45+ Acoustic Guitar Recording Sounds Bad

In addition to trying sweeter thinner-sounding mics that would give you less mids and more top top zing and trying different placement the room is probably too dead for a typical acoustic guitar recording.

Acoustic guitar recording sounds bad. A bad acoustic guitar track can bring the quality of the entire mix down considerably. Sometimes people use three or four mics to record their acoustic guitar. An unattractive basic tone can take quite a bit of headscratching and some very careful EQ to remedy but to be honest this kind of thing is typically the least of the problems. You would think recording an acoustic guitar would be easy.

However as youll only be recording the sound of the acoustic guitar through the guitars pickup youre most likely going to end up with a slightly unnatural sounding guitar. With that in mind here are 10 top tips divided into recording and live sound. Instead of recording it bad and spending weeks twiddling knobs. So go through with a scalpel and cut out the fat.

I record awesome rock guitar sounds all the time and I love a good guitar sound on a rock project. Hey guys I mostly recorded acoustic stuff in the past. Getting a good acoustic guitar tone isnt as simple as just plugging in and turning up. You dont always want the acoustic guitar to sound natural in a mix.

Get Your Balance Right. Notoriously midrangey and honky in overall character they can dramatically lower the quality of a mix - especially when overused. It requires a careful understanding of how EQ frequencies interact and function in a band. The same rule is true for them it can make your mix sound worse.

Acoustic guitars sound bad if there are intonation problems causing the guitar to sound out of tune along with the guitars action being too low resulting in fret buzz. And yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear a mix from a home studio recording the acoustic track sounds thin harsh muddy and just downright disappointing. This is important to me and to most others that do the same. Action which is too high or too low bad fingering bad picking bad or dead strings strings ringing that are not part of a chord guitar pickups which are awful or just simply too close to the strings too high of a gain setting on an amp designed to provide overdrive a problem with the amp or speakers which are half blown out.

Additional problems can occur if hardware including tuners are loose causing mechanical vibrations or when the strings become old and lose vibrancy. Microphone placement is the foundation for any solid recording. There are however ways to make them sound good and use what they give you for your benefit. As you back the mic off in a dead room you get a little softening of the attack but no more room sound to speak of.

Capturing the electric guitar is one of the more straightforward recording tasks but theres still always the possibility of getting better results by avoiding a few possible pitfalls and potential bad habits. Recording or re-amping through a small guitar amp may be just the ticket. Much of the time the DIpickup in acoustic guitars gets a bad rap. Here Rich Tozzoli shares his recording secrets.

This article proves to present some different placement techniques for a simple acoustic guitar recording. Here are some suggested donts when it comes to recording guitar. Recording using the DI input is great for laying down tracks quickly and is often where a lot of songwriters will start when writing a song. Placement is usually dictated by musical genre but most engineers place microphones to capture a good overall balance of the instrument.

Ive covered this stuff before but a lot of questions about sound and tone have came up from my Upgrading your acoustic guitar videos so heres some thin. Dont go it alone.