Once upon a time, Joe made a stupid mistake.
I was recording a bunch of acoustic guitar tracks for an album project.
I was super-excited. I had set aside an entire afternoon to knock out all the songs.
Also, I had just gotten a brand new microphone, and was going to use it along with another mic to record the guitar in stereo.
All was right with the world. I set levels, listened through my headphones, and the sound was HUGE.
Jackpot. Let’s start recording.
I was hanging out in the VIP forums a few days ago, and the question came up about using compression while recording.
Adam commented:
Applying compression during recording scares me and is something I think you should only really do if you are very comfortable with what it’s doing… For me I rarely get the compression right on the first pass.
For a long time I was in the same boat as Adam. I didn’t really bother with outboard compression while recording. After all, once you add compression to the signal and record it, you can’t undo it.
When you’re starting out, you might not even own an outboard compressor, and that’s fine. You can always record everything “dry” and add compression plug-ins later as needed.
But there’s something fun about running the signal through a compressor before it gets recorded. Let’s face it, we all like twisting knobs, right?
In yesterday’s blog post, I railed on the type of folks who are always floundering, waiting on the next piece of gear to come riding in on a white horse and save the day.
Today I’m going to give you a simple tip.
If you follow this tip, I guarantee you’ll get better recordings.
How do I know? Because it has worked every time for me.
I gotta warn you, though. The odds aren’t in your favor. Chances are you’ll read this tip but won’t ever do anything about it.
“It can’t be that easy,” you might say.
“He’s over-simplifying things.”
You shouldn’t just blindly believe me.
A reader is puzzled by stereo (2-mic) acoustic guitar recording:
I recently got into mixing acoustic guitar with 2 mics. The problem is that I do not know how to create as much ‘space’ as some tracks I know of. I’ve tried XY, ORTF, and spaced pair.
XY and ORTF are too narrow. Spaced pair seems reasonable (following the 3:1 Rule), but the mic pointed closest to the body becomes overly ‘bassy.’
How can I balance the stereo image? EQ can control the problem but not by much. How would you go about on fixing this problem?
I know mic position has to do with it but I don’t know where to start. Just wondering if you had to overcome this type of problem before.
As much acoustic guitar recording and mixing as I do, I’ve dealt with problems like this a LOT.
(And this applies to ANY instrument, not just acoustic guitar.)
My buddy Ben sent me this question:
Sound quality or song quality, which would you say impacts a listener more?
A few non-helpful answers come to mind.
Like “both” or “it depends.” 
While they’re not super-helpful answers by themselves, I think diving into each one will uncover some stuff that might help you.
This is another guest post from Nick Lewis of Brighton Mastering. It’s a followup to his previous guest post Making Money from Your Home Studio.
So, you’ve been sitting at home making tunes for a while, you think you’re pretty good at it and see no reason why you shouldn’t start charging other people for your work. After all, you can provide a service to people who can’t do it for themselves.
But how do you go about getting clients? There’s no fixed answer, but here are a few pointers.
If you record acoustic guitar, then chances are you’ve either played around with stereo recording or at least thought about it. But maybe you’re not sure which techniques to use and the pros and cons of each.
I think I can help.
I’ve recorded acoustic guitar more than any other instrument, so I’ve spent countless hours of quality time with my guitar and a pair of microphones. And I’ve gotten pretty good at getting great acoustic guitar tone.
Stereo recording is simply using two microphones to capture a two-channel “stereo” image of the source. By panning the signals left and right, you can create a sense of space and width and depth, simply by using two microphones instead of one.
Now that you’ve done some good pre-production on the song, the next step is to start recording, right?
Some people spend way too much time recording, agonizing over every single track until the song loses all its energy. Others breeze through the recording process as fast as they can, just so they can get straight to mixing. (Which of these describes you? I tend to fall into the second category.)
Whether you’re too fast or too slow, the recording process is so crucial to the rest of the process. These Production Steps all build on one another. If you don’t do a good job on one step and move on to the next, don’t expect awesome results.
