Recording an acoustic guitar duo in two separate rooms means great separation, but a lot of work to make the different spaces sound alike!
Back in SOS January 2016, I wrote about helping guitarists Christian Bolz (www.christianbolz.de) and Tobias Knecht (www.tobiasknecht.de) record high‑quality demos for themselves in their basement rehearsal room. On the face of it, helping musicians create their own recordings might appear like career suicide for a jobbing audio engineer such as myself, but most musicians I know hate techy chores, so even if they can record themselves, they’re usually thrilled to delegate at the first available opportunity! And in that event, of course, their second question after “How much can we afford?” is almost invariably “Who do we know?”, so if you’ve already planted in their minds that you’re (a) fairly competent and (b) not trying to rip them off, then you may suddenly find yourself top of their shortlist.
Fortunately for me, that’s exactly what happened in this case, because they subsequently asked me to record their full‑length debut album. However, for that record they wanted to aim for a more modern and ‘produced’ sound, in recognition of their move into increasingly complex and percussive fingerstyle arrangements, so we had to change our tactics substantially. In the first instance, it was quickly agreed that we should acoustically isolate the two players to make best use of session time (we only had a couple of days to record 26 bits of music!), so we could comp freely between takes during editing, and independently process each instrument at mixdown. With this in mind, I suggested that we use the nearby Mastermix Studios, because its glazed isolation booth would maintain a sightline between the players, and we’d be able to take advantage of its great collection of mics and preamps into the bargain.
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During our pre‑session discussions, the guys played me some commercial records that had inspired their new direction, and in particular a track called ‘Boogie Shred’ by renowned virtuoso Mike Dawes. I’d previously mixed a record for another fingerstyle wizard called David Youngs (http://davidyoungs.net), so I already had plenty of ideas about how to approach the project from that angle. To be frank, though, I was far less confident about how best to record the instruments in the first place to facilitate that kind of end result. So I cheated!
What I mean by that is that I checked the credits on ‘Boogie Shred’ and Googled the engineer responsible, who turned out to be the wonderful Josh Clark of Get Real Audio (www.getrealaudio.com). I find that studio folk are, on the whole, happy to respond to polite technical inquiries, but Josh was uncommonly gracious, providing masses of detail about his recording and mixing tactics — what a gent! Now, it’s worth clarifying that I didn’t plan simply to copy his setup; there would be little point in that, given that I was recording different music, different players, and different instruments in a different room! Nevertheless, there were plenty of ways Josh influenced my plans.
For a start, the presence of an omni Oktava MK012 within Josh’s close‑mic line‑up reassured me that I probably wouldn’t go far wrong by adopting an ‘if it ain’t broke’ policy and recording the guitars with the same pair of omni Oktava MK012s that had sounded so appealing for demo purposes. The band and I had both independently bought MK012s following that session, so we could give each instrument its own pair. Whereas I’d instinctively have started out with these close mics a foot or more from the instruments, Josh advised me to bring them within eight inches and then add separate ambience mics, thereby giving more control over both the degree of detail and the depth perspective. In such close proximity to the instrument, I also decided to space the mics less widely than I had in the home studio (about 10 inches apart), to avoid a ridiculously stretched stereo image.
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Mike’s setup for recording this fingerstyle acoustic guitar duo: the players are acoustically isolated from each other, while visual contact between them is maintained. Josh’s top tip for the more distant mics were AKG C414 B ULS condensers set up in a Blumlein configuration (ie. figure‑of‑eight polar patterns crossed at 90 degrees). We didn’t have these exact mics available in our case, but we did have access to a pair of C414 B XLSs and a pair of C414 EBs, which seemed like no‑brainer first selections nevertheless. I deviated from Josh’s Blumlein setup, though, for a variety of reasons. Partly it was that I prefer the sound of omnis in general, and partly because I wanted to go for a more spacious and decorrelated spaced‑pair ambient character. However, I also felt that wide‑spaced ambient mics would pick up two different perspectives on the guitar tone, giving a more holistic capture, whereas any coincident pair would only sample one perspective, and might also sound more similar to the tone of the close mics if centrally placed.
Another important aspect of the Mike Dawes setup was the use of three different DI signals, so even though the instruments we were using had only one DI output option, I allocated each of the players a Radial StageBug SB4 (specifically designed for piezo pickups). Finally, I planned some spare recording channels in case, like Josh, I discovered that additional close mics were required to capture certain aspects of the performance — particularly the percussion, which involved tapping a variety of different points on the instrument.
Although I knew placing Christian in Mastermix’s booth and Tobi in the main live room would provide great isolation between the instruments, it did present something of an acoustics problem: the booth was much deader‑sounding, so I was concerned that this would make the two instruments sound obviously incongruous in the mix, despite their similar miking. As far as reverberation was concerned, there was no way to significantly alter the nature of the booth sound, so I resolved instead to block the live‑room reverb from reaching Tobi’s mics by surrounding him with a ‘tent’ constructed out of the studio’s four tall gobos and my trusty collection of duvets, carabiners and bungee cords.
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Because the studio’s isolation booth added almost no reverb tail at all to Christian’s guitar sound, a ‘tent’ was built around Tobi to eliminate the live room’s natural ambience from his sound too, thereby matching the acoustics of the two spaces more closely.
