recording classical guitar

Z

zinc1024

New member
I've pulled together a budget set of components for recording my classical guitar work. Here's what I'm working with so far:

- Dell XPS 720 (duo-core at 2.4Ghz, 2Gb, dual 10,000 RPM drives plus some USB 2.0 based 7200 drives for holding audio data), running Win-XP.
- Rode NT5 mics (matched pair).
- EMU 0404 audio interface (USB 2.0).
- Cakewalk SONAR Home Studio 6XL.

Yes I know I could get "better" mics and a better AI (and/or higher quality pre-amps). The NT5's seemed like the best quality for the money ($300) from my research, and similarly for the 0404. Please don't say "get better h/w", this is what I'm going to work with at least for the first round!

I'll be recording in my living room which is:

- on the larger size, probably 18' x 30'
- high peaked ceiling, pine
- partially open on one end (the "far end", where I will be facing from the other side of the room while playing) with a large archway entrance (no doors).
- a large arch of paned windows on the other end (my back would be to the windows as I record).

I'm playing a nice axe, a top of the line Baarslag, using Hannabach carbon strings. I do aspire to be worthy of the guitar, which is a lifetime endeavor since it's a concert class instrument, and this project is just one more motivator!

The last component, the 0404, should arrive tomorrow, and my grand experiment in home music production really begins. Oh yea, what do I want to achieve? A nice to listen to CD for family and friends for christmas, something that sounds reasonably professional and good enough to play more than once as an obligation!

I suspect I'll need some sound baffles. In the interest of easy set up and tear down, I probably need to get some "real" ones. I found a web site with reasonably cheap ones (about $50/2x4 baffle) but darned if I can find it again! Qxx or something, but I don't remember and can't find it again quickly; any pointers here, or other recommendations?

I'm a bit worried about background noise level, both in the house/room, and outside noises. I play best late at night, and I'm on a reasonably "suburban" street for San Francisco, so I'm hoping to not be affected by outside noises too much, though it's sure to happen occasionally.

I am wondering if you wizards can help cite a few of the Big Bumps I'm likely to be hitting soon though? And what I might do to get over them? I'm doing okay so far with Sonar set up and usage, I've been messing with a little 25 key M-sys midi controller making space music with the synths, learning to do all the basics. And yes I've got ASIO working, everything's reasonably real-time now.

I'm still reading/studying what I can, re: micing, mixing, mastering, etc. I just bought the Mixing Engineer's Handbook, seems like that will be educational, but what would be best for learning what I need to know re: Mastering? There seem to be a number of books on that subject and it's not clear to me which would be the most effective purchase there.

Thanks much,
-Kevin
 
You are doing fine. You'll need 2 good mic stands and a stereo mic bar. Do a search on stereo mic techniques, especially the following: Coincedent mic'ing (AKA X-Y), mid-side recording (AKA MS- this will require a 3rd mic you don't own yet), Blumlein recording, spaced stereo recording, Jecklin disc. With classicals and nylon string harps, I've had my best luck with X-Y, backed off about 5-6'. Yep, your room is going to be a problem. That high wooden ceiling is going to reflect sound, creating natural reverb, and possibly phase distortion, standing waves, all that bad stuff. The fact that you have a badass guitar with a big voice will only make it worse. A canopy might help. Imagine 4 speaker stands around you covered with a sleeping bag, a comforter, something big and soft. then put those baffles (gobos) between you and any hard flat surface. Hard flat surfaces, especially ones that are parallel, are going to be your enemy. Next, get mouse and monitor extension cables, and figure out how to get your CPU into another room. The fan on that baby will be picked up by those Rodes like a $20 bill at a pimp's convention. Make sure you have a chair and a footrest that make *no* noise. Start getting soft and silent. Best of luck.-Richie
 
Richard Monroe said:
You are doing fine. You'll need 2 good mic stands and a stereo mic bar. Do a search on stereo mic techniques, especially the following: Coincedent mic'ing (AKA X-Y), mid-side recording (AKA MS- this will require a 3rd mic you don't own yet), Blumlein recording, spaced stereo recording, Jecklin disc. With classicals and nylon string harps, I've had my best luck with X-Y, backed off about 5-6'. Yep, your room is going to be a problem. That high wooden ceiling is going to reflect sound, creating natural reverb, and possibly phase distortion, standing waves, all that bad stuff. The fact that you have a badass guitar with a big voice will only make it worse. A canopy might help. Imagine 4 speaker stands around you covered with a sleeping bag, a comforter, something big and soft. then put those baffles (gobos) between you and any hard flat surface. Hard flat surfaces, especially ones that are parallel, are going to be your enemy. Next, get mouse and monitor extension cables, and figure out how to get your CPU into another room. The fan on that baby will be picked up by those Rodes like a $20 bill at a pimp's convention. Make sure you have a chair and a footrest that make *no* noise. Start getting soft and silent. Best of luck.-Richie
Click to expand...

