hi this is justin colletti of sonic scoop and thanks to our friends over at jay-z microphones we get to do a deep dive today into mic techniques for acoustic guitar we're going to look at some mic techniques on both steel string acoustic and classical nylon string guitar not only are we going to look at ways to record an acoustic guitar with just a single mic and the principles there are pretty simple but we're also going to get into some of the most popular most important and most impressive sounding multi-mic techniques for acoustic guitar stereo techniques in particular a lot of the times when you're doing a really dense production where you're just trying to fit an acoustic guitar in there a single mic is often your best bet but when the acoustic guitar is really featured and meant to be kind of the centerpiece of a production often these stereo mic approaches are going to give a lot more life and dimension character and personality to the guitar and we're going to be looking at some of the best approaches there for this demonstration walkthrough and comparison of all these mic techniques we got a killer guitar player with us name is david william ross he's actually a really good audio engineer in his own right as well and we are at the studio called even fall recording owned by my friend chris swiss who's a drummer you'll see in another video we did on drum mic techniques as well and for this particular shoot i used one of these jay-z black hole microphone i'm actually talking into one of them right now jay-z was nice enough to send me a stereo pair of these mics and they really sound lovely they're great especially for capturing acoustic sources they are pretty clean flat transparent with just a little bit of added brightness in the exact places you'd want them for so many acoustic instruments without being over the top at all so really great value on these and they work great for voice as well all right let's get into the ideas here and to demonstrate some of these general ideas i'll hold on to two of these jay-z amethyst microphones they also sent me a pair of these and we're doing another video where you get to hear these doing some stereo configuration on drums so look for that on this channel but there's two basic approaches to doing double micking on guitar and there's a couple core principles for just using a single mic that we'll talk about but when you're doing two mics on a guitar the two general approaches are either what's called a coincident pair that means where the two capsules are like practically touching each other and the other general set of approaches are more like spaced pairs and there's a couple variations on those and some of them a little uncommon that you may not have seen or used before and you get to hear them all back to back the pros and cons here is if you do a coincident pair where the two capsules are practically touching then you're going to get really great mono compatibility a really great focused center in your sound but the con is maybe a little less of impressive stereo spread in a lot of cases that's going to be just the thing that you want but for when you want more space more dimension maybe a little more sparkle too in certain situations you can go for more of a spaced pair approach but there's also space to pair approaches that have kind of funky configurations you'll sometimes see an over-the-shoulder mic and we'll get to hear what those sound like as well one of my other favorite techniques is a little bit of a happy medium between those two it's technically considered a coincident pair technique called ortf where the microphones are just spaced about seven inches from each other and pointing out by 110 degrees we'll get into some of the finer points of all of those techniques in just a minute but first some general notes on recording acoustic guitar in general and even with just a single mic here's one of my acoustic guitars right here and the first thing you got to know about recording an acoustic guitar is that this instrument sounds significantly different depending on where you're micing it the most classic position to put a single microphone on an acoustic guitar is pointing about where the neck joins the body and the distance from the guitar can vary anywhere from a few inches to several feet back but a good starting point is often something like maybe a foot away maybe two feet away it's going to be uncommon to mic it closer than six inches away although it can happen and it's going to be uncommon to mic it from six feet away although that can happen too and it really depends on the context of the recording how much space you want around the guitar how close it's supposed to feel and if you were just to say point the mic from about a foot away where the neck joins the body you're going to get a pretty decent overall balance but just moving it a few inches either down towards the bridge or up further on the fingerboard is going to change the sound significantly you'll tend to get more and more brightness and clarity the closer you go to the fingerboard and down here by the bridge you'll tend to get a lot of mid-range and these sounds although unusual not exactly how an acoustic guitar sounds in a room can actually be fairly useful in a mix if you want to really brighten things up and tighten things up and get rid of a lot of bottom end micing up closer towards the fingerboard can do that if you want something that is really dark and woody mike and closer to the bridge can do that as well but there's a whole range and just putting on a pair of headphones and moving a microphone around the guitar until you find the ideal spot that's really the way to go one last quick note on miking acoustic guitar there is a danger zone that you're generally going to want to avoid and that's pointing right at the sound hole that gives you pretty much nothing but extreme bass the extreme low end of the acoustic guitar and usually pointing right directly at the sound hole super on axis probably going to be too big and too boomy for most purposes but again experiment with moving the mic around the guitar for yourself ideally do that in every session before you hit record alright so everything that i just said still holds true when you move to stereo mic and the most basic most easy to use stereo mic configuration is called xy and this is that pattern where the two microphones are basically pointing at a 90 degree angle from one another so they almost form like an l and right there in the corner of the l is the sound source so if i was going to mic up u at the camera one of these would be pointing 45 degrees