[LAU] Recording accoustic guitar and string noise

Jörn Nettingsmeier nettings at folkwang-hochschule.de
Thu Feb 26 11:45:17 EST 2009


Michal Seta wrote:
> Hmm...  My classical guitar teacher and a couple of audio engineers I
> had pleasure working with thought that placing mics near the neck was
> providing a bit of brightness to the sound and balanced well the
> body's tone.  In those days I spent entire days practicing to minimize
> the fret/string noise.  Today I think that such noises add to the
> charm of the music but i guess this is context and style dependent
> (but I am also fond of music made exclusively of such "unwanted"
> noises so I may not be the right reference in this context).

chop, chop, says the master of vegetable noises :)

i'm with michal here - don't try to make it too clean. and don't deny
yourself the pleasure of pointing a second mike at the neck - lovely
tones to be found there.
forget the notch filter. the high-pitched squeaks are quite broadband.
if you're just two squeaks short of that multi-million-dollar hit
single, you can try to tackle them with an automated low-pass filter
which cuts in only when necessary (don't hack into the attack of the
following notes).

another very neat trick with guitars is to take two very small omni
capsules (like the sennheiser mke1 or 2), wrap them in a piece of felt
and tape them to the lower part of the guitar body, one at the height of
the bridge and one between sound hole and neck. very nice stereo effect
- you must mix them hard to the left and right, otherwise you'll get
horrible comb filters. if you want to combine those with a fuller sound,
use a large diaphragm pointing in roughly to the sound hole, and add the
small capsules with a strong high-pass for just some "stereo glitz".
will get you a followup job with the guitarist for sure :)




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