Good advice, Richie. His high ceiling is "peaked", so it may not present a significant problem. My best advice is to spend a couple of days recording in different parts of the room with diferent mic placements and seating locations and directions. Label each take (you can keep them in the same file) and make detailed notes regarding the mic positioning, seating location and direction in the room, etc.

It's a lot of work but can pay major dividends as an ongoing reference and learning tool.
 
And keep notes on what works, what doesn't work, and why a particular set up does or doesn't work.
If you're like me (hopefully, you aren't), you try something one day that doesn't work and unless you have a strong memory for such things, you'll try the same thing two weeks later. Writing notes down helps avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over.
 
Thanks all.

The computer system fan noise is certainly a Big Problem...yikes. Moving it around is an SOB, and there's real good place for it to go (the only reasonably close spot with a door is a closet in the entry hall off the living room, and I'm afraid of heat buildup in there).

I think a more reasonable solution is switching the recording venue to my bedroom (upstairs and away from computer, kitchen/refrigerator, and other major consumer electronics), and running a long USB cable to the 0404. Then I'm dealing with a more traditional medium size boxy room with low ceiling, and an array of large pane windows at one end. I guess all your baffling suggestions are valid there too, and I'll think about what I could rig up.

My problem there (actually anywhere, but a little more in the bedroom because the windows there face west and north, to the ocean and GG entrance) is going to be ship foghorn blasts. Stunningly loud on a foggy night...

Well, no one said this would be easy! Thanks and thanks for the micing methods to investigate, and I'll give a report (from my detailed notes!) after I've given some things a try.

-Kevin
 
Change of plan...my bedroom windows face towards (3 blocks away) a major 4 lane street, and we are on a hill above it...too much background traffic noise! (Except at 2 - 3 am, not!).

So the new plan is to quiet the PC, by switching to quiet case fans, a quiet CPU fan, and sound absorbing material inside the case. Between that and it being on the far side of the room under an enclosed desk...well, I'm going to give it a shot and see if I can get it to an acceptable level.

-k
 
I've dabbled with recording classical guitar. Mic placement is extremely important as I guess it is with any other recording. At my master's recital they did the 5-6' XY and that has a pretty nice sound. At home I've used a Neumann bullet about a foot away from the guitar. I do this so I can get less of my not-so-good room and more of my Dake Traphagen. If you point the mic right at the sound hole you get too much boomy sound. If you point it at the left hand you might get more squeaks from sliding up the neck. Of course the best way to take care of this is to be a great player but still, when recording you want to minimize it. I found the best mic placement to be to point it at the 12th fret about 14 inches away.

What types of pieces will you be recording? Christmas stuff?
 
Thanks all!

Not christmas stuff, classical pieces ala Tarrega, Albeniz, Ponce, Bach, Sor, Carcassi, Ravel, Villa Lobos. I'd love to play some Paganini but hey, maybe next lifetime!

Well, in the spirit of giving back and maybe helping some other noob, here's a few interesting tangles I've had to sort through so far. The current bottom line: I'm successfully recording through my Rode NT5's -> Emu 0404 -> Cakewalk Sonar 6XL, and successfully playing what I've recorded back, so I'm pretty much off to the races.

Some interesting ramp up trials and tribulations:

- Cakewalk track views, controlled via the tabs at the bottom, initially drove me nuts, mostly because I didn't really grok they were there and what they are doing (and because they initially come up in "custom" mode with lots of stuff cut out of the view). What they are doing if you aren't on the "all" view is take away pieces are parts of the track parameters, and I spent more than a few minutes as I initially was spinning up on "how in the heck do I change this track's input or output?".

- Calkwalk's concept for how tracks relate to synths. I want to play my midi controller and hear it, then record it. Okay, I need a midi track with the controller as an input, sure. Now how to get that to a synth? There are in fact two ways: create an audio track and load a (soft) synth as an effect, AND make the output of the midi track that same synth. That's method one, not to be confused with instead having an explicit synth track, through "insert software synth", which creates an explicit synth track (a different TYPE of track from "midi" vs. "audio"). And it creates a new audio and midi track for you, and I won't try to explain here how that is all organized, if I even have it figured out yet myself. Sometimes documentation of various types talks to one method, sometimes another; can be quite confusing.

