Topic: Your favorite signal chain for recording natural sounding acoustic guitars?

[alohachris]

Aloha,

What products currently on the market comprise your favorite signal chain to produce the most natural acoustic guitar recordings? The whole chain please.

Thanks.
alohachris

[muj]

depends on the room.....but hey a pair of elm-c's into a gordon model 5 can get you there

[TNJazz]

depends on the room.....but hey a pair of elm-c's into a gordon model 5 can get you there

Good God.   


Yes it's true, but...


Good God!   

[muj]

 

[Krispy D]

depends on the room.....but hey a pair of elm-c's into a gordon model 5 can get you there

Good God.   


Yes it's true, but...


Good God!   

oh come on. at least it is under 10K...

[digifish_music]

Aloha,

What products currently on the market comprise your favorite signal chain to produce the most natural acoustic guitar recordings? The whole chain please.

Thanks.
alohachris

Rode NT4 -> Sound Devices MixPre -> Edirol R09HR or R44

When making critical acoustic instrument recordings I prefer to keep the whole signal chain battery powered. The MixPre isn't really a requirement, just what I have used, but that also depends on where the environment the guitar is located. If you need pristine silence then you need a very low-noise mic-pre.

Positioned like this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsD6uEZsIsU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4

digifish

[anodyne33]

A good starting point when I used to record:

KM84i for the neck
U87 or U89 on the body

Make sure you move them around until you find the best situation, and even more importantly, spend some time listening to the instrument from different places in the room and all around the body.

for pres we'd typically start with the old Telefunkens, but depending on how they felt that day they could be distractingly noisy.
Something like a Neve 9098 strip typically works well with acoustics, but I also used Earthworks pres on them regularly too. Bummer about not having gain control sometimes, but you work with what you got right?

[Javier Cinakowski]

depends what kind of playing, strumming or plucking/notes, pick or not.  Classical Nylon or Standard Acoustic...

For a good sound on any of the above try a AT4050 on the body and a SDC card on the neck.    For a player that plays a lot of notes try two LDC in a xy.  For a gentle strummer try a pair of SDC...

I have never had a large choice of preamps, so I am of no help there...

[rePat]

Taken from NashPhil's post on the 2007 Grammy thread:

This is the weekend of Rockygrass, and both of them were playing the festival already. Sunday morning comes early after a long night of drinking free fat tire, so at 7am the cell phone rings and Doc has agreed to do the session, so I leave the fest and head over to Bryan's hotel room in Longmont, CO (outside Boulder) and set up the gear. I used the bathroom as my control room. I set up one vintage KM54 on each guitar and plugged those into a Brent Averill custom API Pre, and set up a vintage U87 overhead in case Doc decided to sing. Laptop and ADAT. Super simple.

Pretty good reference, I would think.