"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1069508660k@trad...

Perhaps what Paul and Justin were thinking is that the sound of a
pickup is often thin and doesn't have the wood and resonance that

Hey Mike,
I would agree with that statement. They have yet to design a pickup
that can accurately produce the "true" sound of an acoustic guitar.
Mind you, they're close, but they aren't all the way there yet... Maybe
it just isn't possible. For me, that's OK though... I don't need or want
a "pure" acoustic sound. I like it with a touch of electricity going
through
it. In some cases a whole lot of electricity and some effects that give it
an ethereal tone is just what a certain tune needs.

makes a guitar sound big. If you're getting more of the sound that you
want from a microphone on the amplifier cabinet, then start with that,
and see what happens when you mix in some of the direct pickup sound,
as well as the acoustic sound from a mic or two on the guitar.

Right, but again, we're talking about during the mix down process, yes?
Either that or I'm missing something here. If all of those sources come
in on separate tracks, then it seems reasonable that the adding in that
you are talking about happens when you bring it back from the tape
and prepare it for mixing.

One thing that's very helpful when experimenting with a mix of
different paths from the same source is to keep things well isolated -
make sure that the mic that's picking up the sound of the guitar body
picks up negilgable sound from the amplifier. That will make mixing
the two much more controllable. A good way to do this is to get some
cables that are long enough so that you can put the amplifier in
another room. You can hear the sound of the amplifier while you're
recording by adding it to the headphone mix.

Yep, that's exactly what I'm doing. Did that on the first CD too.
The bathroom is just big enough to squeeze everything into it and
the door closes so the sound mostly stays in there. It is now
officially part of the studio... ;-)

If hearing the amplifier sound isn't essential to your playing, you
might try the "re-amp" technique, where you record (among other
things) the direct sound from the pickup, and then when you're mixing,
feed this to an amplifier and record a new track with a mic on the
amplifier. This will help you in two ways. First, it will assure that
the amplifier track is completely isolated from any other track.
Second, it will allow you to play with different settings on the
amplifier and experiment with how those contribute to your total
guitar mix. You can even use different effects between the playback of
the pickup track and the amplifier so you can record tracks each with
different reverb settings, one that's clean, one that's distorted, one
with a chorus, a few different delays.

Wow, that sounds like a very cool technique! I wonder how you
would get the two sound sources to be sync'd time-wise? Does
this require two recorders that are somehow in sync with each other?

While it might not be the sound that you're after, few people have as
"big" an acoustic sound as Leo Kottke. I read an article about his rig
(similar for live and recording) and he mixes about nine sources. You
just have to play around and listen at every turn.

Not sure if it was here or not, but I read a post where the guy was
saying that since this business of getting your sound right is so wide
open that there is probably a case for just about everything or
anything that you can come up with. In other words, if you can
think it up, someone has probably already tried it - and it may have
worked. I know Richard Leo Johnson was telling me that for his
first CD they used like 18 different mics! They had mics all over
the place. In the room at diffirent heights, on the amp, in the room
where the amp was, several on the guitar, more mics than he had
ever heard of being used before. And the sound is incredible! But,
I'm sure that the end result had a whole lot to do with the engineer
that took all of those sources and figured out how and at what level
of each of them needed to be brought back from the tape. The
mixing process had to have been the key. Especially since this
phase cancellation that everyone has been talking about must have
gotten in the way.

Regards,

Steven Dillon

http://www.stevendillon.com
http://mp3.com/stevendillon