Tracking acoustic guitar: more than meets the eye

I'm tracking vocals and acoustic guitar in my studio. Apart the fact that I don't play the guitar very well, the recorded performance isn't always very good.

A great recorded performance starts with a great song. If all you play are full chords with no life and no rhythm, no chord progression, no intent behind the song, it will sound bad, no matter how much money and trouble you spend on what follows. Learn music theory basics, learn progressions, practice your scales, spice up your chords with 5th and 7th and 9th and added and augmented chords. Write a song with a purpose.

Second, the performance: if I had Eric Clapton in my studio, said recorded performance would be amazing. So one thing I can do is practice my guitar skills like I practice my drums skills: learn other people's songs, play along, have fun. If you plan on recording yourself, be prepared, know your song; practice a bit before going for it.

The third element in the chain is the instrument. My acoustic guitar isn't a $2000 piece of amazing art work, but it's reasonably easy to play and has a decent sound. Now, mind you, the strings and the tuning of the instrument is a part of the instrument in my book. Change your strings often, have a replacement pair just in case and tune your guitar; there is no excuse for a badly tuned instrument, whatever it is; tuner are cheap and work very well; you would be amazed at the difference in playing on a finely tuned guitar versus picking it up and pressing "record".

The fourth element in the chain is the microphone. I have two large diaphragm condenser mics. One came with my audio interface (Tascam, not very good), the other one (Rode, much better) I bought because I didn't like the recorded sound of my voice with with the Tascam. So I usually track my acoustic guitar with the Tascam because I have the Rode set up with the stand / shockmount combo for vocals. I'll try the Rode on the guitar one of these days. Recording an acoustic guitar isn't just plugging the mic into the interface, randomly pointing the mic in the general direction of the guitar and start recording. Why? Because mic placement is a job in itself in a large studio. That's what recording engineers do: they place microphones (amongst other things, of course). My studio isn't large by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't mean that because I have a small home recording studio I can't try to do what the pros do. So I recorded myself playing a succession of full chords, plucked chords and muted riffs at different distances between the mic and the guitar, with the mic pointing at different parts of the guitar. I then compared (A/B is the official cabalistic term here) the different tracks and found the best combo for me. Generally speaking, the mic's "front" (i.e. where the mic pattern captures the most sound) needs to be pointing at the guitar but not at the sound hole; lots of people talk about the 12th fret as a starting point. Distance is also very important: too close and you'll get lots of low frequencies (low end) and get a boomy sound that's usually not very pleasing (proximity effect); too far and the room reflections will play too large of a role in the sound and the guitar will sound too distant. Find that sweet spot and you'll be very surprised at how nice your seemingly crappy acoustic sound now sounds great.

Other elements might enter into the chain: a pre-amplifier for the microphone (mic pre) if the sound level you capture isn't high enough with respect to the other sources; outboard (i.e. not in the DAW) gear such as compressors and EQ, etc. I'm not going into details here because a) I don't have them b) I don't plan to have them c) They're not mandatory to have a great sound; furthermore, mic pres can "color" the sound, i.e. add harmonics that will change the frequency content of the signal to give it warmth or clarity (whatever that means). I like my sound as clean as possible up until I decide (usually in the mix) that I want to change the sound.

Once you capture your great performance with a well placed mic recording a well tuned guitar with a nice set of new strings, you can start looking at the sonic content of your track in your DAW. If it's not good, resist the urgent to add multiple plugins to "fix it in the mix". Go back to the performance. Change the mic placement: that's the easiest EQ you can possible have! When you get a decent sound that you like, start with taking out whatever comes in the way: use a gate to remove background noise. use EQ to cut off unwanted low end which might compete with other instruments (bass, kick drum); carve out of your raw track something which sounds nice and may a bit thin: that's OK because by doing all this subtraction, you have done two things: allow other instruments to occupy the frequency space and reduce the total energy of your track so that adding other tracks doesn't ruin everything. Notice I said carve out and not add in. That's very important. I would only add or boost certain frequencies in very special occasions. As a noob rule set for myself, I even try to never do it. Carve like a sculptor, don't add like a cook.

So there you have it. If you follow this advice like I've followed it, you'll be much happier with your acoustic guitar tracks. Recording them will be easier, faster, and you will have more energy to spend on the other tracks that will make your song sound great.

EQ or compression?

I am a regular listener of some audio podcasts, amongst which Ask Joe (Gilder). Joe is a nice guy and tries to answer as many questions as possible, in the nicest possible way.

Which is cool.

However, sometimes, I think being a bit more direct is warranted. I know it's bad for business, but it's good for shaking people up. One of the questions was: should I be using compression or EQ on my mixes?

My answer would have been: if you're asking, you should be using neither.

Asking if you should be using EQ or compression is like asking if you should cook broccoli in water or in oil. If you're asking yourself the question, it means that you need to first read up on those effects, i.e. do your homework. It's not like we're in 1990. In 2012, you type in either of those words in whatever search engine you like, and Bing! you've got tons of answers. You see, I haven't been doing this for long. I have been reading a lot, spent hours online in forums, and my conclusion is this: if you don't know what a plugin does, don't use it. Recording / mixing / mastering is not some black art. It's an art form that you can get good at with a well trained pair of ears and some understanding of acoustics and audio. Don't know what EQ does? Read about it. Get one (yes, that's 1) plugin, most likely the one supplied with your DAW, and learn how to use it, inside out. Don't apply some recipe (boost by 1dB at 400Hz) because some dude said so. Try it, listen, and make your own conclusions. Then read up some more and try to understand how things work. Not learn how things work. Understand. Huge difference. Learning, monkeys do very well: presented with banana, smile to get it, peal it, eat it. Understanding is knowing the underlying principles and inner working of things so that you can apply those principles to different situations. If you learn to boost by 1dB at 400Hz, the day you get a recorded track which for one reason or another would already have a peak at around 400Hz, you'd end up killing your mix.

So what are those effects, you might ask? Well, you can Bing them but I'll try my own explanation. EQ (equalizer) is an effect which allows you to add or subtract energy from your sound wave at certain frequencies in the audible spectrum; you have very basic equalizers in most audio devices and software (iTunes, MediaMonkey, etc.) with usually 5 to 7 bands of frequencies arbitrarily bundled together. EQ is probably the first plugin you need to understand because with EQ you can carve out the bad stuff (there are also other effects which allow you to do that) so that what's important stands out. Note I said carve out and not add up. When you record tracks in your home studio, like I do, the quality isn't that great for lots of reasons we'll go into some other time. The first thing you can do, of course, is to understand how to properly record your instruments: the best EQ is good mic placement and a great performance. That's why there are recording engineers. Once you have your tracks, take stuff out until the track starts to sound "thin"; you'll know it when you hear it: the track loses its "character"; go back and add up a little of what you have just taken out. If you do that for all your tracks, you'll see that all of a sudden, stuff starts to pop out from the tracks: you're on your way to a nice song. So that's EQ.
Compression? Compression limits the energy at a certain level (measured in dB) with some parameters that tell the plugin how to do it. That's it. What I hate about compression is that a lot of people seem to use it without understanding how it really works because everyone else does it and because it's cool and because it "puts the tracks together". OK. So now that I've learned that, I'm going to slap a compressor plugin on all my tracks, all the time. NOT :-) So I'm not using compression at all because I haven't figured out how it works. It's on one of my ToDo lists (remind me to tell you why I have multiple :-)).

Now Joe, being the good pro that he is, kind of changed the question into: if I should only use one, which one would it be? Joe agrees with me (haha): EQ.

Understand EQ :-)