Recording - July 2017 - 26

So You Want
To Record An

Acoustic
Guitar?

proximity effect than the cardioid, but a
100 Hz rolloff will usually cure that.
If you're looking for Oktava MK012s,
by the way, you need to get them from the
official distributor (oktava.com). I mention
that because there was a rash of MK012s
on the market about 10 years ago that
had failed to meet specs, and they were
followed by knockoffs that weren't really
Oktavas. Go to the official source and
save yourself some heartache.
What about Scenario 4, the dense mix?
I'd actually choose the same mic I'd use for
the other setups, making sure not to use one
that woofs out or screeches. A little gentle
boost in mixdown around 10 kHz (no more
than a couple of dB) plus a steep rolloff of
the lows should make it fit in nicely.

Other voices
I've only mentioned a few mics
above. What about some others?
In an article I wrote for Recording
several years ago, I touted the Neumann KM 84 (hero of my session with
Bob Abrams). Unfortunately, the KM 84
is long gone, and its successor (the KM
184) is a very different-sounding microphone; though I've liked the KM 184 on
flutes and mandolins, I haven't had much
luck using it on acoustic guitars. The
KM 84 occasionally shows up on Ebay,
though, and deserves mention here. I've
had excellent results using it on Taylor
and Gibson acoustic guitars; it seems to
get along less well with Martins and their
imitators, as it tends to woof out on them.
What about the venerable Neumann
U 87, which I also lauded in that
long-ago article? When you're recording solo or duo guitars, without a
singer, it can do a splendid job on an
acoustic guitar-the U 87 has an unusual
liquid quality that imposes itself over the
guitar's tone. It's a very 1970s sound.
26

RECORDING July 2017

Unfortunately, the U 87 now sells for
about $2400, not including shockmounts.
Somewhere along the road, I had the
pleasure of reviewing the Sennheiser
MKH40, a small-diaphragm condenser
mic. My memory of using it on acoustic
guitar is that it had a unique ability to draw
the listener's attention. When it was on a
guitar (say, in a small ensemble) you had
to listen; the instrument just wouldn't stay
in the background foliage. That might be
what you're looking for or it might not, but
in the right context it can be an enormously
attractive sound. The MKH40 costs about
$1200, the same as the Gefell M930.

Hear me in stereo
One alternative available for recording
acoustic guitar in Scenarios 1 and 2 (solo/
duo guitars, with or without a singer) is to
mic the guitar in stereo. One way to do
this on a solo guitar is to point two mics at
the instrument's body-one on the usual
15th fret, the other down by the bridge-
panning them hard-right and hard-left
respectively. This can produce a "biggerthan-life" guitar sound that spans a listener's speakers-sort of like a 10' acoustic
guitar body. I've done this a few times;
Julie Henigan's album American Stranger
has several examples. On that recording,
I think I was using Shure SM81s on the
guitar. When vocals leak into these mics
from the side, their response is basically
flat with a rolled-off treble.
The hazard in recording guitar with
two parallel mics is that most guitarists
move around a little when they play. (Julie
doesn't, luckily for me.) This changes the
relative distances of the two mics, and two
things can happen: first, the image of the
guitar can shift drastically in the speakers,
sounding like the guitarist just jumped
across the room.
The other problem that can develop
from the guitarist's motion is comb filtering.
If he or she twists the guitar so that it's
closer to one microphone than the other,
cancellations and reinforcements will
happen in the high frequencies-a 1"
difference in guitar-to-mic distances will
produce a cancellation at 6.8 kHz and
a reinforcement at 13.6 kHz.
For recording an acoustic guitar in
stereo, therefore, I prefer to use an XY
arrangement, using two cardioid mics

(usually small-diaphragm) nose-to-nose,
with their capsules angled at 110° and
stacked one above the other (see Figure
4), and the whole assembly sitting-
where else/-above the 15th fret.
The sound clip that goes with this
article (downloadable from https://
is.gd/RECJuly2017AcGuitarExample),
used by permission of the artist, Phil
Cooper, is one of my favorite acoustic
guitar recordings. Phil was playing a
small-bodied Breedlove C2 guitar, and
I put an XY pair of cardioid Oktava
MK012s over the 15th fret, panning
them hard left and hard right. I think I
rolled the bass off at 100 Hz to compensate for proximity effect, but there
was no other EQ or processing used.
Can you do this when someone is
singing? Yes, if you're careful. If Phil had
been singing on this track, I might have
used the hypercardioid capsules on the
MK012s; XY works with hypercardioids if
you change the angle to 90°. And here's
something that might only work with Phil
Cooper's voice: I used to record him
with an XY pair of KM 84s or MK012s
at neck level (his neck, not the guitar's),
and I could change the mix of guitar and
vocal by adjusting the mics' angle. I did
need to use a pop filter when I did that,
as most small diaphragm condenser mics
are inordinately sensitive to p-pops. The
guitar was off-axis, but on the KM 84s
and MK012s I was using, it actually
sounded good that way... so much so that
I occasionally recorded Phil's guitar with
the mics in that position even when he
wasn't singing.

Beyond the mic
The quality of your mic preamp matters
a lot on acoustic guitar recordings. If the
preamp is thin-sounding, or one-dimensional
(flattening everything out until it sounds like
a cardboard cutout), or hard and shrill in
the high frequencies (the telltale clue is
exaggerated pick and fret noise), your
recordings of acoustic guitar will suffer for it.
I can't emphasize this too strongly;
too many low-priced interfaces include
cheap mic preamps that won't do an
acoustic guitar justice. If you have a separate mic preamp, and can patch it more
directly into the A/D converter, your
acoustic guitar recordings can gain a


http://www.is.gd/RECJuly2017AcGuitarExample http://www.is.gd/RECJuly2017AcGuitarExample http://www.oktava.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2017

Contents
Recording - July 2017 - Intro
Recording - July 2017 - Cover1
Recording - July 2017 - Cover2
Recording - July 2017 - 1
Recording - July 2017 - 2
Recording - July 2017 - 3
Recording - July 2017 - 4
Recording - July 2017 - 5
Recording - July 2017 - Contents
Recording - July 2017 - 7
Recording - July 2017 - 8
Recording - July 2017 - 9
Recording - July 2017 - 10
Recording - July 2017 - 11
Recording - July 2017 - 12
Recording - July 2017 - 13
Recording - July 2017 - 14
Recording - July 2017 - 15
Recording - July 2017 - 16
Recording - July 2017 - 17
Recording - July 2017 - 18
Recording - July 2017 - 19
Recording - July 2017 - 20
Recording - July 2017 - 21
Recording - July 2017 - 22
Recording - July 2017 - 23
Recording - July 2017 - 24
Recording - July 2017 - 25
Recording - July 2017 - 26
Recording - July 2017 - 27
Recording - July 2017 - 28
Recording - July 2017 - 29
Recording - July 2017 - 30
Recording - July 2017 - 31
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Recording - July 2017 - Cover3
Recording - July 2017 - Cover4
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