A difficulty with recording acoustic guitar, though, is that it tends to sound best when the mics pick up plenty of early reflections. You see, the instrument’s resonating wooden body has tremendously complex and variable frequency dispersion characteristics, and this means it sounds very different from different angles. Without any early reflections from the environment, each mic picks up only one of these angles, and the recorded sound can therefore lack upper‑spectrum harmonic richness and complexity. So while I was keen to avoid any reverb tail on the guitars, I nonetheless wanted to encourage early reflections.
The booth was very dead‑sounding, so Mike propped up some MDF off‑cuts to reintroduce some natural early reflections and enhance the upper‑spectrum tone of Christian’s guitar. In Tobi’s case, I knew the live room’s hardwood flooring would already work in our favour, but I also decided to arrange the gobos in my ‘tent’ so that their reflective sides faced inwards. The booth, though, had no reflective surfaces other than the window, so I decided to bring a stack of MDF off‑cuts with me to reintroduce some reflections that way. These I leaned against the walls at various points, angled towards the playing position.
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One further setup problem needed addressing: the booth window was a little high in the wall, so Christian and Tobi (who both performed seated) would only really be able to see the tops of each other’s heads. Some pre‑session DIY paid dividends: I bought a thick slab of MDF and some robust L‑shaped aluminium profiling, and used these to build a simple platform that would fit neatly over four of the heavy‑duty plastic crates I use for transporting my recording gear.
Mike put together a DIY podium in the booth to raise Christian’s seated position and improve the sightline between the two guitarists. The resulting podium felt reassuringly solid, had comfortably enough space for Christian’s chair on top, and added another source of early reflections beneath his guitar. Furthermore, because the storage boxes are stackable, I knew I could raise the platform further if the 25cm height of a single layer of boxes proved insufficient. (Few engineers ever really grow out of their Lego phase!)
Having developed a clear strategy for the session, implementing it on the day turned out to be relatively straightforward, not least because fellow engineer Simon‑Claudius Wystrach (www.simonclaudius.com) was there to help with building Tobi’s ‘tent’, outfitting Christian’s booth, and line‑testing the mics/headphones while I used some commercial reference mixes to acclimatise my ears to the studio’s control‑room monitors. Following the musicians’ arrival, we all worked together to fine‑tune my initial close‑mic positions in search of the most appealing sound, doing test recordings as we went for discussion purposes.
Session Notes: Recording An Acoustic Guitar Duo
Whatever anyone tells you, this process inevitably involves a lot of trial and error, but you can use a few principles to steer things. For example, the instrument’s soundhole can be an important factor, because the more on‑axis your mics are to it, the more low‑end ‘woof’ you’ll get courtesy of the instrument’s primary air‑cavity resonance. That’s
Because the studio’s isolation booth added almost no reverb tail at all to Christian’s guitar sound, a ‘tent’ was built around Tobi to eliminate the live room’s natural ambience from his sound too, thereby matching the acoustics of the two spaces more closely.
A difficulty with recording acoustic guitar, though, is that it tends to sound best when the mics pick up plenty of early reflections. You see, the instrument’s resonating wooden body has tremendously complex and variable frequency dispersion characteristics, and this means it sounds very different from different angles. Without any early reflections from the environment, each mic picks up only one of these angles, and the recorded sound can therefore lack upper‑spectrum harmonic richness and complexity. So while I was keen to avoid any reverb tail on the guitars, I nonetheless wanted to encourage early reflections.
The booth was very dead‑sounding, so Mike propped up some MDF off‑cuts to reintroduce some natural early reflections and enhance the upper‑spectrum tone of Christian’s guitar. In Tobi’s case, I knew the live room’s hardwood flooring would already work in our favour, but I also decided to arrange the gobos in my ‘tent’ so that their reflective sides faced inwards. The booth, though, had no reflective surfaces other than the window, so I decided to bring a stack of MDF off‑cuts with me to reintroduce some reflections that way. These I leaned against the walls at various points, angled towards the playing position.
Tips For Recording Acoustic Guitar At Home
One further setup problem needed addressing: the booth window was a little high in the wall, so Christian and Tobi (who both performed seated) would only really be able to see the tops of each other’s heads. Some pre‑session DIY paid dividends: I bought a thick slab of MDF and some robust L‑shaped aluminium profiling, and used these to build a simple platform that would fit neatly over four of the heavy‑duty plastic crates I use for transporting my recording gear.
Mike put together a DIY podium in the booth to raise Christian’s seated position and improve the sightline between the two guitarists. The resulting podium felt reassuringly solid, had comfortably enough space for Christian’s chair on top, and added another source of early reflections beneath his guitar. Furthermore, because the storage boxes are stackable, I knew I could raise the platform further if the 25cm height of a single layer of boxes proved insufficient. (Few engineers ever really grow out of their Lego phase!)
Having developed a clear strategy for the session, implementing it on the day turned out to be relatively straightforward, not least because fellow engineer Simon‑Claudius Wystrach (www.simonclaudius.com) was there to help with building Tobi’s ‘tent’, outfitting Christian’s booth, and line‑testing the mics/headphones while I used some commercial reference mixes to acclimatise my ears to the studio’s control‑room monitors. Following the musicians’ arrival, we all worked together to fine‑tune my initial close‑mic positions in search of the most appealing sound, doing test recordings as we went for discussion purposes.
Session Notes: Recording An Acoustic Guitar Duo
Whatever anyone tells you, this process inevitably involves a lot of trial and error, but you can use a few principles to steer things. For example, the instrument’s soundhole can be an important factor, because the more on‑axis your mics are to it, the more low‑end ‘woof’ you’ll get courtesy of the instrument’s primary air‑cavity resonance. That’s
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