- Can't have a synth still in and active in an audio track effects bin if you are going to change the input to your sound input port and expect it to record and play!! Gotta pull that synth out of there.

In general I tend to be going through a lot of "okay, so why THIS TIME" am I not yet hearing it/recording it?", and I keep finding new reasons!

- An external audio interface is a new/different "sound card" for the computing system, and various software components only want/expect/handle ONE sound card active on a system at a time. So my casual assumption that I could hook up my Emu 0404 via USB, input from it, then play what I record out on my built in sound card connected up to the computer speakers...NOT! Well, in fact, not not...it worked...for a few minutes initially, until ASIO4ALL went bonkers, at which point the EMU USB port goes dead, and "why won't this record anymore?". A bunch of trial and error led to the "aha, even though calkwalk gives me the choices of this vs. that sound output, and even though the ASIO4ALL control screen shows me two different I/O ports...they are conflicting somehow, in a random kind of way that takes varying amount of time to fail" This trial and error involved way too many reboots and enabling/disabling the onboard sound. Finally I realize the answer (and s/w expectation) was that my EMU had to be my new sound output port if it was also going to be my sound input port. Nicely, it provides a small stereo out plug used by my computer and powered speaker set up.

- Emu 0404 software install never completed successfully. It always hung. And I suffered from a little RTFM failure. I read the install instructions paper insert, it said to turn off any onboard sound first (without saying how: first through the firmware controls you access through an F2 or similar key when the hardware first powers up, second through choosing disable after going control panel, administrative tools, device manager, audio/sound, right click on your sound device...), so I did, and proceeded to install. (Also note that it never said "and don't ever think you'll be able to turn that onboard sound card back on and use it at the same time as you use your Emu audio interface!) Several attempts later I read the "quick start guide", since my install was hanging (after the install shield seemed to complete, by the way, but the initial 0404 install screen would hang and never close/finish). THAT said to first power up and connect the 0404, THEN install...whoops!! That caused a lot more to happen during install all right, and get me to a "device is working properly" state when I checked it via the device manager, yeah! I still had to terminate the installation program/screen manually, it wouldn't finish on it's own, and it's not obvious installation has been successful but...I got it all working.

- Audio track outputs seem to need to be specified when recording, even if you are okay with "none". Only after specifying an output was I able to get/see/record signal on a track, if I selected "none", nope. I'm probably missing something here still but so far, that's my experience.

Bottom line result from a few hours of installing and integrating: I got 2 minutes of guitar playing recorded using an XY mic arrangement at 1.5M slightly above soundhole height, and it didn't sound half bad, for a first ever successful try!


So now it's upward and onward to the real fun and issues of room silencing, mic'ing, mixing and mastering, oh boy! (Not to mention 20,000 takes...). But before I get too deep in that I want to get a few tunes laid down and do a practice run on generating a CD, and figure out how I want to organize my recording of pieces relative to tracks and projects and what not. I don't want to end up with a lot of material in some horrible structure relative to doing the mastering and production work, so I want to understand that path now rather than later.

For the 1% of you that actually made it this far, here's a basic question: I assume I just want to use the stereo mic pair as a stereo signal that I record onto a single audio track, since processing from there is going to be uniformly applied to the stereo mix. Any reason to instead record onto two tracks using mono inputs from each of the two mics?


-Kevin
 
I can throw up a few recordings of a Nylon string. I've been quite successful with two LDCs in the past but you seem to have done quite a bit of research, so good job.
 
Would love to hear them and the specific techniques (micing, processing) used.

I'll do the same once I have something worthwhile...probably will be a few weeks, particularly as I'm on the road all next week and will make no progress.

Any suggestions on places to start re: mastering for classical guitar would be useful. (I guess with a simple stereo recording in of a single instrument, there isn't really any "mixing" to do, is there?) I realize a lot of that question revolve around taste. I'm not looking this time around for as much an "honest" sound as a highly pleasant sound for casual listeners.

-Kevin
 
zinc1024 said:
Thanks all!


For the 1% of you that actually made it this far, here's a basic question: I assume I just want to use the stereo mic pair as a stereo signal that I record onto a single audio track, since processing from there is going to be uniformly applied to the stereo mix. Any reason to instead record onto two tracks using mono inputs from each of the two mics?
-Kevin
Click to expand...

The whole point of recording with two mics is to put them on separate tracks. Panning the two tracks opposite each other is how you define your stereo image. Recording two mics onto a single track is not stereo, it is mono. Record each mic to its own track.
 
tdukex said:
The whole point of recording with two mics is to put them on separate tracks. Panning the two tracks opposite each other is how you define your stereo image. Recording two mics onto a single track is not stereo, it is mono. Record each mic to its own track.
Click to expand...

