The "faker" acoustic sound

D

dumass

New member
hey, how would you go from the real true natural acoustic sound to the acoustic sound of Dashboard Confessional and The Starting Line? The guy that i'm recording right now likes his sound more processed like Dashboard's sound.

is this in the eq or compression or reverb or what?
 
I'm listening to "The Swiss Army Romance" RIght now. There's definitely a good amount of compression. I'd mic it and take the direct in. Some of the parts sound really direct.
 
It sounds to me like there is quite a bit of direct signal mixed in on most of Dashboard's acoustic stuff. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I have a nice fishman preamp/blender on my Taylor and I sometimes use it to thicken up an acoustic track that isn't going to be doubled. It sounds like Chris is using a pretty good amount of direct though. I know he mostly plays Gibsons and Guilds.
 
hey! I could be wrong, but I always thought his stuff was done with some heavy compression and two seperate tracks...one guitar track on the left, and one on the right panned fairly hard in either direction. it's so thick, that I'm guessing there might even be another track here or there blended in. There's little more (in most of his early stuff) besides vocals and guitars, that there's not a lot sonically to get in the way, so it's just full on with probably little EQ.

His new stuff is just too damn comercial. the old stuff like Swiss Army... is the stuff I dig.
 
Oh! I just remembered something about the Dashboard Confessionals guitar tunning that help make the tracks seem so thick...

This is a way he ends up tuning his strings for a lot of songs...

Db | Db | Db | Db | Ab | Db

So, as you can see, he's hitting a bunch of the octives...even when he uses standard tuning, he tends to hit a lot of the strings open. It's kind of interesting to check out a tab site of his stuff. It's not very traditional the way he plays...lots of open strings that are always ringing around.
 
i love the way those guitars soundon his older stuff too. it's awesome, i reference all the time when micing acoustics.

anyway, I think the extreme brightness etc. of it is a combination of a killer acoustic guitar, awesome mic/pre. mixed really well, and since it's really only guitar and vox, the entire spectrum can be used for just those 2 things. compression, a touch of reverb. panned guitars - a lot of tracks soun hard L/R.

those are all things that of course play into it all, and you can't expect to match it perfectly in a home studio with mediocre gear and experience I think. at least I havn't been able to get THAT close.
 
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