that way and the other one 45 degrees that way so when they come together it's a 90 degree angle with you in the center the source that i'm miking so that's the idea behind the x y technique this kind of coincident approach is again going to have the most solid center a relatively narrow stereo spread but really good mono compatibility and really easy to implement one other important thing to know is that there's two different ways of approaching an xy configuration for acoustic guitar one of them is the way i was already showing you where one mic points to the left and one mic points to the right this way one of the mics is pointing slightly more towards the fingerboard and one of the mics is pointing slightly more towards the bridge but there's a different approach as well for doing an xy mic technique on acoustic guitar and that is to have one microphone pointing more up towards the base strings and one microphone pointing more down towards the treble strings and that's a different approach where in the left you're going to kind of have the bass strings and in the right you're going to have the treble string so it's almost a little bit more like making a piano in stereo over the hammers with the bass on the left and the high strings on the right instead of the body on the left say and the fingerboard on the right so a subtly different approach there i want to compare that back to back with another coincident mic technique that's one of my absolute favorites called ortf and this one is a nice happy medium between the coincident techniques and the space pair techniques when you do ortf these mics are going to be about seven inches apart from each other and they're going to be angled out a little bit more than 90 degrees by about 110 degrees and this still has pretty good mono compatibility but the stereo spread gets a little bit wider and you get a little bit more sense of the space that the instrument's in i think for just a solo instrument it's one of my favorite most beautiful sounding stereo mic techniques out there but if you're trying to fit something into a dense mix or you want a really tight solid center you could be better served by xy or just by a single mic let's listen to those two approaches back to back in both steel string and nylon string and then we'll start looking at our space pair approaches after that which can give us even more width and even more dimension one quick obvious note if you're listening on something like your phone or maybe inexpensive laptop speakers you might not notice a huge difference so to hear the difference between these two relatively similar mic approaches it's probably best to listen on decent studio speakers decent headphones even a pair of earbuds will give you a sense for how they really differ from one another [Music] do [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] all right i hope you enjoyed listening to that david plays beautifully what are some of your thoughts between those two approaches let us know in the comments down below now there are separate takes for each of these so there might be subtle variations from take to take that you'll also hear but i think if you're listening closely for things like stereo spread and amount of center focus you'll hear some subtle differences between these two approaches maybe you have a favorite of your own the feeling of these two approaches to miking can change a little bit depending on the distance from the guitar so i try to give you some variation there as well before we get into the more spaced variations of these techniques i want to just give you a quick note that there's still a couple more variations on top of these another popular one is what we call a bloom line pattern and this is where you have a traditional xy but instead of using a single capsule microphone you use a dual capsule microphone that has a bi-directional mode and a bi-directional mode on the microphone means it hears equally out of the front and the back and doing this kind of bloom line approach with an xy just gives you a greater sense of space there's just as much voltage running in the back of the microphone as there is in the front of the microphone so you just get even more of a sense of the space the natural reverberance the natural ambience of that room which if you're in a great sounding room can be a great way of doing things particularly for a solo guitar performance or for a guitar performance that's meant to feel a little further away if it's going to be in a more dense mix if you're not in a great sounding space or you want a really focused and clear and defined sounding guitar to go into a dense mix probably not the approach for you but for a single instrument or a really spacious sounding instrument can be a beautiful different approach to x y that's just the same exact setup but using bi-directional polar pattern instead of cardioid the other one i'll mention really briefly not super important or super popular for acoustic guitar but just so you're aware that it exists you can take this whole apparatus and turn it 90 degrees so that one of the microphones faces the source and the other microphone is totally off axis with the source this is called mid-side and what ends up happening here is the microphone that's pointing right at the source becomes your mid signal and then the bi-directional microphone that's pointing away from the source left and right becomes both a left and right microphone and decoding this in your daw is pretty easy you basically take this bi-directional left-right microphone duplicate it flip one of the channels and all of a sudden you get this really wide stereo spread in stereo but then this microphone completely cancels out and disappears in mono so you get wide stereo with great mono compatibility that's a really fun approach as well but i'd say it's arguably one of the less common approaches for recording acoustic guitar the next two that i do want to get into that are very popular approaches to recording a single acoustic guitar with two mics would be a spaced pair and a variation on the space pair where one of the mics is over the shoulder so with a spaced pair technique generally one microphone is pointing more towards the bridge one is pointing more towards the fingerboard and just to really exaggerate this i'll space them pretty wide for the purposes of this recording we'll get to hear it at multiple distances again so that you get a feel for how these can change as the guitar gets closer or further away and this i've got to say is one of the most instantly impressive sounding approaches you really get a big spread