Acoustic guitar is a staple instrument across a variety of musical genres from Folk and Country through to Pop and Rock, so there’s every chance you are going to be recording one on a regular basis.

Here are our tips to help you get the best possible acoustic guitar recordings.

The Basics

Check Your Strings

Make sure the guitar has new strings on it. Guitar strings are a sponge for grease and grime, they would be a CSI’s dream, very soon even a new set of strings can start to sound dead and lifeless. If you are making the effort of capturing tracks then spend $10 and put a set of new strings on your pride and joy. Depending on the time you last did it then it might sound like a new guitar. Some suggest that new strings for recording can affect tuning, so let’s look at that next.

Tuning, Tuning And Tuning

Tune the guitar and after you have tuned it then check it and tune it again. It’s amazing how many well known tracks feature out of tune guitars, so invest a good chromatic tuner and keep checking the tuning before and after every take. Don’t trust your ears when it comes to tuning, the old 5th fret trick might be good for a bar gig but not for capturing a moment of guitar playing history (we hope!)

Mic Check

Your guitar may have a built in pick-up, that might be great (possibly) for live work but not for the studio so get a good microphone to record your guitar. If you’re on a budget then choose a good all rounder there are plenty of great microphones for those on a budget these days for around $150. These microphones have a multitude of uses from vocal through to instrument recording. If you have few bucks and have the budget for a dedicated mic then call up a good dealer and get some advice.

Use Your Ears

Not to strum with, that would be plain silly, but test the microphone position with the guitar. If you’re recording at home, not in a large studio with separate rooms, then the best way to do this is to put the mic through your headphones and the move the guitar around whilst listening to the results. Moving the mic further away wlll give you a more natural room sound, close up will give you more attack and body. Move the guitar around and you will hear the sound change dramatically. Read more below on microphone placement.

Relax

Relax and play! Studios have the effect of turning even some great players into a wreck. The best thing to do is to relax, play, do several takes and then have a listen back to see what’s working. If you have someone who is going to pieces then tell them you just want them to play along whilst you do some adjustments, but record it - I’ve got some great performances this way.

What Sound Do You Want?

The acoustic guitar is a versatile instrument capable of a range of different sounds that can be used in the arrangement of a sound in different ways. The different styles of playing an acoustic guitar benefit from different mixing techniques.

1. Strummed Steel Strings - Using a small-diaphragm cardioid condenser is the ideal way to capture the attack and brilliance of strumming on this steel-string guitar. Aim the microphone at the 14th fret and angle it toward the body to capture a balance of brightness from the strings and body from the soundhole. Moving the mic towards the neck emphasise the brightness of the guitar sound. Moving it towards the soundhole will capture more body.

2. Fingerpicked Nylon Strings - For a more delicate fingerpicking part, try a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser mic to capture the fullness and warmth of a nylon string guitar. Again, aiming the mic for the region where the neck meets the guitar is the best starting point. Make sure the mic is close enough that you don’t capture too much ambience from the room, but not so close that the guitar sound booms.

3. Using Two Microphones - With two mics, you can actively control the balance between brightness and a full low end. Use a small-diaphragm cardioid condenser on the neck to capture brightness from the strings. On the body, try a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser mic to round out the bottom end. Keep the microphones roughly the same distance from the instrument to avoid phase problems. Adjust the levels to create the perfect balance for the part, player and instrument.

4. X-Y Pair - Try a pair of small-diaphragm cardioid condenser mics in roughly the same spot as the single mic would go. The idea here isn’t necessarily a wide stereo image, but a very natural sound that provides control over the balance between string brightness and body.

Microphone Placement

You can spend a lot of money on a microphone, a pre-amp, converters, compressors and EQs to try and get a different or better sound - but there’s a free way to transform your sound and anyone can do it.

Move your microphone.

Simple as that, below are a number of recordings all done with the same guitar, a Taylor 414CE and with the same microphone in the same room. They were all recorded with an AKG C414 through a UA4710D and with a Maag EQ2.

As you will hear, the sound changes a lot depending on where the microphone is, those who do this all the time will already know the huge difference mic placement makes, if you are new to recording then spend time trying different mic positions when recording anything.

Microphone Placement In A Home Studio

If you have a home studio then use a pair of headphones as you move the microphone around. In the case of an acoustic guitar, put a strap on and then walk around the microphone as you play. You might also want to try a few takes with the microphone in a different position and then listen to check which one works best in the track.

Have fun!

Microphone Placement Audio Examples

How To Create Big Acoustic Guitars Without Using Any Plugins - Free Video Tutorial

Paul Drew shows how to create big stereo acoustic guitar tracks without using any plugins, this simple technique is used by top engineers and producers and should be in every recording tricks toolbox.

It demonstrates how flexible one single acoustic guitar can be in the right hands and removes the need for tricks using plugins that introduce delays and other phase related tricks, which in some cases do no translate well in mono.

Recording Acoustic Guitar With Four Different Stereo Microphones

James Ivey demonstrates the difference between four different stereo microphones when used for recording acoustic guitar.

Many people think of stereo microphones as something you use as a room or ambience mic, and while stereo mics are great for this, they can also very useful when recording much narrower sounding source material. In this article, I’m going to demonstrate four different stereo microphones used to record a simple acoustic guitar chord progression. This is not a shootout, it’s an opportunity for you to hear some very different microphones and decide which attributes of the recordings you like or don’t like. To compare these mics would be like comparing Apples to Car Tyres. You will soon see what I mean.

What Is A Stereo Microphone?

