Guitar Track

At my work I'm one of the student engineers in one of the school's recording studio. This week I helped start a project for a friend in one of my classes. We laid down the click, the scratch and then the guitar track. We wanted to try out some different techniques and see what we liked. We also wanted options when it came to the mix down.

Basically we took a AKG C414, stuck it aprox. in front of the sound hole (but without getting that low woof typical of directly in front of the hole), put it in omni-directional mode without any roll-off or pad. Then we took a pair of SE3s (pencil condensor), put one pointed at the fretboard, and the other pointed at the back of the guitar's body on the right side of the player. We then panned the SE3s hard left and right. The result was spectacular. Phase wasn't a huge issue in this set up for us, and if we deside that the mix gets a bit too busy for this sound we can take out the SE3s and work just with the 414.

I always find it hard to describe sounds in words (besides actually immitating the sounds) such as "rich," "full," "present," "warm," "squishy," "biting," or "velvety." If you have the opportunity to try this set up and hear it for yourself I really encourage you to do it. It's appropriate for this project, but not be appropriate for other projects. I've taken the same SE3s and X and Y'ed them infront of guitars and gotten great results which work better with other projects. This is one of my favorite parts of working in recording sound: There's not really any wrong answers, there are just better answers depending on the situation.