Recording - August 2013 - 40

available as an add-on outboard product, that to my ears comes the
closest to the sound of a miked-up recording.
The Fishman Aura is a system which combines an onboard pickup with
an electronic section (built-in or in stompbox format) that contains “sound
prints” of various models of real guitars miked up with various high-end
mics. If the player chooses a guitar that Fishman has used for its sound
prints (or a guitar of similar design), the Aura system will add the missing
body resonance and mic tonality and ambience to the sound from the
onboard piezo or magnetic pickup. The results are surprisingly rich-sounding, and while the system is designed more for live than studio work, it
could be used to provide a more-than-usable track even in recording.
One trick the Aura system uses is also another good approach, in
general, to try to salvage a DI acoustic sound—mix a little bit of mic
signal in with the DI signal. Even if the mic signal, on its own, might
have too much leakage or other problems to be used at full level, a little of it blended with the DI can restore some of the missing air and
tone, and, in combination with eq and other tweaks, turn an unusable
recording into a passable track.

Figure 10a. A cardioid polar pattern (shown here on the
Lewitt LCT 640) has a broad, shallow null at 180º, which
rejects sound from behind. The dotted line represents lower
frequencies, which aren’t rejected as well... a common issue
with most if not all mics.

Figure 10b. In supercardioid mode, the nulls are deeper and
narrower...

Figure 10c. ...and in Figure-8 mode, they’re very deep, making
them really useful for a singer/guitarist miking arrangement.

to restore some of the missing body resonance also common
with piezo systems—a convolution reverb loaded with an
impulse (sound print) of a very small room or even a sample
of a wooden box (like a guitar body!) might be useful.
Some higher-end guitars like Taylor and Martin have
much more usable onboard pickup systems, combining
elements (bridge & body sensors, and even internal minimics) that can provide a far more suitable sound than the
more common inexpensive designs. Taylor’s “Expression”
system offers high-quality onboard sound. And Martin
licenses an advanced system from Fishman, which is also
40

RECORDING August 2013

The singing guitarist blues
The situation that may provide the biggest challenge when it comes
to isolation is the singer/guitarist who needs to play and sing at the
same time when recording. Now, in the old days, this was not an
issue—everybody played and sang together, and were all recorded
in one pass (in mono, no less!). Even nowadays, if you’re not worried
about having to separate or edit the performances after the fact, the
leakage doesn’t have to compromise sound quality, as long as you
observe the usual conventions for multi-miking (see above). But sometimes isolation will be required between the voice and the guitar, for
later editing, or for independent processing, and then this can be a
problem. There are, however, ways of addressing it.
You could, of course, simply ask the player to perform the two parts separately, overdubbing one at a time. If he/she is amenable, and the performance doesn’t suffer, then—problem solved. However, this may not work out
for musical reasons, and the quality of the performance must take precedence over recording considerations. So, assuming you’re stuck trying to
capture the two together, with at least a modicum of separation, what to do?
Well, if a decent onboard pickup system is available, that might be
a partial solution. You could achieve an isolated guitar track, and the
guitar leaking into the vocal mic will even blend with the DI, warming
it up as discussed above. However, the vocal track may still have too
much guitar on it to control or process as required, and a fuller solution may be needed.
I’ve seen people try to isolate the guitar and vocal mics with small
baffles placed above the player’s hands and below the neck, with the
vocal mic above and the guitar mic below, in an attempt to block
sound waves from the guitar and mouth getting into the wrong mics.
While this may sound promising in theory, it’s kind of a risky and
somewhat dubious approach for a number of reasons. First off, you
won’t really achieve as much separation as the visual might lead you
to expect—remember, sound waves can easily get around barriers.
The baffle itself might cause unwanted and problematic reflections to
back up into the mics, negatively impacting sound quality. And it can
feel awkward for the performer, who will likely either complain, or
worse, soldier through but deliver less than the best performance.
Probably the best approach to this situation is to try to take advantage of the polar patterns of cardioid and figure-8 microphones, which
reject sound from certain angles as discussed above. Again, all directional mics have a null spot, where they will pretty effectively reject
sound even from a close source—or at least reduce it to a severely
attenuated, muffled low-frequency signal. If the mics can be angled to
take advantage of those null spots, while still capturing high-quality
sound, then a surprising degree of isolation can often be achieved,
even with the sources as close together as in this scenario.
For example, if a cardioid-type vocal mic is positioned so the back
of the mic (its null spot) faces the guitar while the front faces the
singer’s mouth, and a similar guitar mic angled down at the guitar
with its back facing the singer’s head, decent isolation can result.
Given the angles and distances involved, and the size of most mics,

Recording - August 2013

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