Topic: what to do with solo guitarist recording?

[JasonSobel]

ok, so I recorded my father-in-law on guitar this past weekend, just a few songs that he used to sing to my wife when she was little.

I set up one "vocal" mic and one mic for the acoustic guitar.
the left channel I set up as the guitar mic and the right channel was the vocal.
The vocal mic got almost no guitar, which is good.
the guitar mic was a pretty good mix of guitar and vocals.

Initially, I was thinking that I'd mix the two channels in post, but keep it panned a little bit for a faux-stereo mix.  but because the guitar channel picked up a fair amount of vocals, I'm thinking I'll just mix to mono.  or do you think I should try to create a stereo mix?  any thoughts?

[cleantone]

Sometimes it can be hard to combine two tracks miked this way. There is gonna be bleed from each source into the other mic. So you can have some major phase issues when combining them. It is usually pretty crucial to monitor the two channels combined to mono while miking. That way you can hear the phase anomalies and position the mics to minimize it. You can normally find a happy medium to get the best sound without enough bleed to throw your phase out of whack. This may or may not be an issue. For mixdown I would suggest trying a stereo reverb on the mix. Something natural sounding. You'll likely mix down to almost mono. You can try panning the guitar a little off center. good luck.

[guysonic]

It may sound much better to use the mic getting both and paste this mono source direct to stereo channels, and then if voice could use a little 'effects' boost, mix some of the the vocal mic into that mono-to-stereo track for flavoring.

[John Kary]

Keep the vocal track dead-center and aux-send it to a stereo room reverb.  Dial the dryness/wetness of the reverb to where it blends in to sound louder than the vocals in the guitar-mic source, but not prominent over the main vocal track.

Double the guitar track.  Pan one hard left, one hard right.  Setup a reverb on an aux send and throw both guitar channels at it.  Gang the faders and mix to taste.

That should end up sounding pretty good... the vocals will originate at dead-center but have some reverb ambience at both +/- 45 degrees to fill out the mix, while your vocal bleed in the guitar track will fill out the entire stereo field.  And of course EQ each track if needed.