[Nate Najar]

I am always trying different things in this little room of mine to improve the quality of my recorded guitar sound. I don't usually intend on things i record in here to be production output- i often go to proper rooms- but sometimes things from here slip out into the real world and also it would be nice to be able to make better sounding recordings at home. Classical guitar, usually in a jazz or contemporary context, but often unaccompanied proper sounding guitar as well.

My room is fairly well treated for the terrible boxy small dimensioned spare bedroom it is- Good bass trapping, reflection points, and an ever growing cloud- so in the mix position it is fairly neutral and surely any mixing and editing deficiencies are pilot error at this point. But it is still very difficult to record the guitar in here.... the guitar was made to create a good sound in a large acoustic, so you cannot mic it from 6 inches away and sound like a guitar. When I was starting out, I bought the schoeps mk41 thinking I could just mic it from 6" away and "turn off the room" so to speak.... and it's been one compromise after another ever since.

The room is 12'x12'x8' with drywall, carpet and a concerts slab for a ceiling. So far, for direct on micing the guitar, an re20 10-20" out give the most balanced sound. The next is an omni about 12" out. Both require a fair amount of surgical eq to get out resonances and so forth. The mk41 doesn't really work until about 20-36" out and then there is good focus but the tone suffers. Things can be bettered by moving around the room and moving the mic around, but nothing drastically better results, just shades of different, because in a room this small there are only so many places to sit and put a mic in front. Of course with any of these solutions, the actual room is the early reflections and then we must manufacture an acoustic in the reverb for some sense of larger space.....

So I thought of something today that I cannot figure out why I never tried sooner.... I put the schoeps mk41, with its laser beam directionality and near perfect off axis response, just off the floor pointing up at an angle toward the guitar top. et voila! the tone cleared right up. It isn't perfect of course, but it is a significantly cleaner sound frequency wise. There is so much less comb filtering that it really sounds like my guitar in an acoustic as opposed to the warbly, hollow representation I have been dealing with all this time. This sounds so good that I think I could output production unaccompanied guitar things here and not be displeased.

But I am not sure this would work with any other mic besides the mk41.... the omni sounded terrible here. I imagine a boundary mic on the ceiling might also be pretty good but I haven't rigged that up yet. My little DPA's are the low sensitivity so the self noise for unaccompanied work is high enough to be distracting to me.... but for proof of concept it's worth a try.

[Mike Rivers[_2_]]

On 11/30/2016 2:08 AM, Nate Najar wrote:
.... I put the schoeps mk41, with its laser beam directionality and
near perfect off axis response, just off the floor pointing up at an
angle toward the guitar top. et voila! the tone cleared right up.
It isn't perfect of course, but it is a significantly cleaner sound
frequency wise. There is so much less comb filtering that it really
sounds like my guitar in an acoustic as opposed to the warbly, hollow
representation I have been dealing with all this time. This sounds
so good that I think I could output production unaccompanied guitar
things here and not be displeased.

Putting the mic on the floor might have it working sort of as a boundary
mic (PZM), or at least getting rid of a reflection from one direction.

It never hurts to try something unconventional. I'm reviewing Sylvia
Massy's book "Recording Unhinged" now and she describes her approach as
"Adventure recording" where anything goes. She's more inclined to do
things like record the sound of a piano being pushed off a stage and
then being shot at, but she has a collection of unusual mics, some fine,
some awful, and found that sometimes the unconventional mic or placement
is what works.

Have you ever tried the over-the-shoulder position, with a cardioid mic
positioned a few inches out from your right ear (assuming you play
right-handed) and pointing down toward the upper bout of the guitar? I
saw that in a Shure tip years ago, suggesting that as an application for
their SM-81. It works better than I expected it to.


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