between left and right and the tone is different in left and right so it really gives you this ultra stereo sound and that's where i think the most impressive stereo often comes from where the two sides sound significantly different from one another and they do here because one of those microphones is pointing towards the fingerboard which is really bright and squeaky clean and one of them is pointing towards the bridge which is a lot woodier and thicker and more mid-rangey sounding and panning those out hard left and right man even on laptop speakers you may even hear some of the stereo spread from this technique as impressive as this technique is for a solo acoustic guitar it may not always be the best technique to use if you're trying to fit an acoustic guitar into a super dense mix and the mono compatibility isn't going to be as great as it is for some of those coincident techniques one other quick note on the space pair approach is that the microphone that's pointing towards the bridge of the instrument is probably going to have a lot more level behind it than the microphone that's pointing up towards the fingerboard where the acoustic guitar just doesn't project that much level this means that you're probably going to have to turn up that fingerboard microphone significantly compared to the one pointing at the body you might need to turn it up by 6 12 db it really depends on the guitar the room how far you are etc how far apart they are from each other but play around with that i've done my best here to equalize a level between those two microphones and again i'm spacing them pretty wide here you could come in a little bit closer or even further out if you wanted to reduce or increase just how dramatic this effect is there can be issues with phase coherence when you fold down to mono with this microphone technique one rule of thumb that some audio engineers will use is a three to one rule where the distance of the microphones to the guitar and the microphones from one another if you're following a three to one ratio for those you can potentially get better phase coherence i find with acoustic guitar it can be a little bit impractical and a little bit limiting to really shoot for a strict three to one ratio but bear in mind that that is a rule of thumb that some people really do adhere to and when it is possible it can help potentially with phase coherence and folding down to mono so we'll play that one and then we'll play a variation where one of the microphones is pointing right towards where the neck meets the body on the acoustic guitar and the other one is coming over the player's strumming hand and if you want to get really methodical about this you could take out your measuring tape and measure so that both of those two microphones are the same distance from where the neck meets the body on the acoustic guitar this isn't 100 necessary to do but if they are the exact same distance it should theoretically improve the phase coherence of this technique and make it even more monocompatible you could actually do this technique and just play it in straight mono and you could also take this technique and pan those two sides either out 100 or out some degree or another so this can be a mono mic technique with a bit more depth or a stereo mic technique and it's a spaced pair that potentially has good phase coherence if you're measuring things pretty precisely and pretty accurately but even if you're not it has some of the impressive openness of a spaced pair with a little bit more monocompatibility so another one of these positions that's kind of a bit of a happy medium let's listen to those two general approaches right now [Music] um [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] all right what do you think of those two space setups let us know about your favorites in the comments down below and again of course if you're listening on headphones or real studio monitors you're going to hear the differences even better than if you're listening on an iphone but even earbuds are inexpensive headphones should really reveal some significant differences between each of these approaches but just to drive home the idea that you don't always need to mic in stereo or you don't even necessarily always need to mic with two mics at all one mic is often just great for acoustic i'm gonna play you a couple of clips with these same guitars recorded with just a single microphone just for fun i've added in a distant microphone as well and this distant far microphone is actually pointed off axis from the guitar to make it feel even further away and i brought in a little bit of that to taste in some of the audio examples here as well so you can get a sense for the idea of using a close mic with a room mic on acoustic guitar and still having the signal completely in mono [Music] [Music] [Music] all right well i hope you've enjoyed this walkthrough of some of the most popular important and useful mic setups for acoustic guitar whether using a single mic or stereo pair whether it's a lovely jz black hole like this one or any other mic you may be using these are really the bread and butter approaches that are likely to get you through 80 90 of your sessions let us know what are your favorites of the techniques that we explored today are there any favorites of yours that we left out let us know in the comments down below i'd love to hear from you about it and remember what you like most in this context today isn't necessarily what's going to work best on your own guitar in your own room with your own player in your own session your own production what might be your favorite right now today could be different depending on any of those circumstances thanks again for joining us big thanks to our friends at jay-z microphones for sending this lovely pair of black hole microphones i have a whole bunch of their mics i love them i use them on the podcast and on my videos all the time i'm talking into all the black holes right now this is their really transparent transformerless solid-state black hole design that i think is ideal for recording a wide range of acoustic instruments works well in voice as well it's neutral but just a little bit of extra presence and clarity and articulation and it works really well on a whole variety of real instrument sources so definitely check these guys out big thanks to them for sponsoring this whole series and look for more on these will we mic drums and also we shoot out the whole vintage series from jay-z microphones coming your way soon this has been justin coletti of sonic scoop thanks for hanging out with me see you next time