Guitar Gear

If you record at home like me, you’ve probably devised different ways to get good quality sound in your recordings; all without breaking the bank. Make no bones about it, to record good-sounding songs is going to take a small investment but it shouldn’t make you spend your life savings. I’ve been recording in my garage for decades and I’ve learned some neat tricks; in fact, I’m still learning!

Now one thing that has always been a challenge to record for me is acoustic guitar. I’ve pored over article after article from pros on how they do it. But they also use great and expensive mics. But it’s not that I dismissed the great information in these articles. I just had to adjust it to the equipment and environment that I had to work with, and I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned here.

Use two decent mics. Okay, I know that’s a bit of money. But believe me, it’s worth it. And while I have a dedicated instrument mic – a Sennheiser e609 – I only use it to mic my amp cabinet. I actually use vocal mics to record acoustic guitar because I feel they’re designed for natural sounds. The mics I use are a Heil PR22 and a Shure Beta 58a. The Heil costs $119 while the Beta 58a costs $159. Yes, it’s a bit of an investment but to me, these are simply great mics for the money. The Heil has more presence than the 58, but the 58 has a nice, round, bottom-end.

How you place your mics is important. I’ve read about all sorts of different mic-placement methods, but many of those were using condenser mics and recorded at a far distance. The PR22 and Beta 58a are dynamic mics, and work best closer to the sound source. What I discovered in my last couple of recordings is a placement that works with all my acoustic guitars (I have three). Here’s a quick sketch of where I place them:

As far as distance is concerned, the PR22 is about 6″ from sound hole, while the Beta 58a is about 2″. Both are pointed directly at the guitar.

You’ll notice that the PR22 points more towards the high strings above the sound hole. This avoids the boominess from lower strings. The Beta 58 picks up the body resonance. Once I have the mics placed, I set their input levels on my interface so they’re roughly equal, and I arm both inputs for recording.

When I finally get to mixing them, I pick a side I want to pan the two tracks. Whatever side I choose, I pan the PR22 10-15 degrees to that side, then pan the Beta 58a about 25 degrees. This provides a really rich sound.

Here’s an example of how my J45 sounds in a song recorded this way.

Note that the ONLY things I did with either of these tracks was to filter out some of the bass and I added a bit of reverb to the PR22 track to get a kind of wet/dry sound. I also rolled off some of the highs from the PR22 track because that mike has a natural presence boost that can make the guitar sound a little too shimmery. The result is a really rich sound!

Note that this is my setup. But it’s a good starting point as I’ve used different mics in the same configuration and gotten pretty good results.

Don’t assume you can EQ bad stuff out.

I used to be of the mind that I’d just get a take, then EQ to “fix” the sound. But to be honest, that only works for real minor things, such as how I rolled off the highs a bit on my PR22 track above. But anything more than a slight adjustment will never sound good.

I say this immediately after the mic placement section because though I gave a good starting point, ultimately, depending on your guitar(s) or mics, you’ll have to play around with placement. I found that even if you just have inexpensive mics, getting good placement will give you a good starting point from which you can EQ if necessary.

You need a quite place to record, but you don’t need a silent place. I’d love to have a completely sound-proofed recording space, but as long as I don’t have a lot of background noise (like kids screaming), it’s quite possible to get good takes where it would be really difficult to tell if there was ambient noise. Plus, one of the things that I love about the PR22 mic is that, like all Heil mics, it has unparalleled rear sound cancellation, so that helps keep tame any background noises.

Don’t be afraid of your input gain knob. The more sonic content you can capture, the better, so make sure you have your input gain up. You just have to be careful when you play that you don’t move or make other sounds that’ll get picked up by the mic. It’s not easy to do at times, especially if you’re capturing a strummed guitar, but it’s not not doable.

Yeah, this is the poor man’s approach to approaching acoustic guitar recording, but it’s effective and produces great results if you work at it!