Great sounding recordings through skills and knowledge without expensive gear
Check out our YouTube Channel
Join the FaceBook Community
Follow us on instagram
Recording Acoustic Guitar With Vocals
Recording acoustic guitar with vocals can be challenging to get a nice tone. In this lesson we show you how to overcome these challenges and get great sound quality every time.
In this lesson I’m going to show you 2 different strategies for recording a guitar with vocals. Which strategy is best will depend on the flow of the song, and the artists abilities.
1- live take
2- click track
1- live take. This method has lower sound quality, and it’s difficult to overdub or layer tracks on top. The main challenge with this technique is the guitar bleed into the vocal mic, and the vocal bleed into the guitar mic. Since the vocal mic is about 6” from the singers mouth, and the guitar mic is about 2’ from the singers mouth, the sound from the vocals will be captured by the guitar microphone about 2 milliseconds later. When the 2 microphones are mixed together, the vocals that bled into the guitar mic are mixed with the main vocal mic, but due to the time difference, they are out of phase. Check out lesson 8 on phase for more info on that. This will change the sound, and not in a good way. The objective is to get as much isolation on each part as possible through microphone polar pattern and placement.
If you are recording in a room that is large, or well treated and doesn’t have a lot of reflections (check out lesson 10 on room acoustics), a microphone with a figure 8 polar pattern will give you the best isolation. Place the vocal mic a little below the mouth, angled upwards to maximize rejection in the direction of the guitar. Place the guitar mic a few inches above where the neck meets the body, and aimed slightly downward to get the most rejection of the vocals. With this method, you have the option to re-record the vocals by themselves over top of the guitar part. The original vocals will be faintly heard in the background, but it’s ok because it will have a bit of a layering effect, and the new vocals won’t have any phasing issues.
An alternative method is to use a single shotgun type microphone. Place it about 6 feet in front of the artist, pointed at their chest, and aim it more up or down to change the balance of vocals/guitar.
This can capture the sound really nicely, but what they play is what they get, and there aren’t any options for adding stereo spread to the guitar, or mixing the parts separately.
2- click track
This is the preferred method, because it always works, except for when the artist is unable to play to a click track. If they are struggling to play to a click, you can bring in drum beat loop. It’s very rare for artists to struggle playing to a drum loop, but it does happen from time to time. If they can’t play to a click track or drum loop, you will need to record them as a live take, or live take and replace vocals.
If the song has tempo changes, then you need to work with the artist to map out the song and program in the tempo changes at the appropriate spots, and record a count in so they start at the proper spot. Using a click track provides the option of adding more production to the song after it’s been recorded, and also makes it possible to do several takes, and you can choose the best take for any part of the song. You can also use the additional takes for layering to get a bigger sound, and for stereo spreading.
Step 1
- establish the song tempo and set it as your project tempo. Send only the click track to the artists headphone mix. Have them play the song along to the click track, and record both the guitar and vocals together with a single microphone. This will serve as ghost track which will later be deleted. If they have a hard time with this, then just record the guitar part by itself, then record the vocal part by itself. Even though you did them separately, these 2 tracks are still just scratch tracks.
Step 2
- play the click track and ghost track together in the headphone mix. If they recorded the guitar and vocals parts of the scratch track separately, then only play the vocals and click in their headphone mix. The first real recording you do will be only the acoustic guitar part. You can use any of the stereo spreading techniques explained in lesson 38, which can get better separation of the guitar.
Step 3
- remove the ghost track, and play the newly recorded guitar part and click track in the headphone mix. Record vocals on top.