Thread: Acoustic guitar
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Old 11-28-2017, 11:40 AM   #71
vanceen
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Join Date: Nov 2017
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When you play acoustic guitar, you're not just playing the guitar. You're playing the space you're sitting in. If you're in an acoustically good room, the experience includes the reflections of the guitar's sound from all the surfaces in the room back to your ears, with different fundamental frequencies and harmonics bouncing around differently. Take that guitar into a different room and its sounds very different.

Recording is another thing. If you're used to sitting in a live room playing, you will miss all the reflections, even if you don't know that's what you're missing. It just doesn't sound "right".

The important question is "how does the acoustic guitar fit into my recording?"

If you're recording a solo, you will want to try to capture the room reflections in stereo, or at least put a convolution reverb on the recording to give it some life.

If you're using the guitar as a rhythm part, all those reflections don't matter much; in fact, you'll probably want a highpass filter set to cut out most of the bass. It will sound bad when solo'd, but it can sound fantastic in the mix.

If you're recording something built around a guitar part and a vocal, you will go somewhere in the middle of these two approaches.

In general, different things matter when recording an instrument that when playing it, especially playing it alone. When I'm playing my electric guitars, I use vintage tube amps and get very picky about the tubes and the speakers. If I'm recording them, I put a ribbon mic and an SM-57 on the cabinet and try to get a sound pretty close to what I want to hear in the recording. But it will always sound a little lifeless and sterile compared to playing alone in a room with a really good amp. And I guarantee you won't be able to tell what kind of tubes you're using.
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