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Mic Demo (Neumann U89 and Rode Classic II)


rockabilly69

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Wonderfully musical, as usual, Daniel. Love the changes. To my ears, a "quiet" recording, but one in which the subtlety of the instruments (slide noise and harmonics, overtones, sustain) isn't lost at all. Sounds very balanced to me. After your caveat, I thought it might be a bit boomy. Not at all! How'd you set the mics up, relative to the guitar(s)? Another swell post! Thanks....

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Rob, you hit my recording ethic on the head. I'm trying to get "quiet recording" where nothing is hyped. The low end typically gets exaggerated when you get close enough in

to get the little extra things coming off of the guitar (slide noises, etc). That's what I meant when I said it's all about the low-end, in other words, it's not exaggerated, but more

what I hear when I sit and play my guitar at home (100 year old house with high ceilings). I've got all my guitars where I want them, so I shifted focus and started listening

closely to different microphones.

 

My favorite microphone set up for recording acoustic guitar is M/S (mid-side). For M/S recoding you use a figure 8 microphone pointing left and right, and one cardoid

(sometimes you can get away with an omnidirectional) microphone pointing right at the source. The capsules of the microphones are lined up right on top of each

other and equidistant to the source. For a starting point I generally point them at the neck joint of the guitar. Then I close my eyes and move my guitar around while

playing until I hear what I want to hear in my headphones. Then I hit record. After recording the two tracks, you clone the one figure 8 microphone track, and flip the phase

of the new cloned track. You now have 3 tracks (fig 8 track, cloned fig 8 track, mid track). You then then pan the original fig 8 track hard left, and the cloned track hard right.

The mid track in panned directly center. In the mix you bring up the sides till they balance with the center track. The soundstage of M/S recording sounds very natural to

me and very open. The Rode Classic II was the mid mic set to one-click away from cardoid (towards omni), and the Neumann u89 as the side mic set to Fig 8.

 

I used my stereo Drawmer 1960 pre/comp for both microphones, and each channel was set to 4:1 compression with a fast attack, and med release.

 

For the slide track I just used the the Rode Classic II, and cloned that track. I panned each one of those about 50% left and right. I also used a Waves R-Comp compressor and

a PuigTech EQ plug-in on these two channels. Over the whole mix I used a Slate Digital VCC plug-in (set to Trident) and a Waves Reverb.

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Dan, thank you for sharing your music and your tips on how to record.

Your music is always bringing me somewhere

You know Gio, I love music that takes me somewhere, so I very appreciate this, and of course, all of the other nice comments!

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Wow, that was beautiful. Well played.

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exemplary recording, as always!

 

love the slide playing

 

 

and thx for the detailed notes, I will experiment with some of that mic placement too!

 

am curious why you flip the phase on the L/R dupe track? wouldn't it sound better of the panned L/R were in phase?

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