A stereo microphone is a microphone that can record two (or more) signals at a time using two (or more) diaphragms. The benefit of using a stereo mic over two mono microphones is that stereo mics are normally designed to get the two diaphragms as close to one another as possible thus reducing phase issues between the two diaphragms and the resulting stereo recordings. The obvious downside is that in most cases, stereo mics always record to two channels. There are some exceptions, but we can come onto that later. The other drawback is that due to having almost twice the number of parts, many stereo mics are quite expensive. See the tour of the Blackbird Studio tour video in which John McBride playfully throws a priceless stereo Telefunken 251 at the cameraman (3:23).

For this session, we have four mics to play with. The two most conventional mics are the Vanguard Audio Labs V44S and the Sontronics Apollo 2. The other two microphones fall into what we might call the smart or modelling microphone category. These are the Townsend Labs Sphere L22 and the Antelope Audio Edge Quadro. I’ll let you know how each of these beauties is being used and set up as we listen to each example.

Getting It Down

To keep things reasonably fair, all the mics were recorded through my Antelope Audio Goliath HD Gen 3 interface via my HDX card. The reason I used this and not my Audient console is that later on, I need 4 digitally controllable mic pres. The Goliath HD gives me 16 of these so I have plenty of scope for Jivey levels of overkill if needed. Also in the name of fair play, the gain of the mic pres was set to +30dB for all the recordings. It turned out this was a good nominal level for all the mics for when I and my Patrick James Eggle acoustic guitar were put in front of them.

All the audio files are also downloadable so you can line them up in your DAW for a better comparison if you so desire. The original session was recorded at 96kHz 32 bit the downloads are however only high bitrate MP3. No processing of any kind has been applied to these recordings.

Vanguard Audio Labs V44S

The V44S, by Californian company Vanguard Audio Labs, is a dual large-diaphragm FET condenser mic. The upper capsule can rotate through 90 degrees to allow different stereo configurations and each capsule can be set to either Cardioid, Figure-8 or Omnidirectional allowing X/Y, Blumlein or Mid-Side recording techniques from a single microphone. In this example, the two capsules are set to Cardioid with the capsules set 90 degrees to each other an at a 45 dress angle to the instrument (X/Y). The guitar is about 12 inches away from the mic which is pointing between the 12th and 14th fret. This is the same for all the examples moving forward.

Sontronics Apollo 2 Blumlein Ribbon Microphone

The EMI (Abbey Road) engineer and recording engineer Alan Blumlein was a true innovator the grandfather of many modern recording techniques including the one his name was given to - Blumlein stereo recording. Blumlein stereo is where we take two figure 8 pattern mics, place them at 90 degrees to one another and at 45 degrees to the source. Ribbon mics are particularly good for Blumlein recording as they naturally exhibit a figure 8 polar pattern. The Apollo 2 is the second in the Sontronics Apollo line and has two ribbon motors fixed at 90 degrees to one another inside a mesh housing and as you might expect from a ribbon mic the output is warm and dark and nothing like as bright or delicate as that from a large-diaphragm condenser.

Antelope Audio Edge Quadro

Antelope Audio is the newest player in the modelled microphone market but they have come in hard with a range of single and dual diaphragm designs and the behemoth that is the Edge Quadro a twin capsule, quad diaphragm 4 output microphone. Yes, this thing records to 4 channels and so requires 4 mic preamps. The following examples have been recorded with the capsules at 90 degrees to each other and 45 degrees to the instrument (X/Y) with the polar pattern of both capsules set to cardioid. The first recording is the Edge Quadro in its “naked” mode. No mic models are being applied in software post-recording.

Cracking The Code

For licensing reasons none of the mic modelling companies can name their emulations after the real thing, but it isn’t too tricky to work out what the models are supposed to be. In Antelope land if it says Berlin read Neumann and if it reads Vienna read AKG. So below with have the exact same take as the one above with first a Neumann U67, then an M49 then an AKG C12 finally the AKG C414.

Antelope Audio Edge Quadro-Berlin 67

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Antelope Audio Edge Quadro-Berlin 49T

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Antelope Audio Edge Quadro-Vienna 12

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Antelope Audio Edge Quadro-Vienna 414

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Townsend Labs Sphere L22

The final mic in this recording selection is a bit of a wild-card as so far, all the mics I have used have had two dedicated microphone capsules (or ribbon motors). In the case of the Townsend Labs Sphere, there is only a single dual-diaphragm capsule. However, with the help of the very clever real-time AAX-DSP Sphere 180 plug-in, we can emulate a stereo microphone in software and monitor this as we record. Later, if we are not happy we can change our minds and change the mic type or polar pattern when we come to mix. It has to be said this is not officially a stereo mic but it does do an amazing job of emulation two mics or different mics in a stereo field. Technically speaking the two opposing diaphragms are at 90 degrees to the source but the Sphere 180 software allows us to reconfigure the mics into a conventional X/Y configuration. If you want to find out more about how to achieve this check out the reviews and tutorials lower down the page.

Understanding Townsend Lab Microphone Codes

Once again Townsend Labs have gone with a slight spin on the naming convention so just in case you can’t work it out, LD-251 is a Telefunken 251. LD-67 NOS is a Neumann U67 with a New Old Stock valve inside. The LD-47K is a Neumann U47 and finally, the LD-017T is a Russian Soyuz 017 valve mic.

Townsend Labs Sphere-LD-251

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Townsend Labs Sphere-LD-67 NOS

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Townsend Labs Sphere-LD-47K

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Townsend Labs Sphere-LD-017T

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Final Thoughts

No matter which mic or which technique you like from the above examples the thing I really like about all the above examples is the interesting stereo image you get and the slight stereo movement in the sound as the player moves ever so slightly as they are playing. Yes, all these examples are panned hard left and right so the right-hand side of all of them is slightly louder do to the nature of how the sound is projected from the instrument this was just for demonstration. If these tracks were being mixed for a final recording you might choose to pull the stereo in a little to make the image more central but I like how the performance moves slightly in the stereo field.