What he said.-Richie
 
Cakewalk, at least Pro Audio 9.3 I use, allows you, if you want, to record a stereo signal to a single track. The track will auto pan the signal L & R and you can then process as you wish. I don't do this often as it doesn't allow any tweaking of panning nor individual processing if required. BUT it can be done.
 
Times have changed, acoustics havn't

Back in the day I used reel to reel recorders with crappy mics. While the hardware has changed the sonic nature of the environment and the performance are still the critical features to a good Classical Guitar recording. Take your rig to a hall, theater or room where you can play your pieces without interruptions or outside noises. The ambient sound of the rooms reverberation can make your guitar sing. There is nothing worse than nailing a performance only to find the room had a buzz in it or outside noise polluted the recording.
 
Thanks all for the input.

Gotta say the comments about "that's mono" had me royally confused until Rayc's comment about Cakewalk allowing stereo (two channels of audio data, one "left" and one "right") to be recorded onto a single track. That's what I've been doing, and...it's definitely stereo, two channels of audio data, one from each mic, one left and one right...but on one Cakewalk "track". But I can see how getting each mic to a separate track increases flexibility, so I'll switch to that.

As for the suggestion of doing this in a hall somewhere, well yea, but that's not the idea. I'm an amateur, this is home amateur effort, it's going to take me a lot of recording to get acceptable source material, and indeed part of the plan is use reasonably high quality recording on a routine basis to get there. Yea, background noise is an issue, my largest problem being my wife not going to bed early enough, quite frankly!

A new question: what levels to record at? I do find the EMU input gains are extremely sensitive, and the range from "way too low" to "way too high" is extremely small, about 1.5 ticks of the dials (which have about 8 or 10 total tick marks). Makes it a little tricky to dial in what I want re: levels. The real question though is what levels do I want? Where should the average signal level be, roughly? And where should the peak signal level be, roughly? Is "fill it up and it's good as long as you don't clip" a reasonable strategy, or is there a good reason to keeps the recorded signal more constrained? I like the sound of the more full signal BUT I'm pretty sure that I'm being suckered by simply being able to play it back louder and being confused by "hey, I can hear more!".

The related question is what's an acceptable noise floor (for a reasonable amateur recording, I'm sure the pro answer is something well beyond what I could possibly attain!). When I see the meter dancing down low when nothing is happening in my room...what's the highest reading I want to see? I assume recording at lower levels helps reduce the impact of background noise...or does it? I could see how maybe because ratios of instrument signal to noise don't change, recording at lower level might not help cut the impact of background noise...I dunno!


THANKS!!

-Kevin
 
In order to get your wife to go to bed earlier, have sex with her. This will help her sleep, and will also relax you for the recording process.

One thing I would try for a guitar like that is to record with a single mic, a foot or two away, perhaps pointed at the bottom of the sound hole. (It might be good to try a greater distance; however, that will increase the background noise.) I don't think an XY setup under these circumstances is worth the aggravation. Use a little compression if you can; this will enable you to increase your recording volume a little and get those nice big fluffy-looking .wav files without clipping.

To help you figure out where in the room to play and which direction to face, try getting someone else to play the guitar with you sitting right in front of them.

Try throwing a blanket over the computer to quiet fan noise. Just don't forget to remove it.

As a low tech self-recorder, I find that low tech solutions often work best. Especially the sex part.
 
Feedback wanted (be gentle...)

Attempt #1 is ready for your feedback (constructive is always nice...):

www.garageband.com

search for kevin d. morgan

click on songs tab, then one of the pieces on the right. Sorry I don't know how to provide a direct URL...

The playing is weak but I'm not extremely focused on that right now, I want to get the recording and processing right for what I'm looking for before focusing on the performance. What I'm looking for is a vibrant sound that captures the complexity of the guitar tone/overtones just as your ear would hear them from 4' away.

So please give me feedback and suggestions for improvement re: micing and sound processing.

Specs to refresh are:

- Rene Baarslag classical guitar, Hannabach carbon strings
- Rode NT5 stereo pair XY config, 18" from sound hole (slightly above)
- Emu 0404 audio card, running at 24 bit.
- Cakewalk Sonar 6XL.
- Cakewalk reverb, EQ, and Boost11.
- 320 bit MP3

Thanks!

-Kevin
 
Well Kevin, I'd say you are off to a pretty good start. Listening through a cheap sound card and speakers I feel you are capturing the full sound of the instrument. It's detailed and clear with all notes sounding natural.
Very nice.:)
 
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