Audio Recording

I have received an inquiry and I think it would be helpful to share this to anyone having the same problem:

On 6/3/2011 11:47 AM, Jeff wrote:
From: Jeff
Subject: Tutorial Idea for Acoustic Guitar

Message Body:
Hi Emerson, I have an idea for a tutorial for you; it’s a subject that really interests me in that I like to record acoustic guitar and vocals. There is a song by Laura Pauisini (written by Daniel Vuletic) called Come Se Non Fosse Stato Mai Amore. The song starts with a simple acoustic guitar refrain but when you listen to it with headphones the recording has the most beautiful open separated sound. I would dearly love to know how they achieved that such that I might be able to reproduce the same effect myself at home.

Do you think you can help?

Kindest regards, Jeff.

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Hi Jeff,
Thanks for contacting www.audiorecording.me. First, I already wrote a lot of guitar recording and mixing tutorials. The following tutorials are helpful to get started with some basic techniques on recording and mixing guitars:

Double tracking acoustic or electric guitars
Mixing acoustic guitar and vocals
How to mix guitar tracks
How to pan acoustic or electric guitars

Although some of the tutorials above are referring to electric guitars; the techniques can as well be applied to acoustic guitars. Relating to your inquiry, this is the Youtube URL of the music you are talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj9YhRQG8bk

I have listened to the music and it looks like the guitars are recorded at least twice in the multi track. It means the guitarist was actually doing two different sets of performance for the recording of the same guitar track (for example the intro guitar track). I also noticed that since the sound is open spaced; it is probably using a condenser microphone to record the acoustic guitar. You actually need to research for a good microphone that you can use for recording guitars if you haven’t got one. Use mono for recording each of the guitar sets. The first recording is panned to the left and the second recording is panned to the right of the stereo field. How much is the amount of panning depends on the depth of your stereo. You can start panning guitars somewhere between 0.5 (50%) to 0.85 (85%). This is done using your audio mixing software. The result during mixdown is obvious, the left and right channels of the intro for example are actually two different sets acoustic guitar recordings, see screenshot below:

During recording or mixing, you do not need to implement any reverb or artificial delay like it was told in some tutorials. It is because the room reverb will be captured “naturally” by the guitar recordings using condenser microphones. Make sure though that your room is spacious enough to have some reverberations. And having recorded guitar twice can also introduce some sort of natural delay between them (like a minor strumming delay as observed in the introduction of the song). Try to do my above suggestions in your home recording studio. And also you can as well try to add a very light chorus effect pedal to your guitar when recording. This chorus effect will further thicken the resulting acoustic guitar sound. This will add more “openness” and “ambiance” to the resulting sound.

Now for the vocals and bass guitars; you can simply pan them to the center of the mix. The vocal has some reverb and it has been added in the mix, not in the recording. You can read the following tutorials about mixing vocals and bass:

Mixing vocal tips:

How to sit vocals properly in the mix
How to mix vocals and put some effects
Tips in mixing bass guitar

The best ambiance and open space on recordings can be achieved by moderate use of effects such as reverb and delays. For example, only vocals have some significant amount of reverb in the entire tracks. The guitars, synth, drums and bass does not have significant amount of reverb applied to the mix. To get the most out of ambiance; you can maximize the use of your stereo field. For example say you panned guitars at left and right (75%), you can further use the hard left and right by adding synthesizer for example. One great technique in achieving openness is delay. Say for example a synth track. The first synth is panned is to the right while the one of the left. Both synths can be the same recording, but a slight delay has been to one of the track (left track for example). A delay of 15ms to 30ms can add nice ambiance to your stereo recordings.

Finally, one last option is to double your recordings for all tracks; then panned each of them in the right and the other recordings on your left. This is not only for the guitars but for other tracks as well (piano, keyboards, and other string instruments); except for bass, vocals and drums. Good luck to your projects!