track. for example, in Logic, the "direction mixer" plugin can act as a M/S decoder; you pan the mono mid channel hard left, the mono side channel hard right, send them both to the same stereo bus, put the "direction mixer" on the bus and in the plugin set the input to M/S rather than L/R
Click to expand...

Another way of doing it is to simply route the side mic to two channel inputs on your DAW. The benefit here is that it allows you to do live monitoring in stereo etc which can be VERY helpful during setup if you're recording yourself playing the guitar. Saves playing, recording, listening then moving mics and repeat - you just play and listen then move mics.
Of course this does mean your side channel doubles in file size, but you can always delete one lot from the session + harddrive completely and copy/paste the other later if you're worried about it.
 
Incidentally - if you are using an older version of Pro Tools that DOESN'T compensate for plugin delays (Pro Tools 10 should compensate ok), then be really careful when you phase invert with an eq plugin.
If you put a single band eq plugin on the two side channels AND the mono and invert the phase of one of the side plugins - then you can be sure that everything stays in sync. Just putting one eq plugin in and inverting it might mess up your tone and stereo image because of the processing delay.

be careful!
 
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