recording the Brouwer Etudes Part I: mic setup

I figured this would be a good opportunity to talk a bit about different approaches to recording guitar, specifically solo classical guitar.

The standard approach is to use a matched pair of mics placed a few feet back from the guitar player. The configuration people use varies, although ORTF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORTF_stereo_technique) using small diaphragm cardioid condensers is pretty common. The engineer will generally move the mics closer to get less room ambience or further away to get more.

This works.. It produces that mellow sound that most of us associate with classical guitar recordings. It also misses a lot of the subtlety of the instrument. Close micing the body, which is common place with steel string acoustic guitars, is generally avoided with classical guitar because it picks up more finger noise, you're more likely to hear the performer moving around, etc...

Close micing also gets a much more accurate sense of the dynamics at the more extreme frequencies. Most classical guitar recordings are heavy in the mid-range of the instrument. The guitar, however, makes a lot of noise in the low end and high end as well. Of course, guitar players don't like to be reminded of all the string noise and fret buzz and thumping that can happen when they're playing. Maybe this is one reason that close micing is often avoided.

For me, I wanted to capture the intimacy of the performance. I think the Brouwer Etudes are very visceral pieces of music. The string noise, etc. is an integral part of that. I was also thinking about why goo drum recordings are so dynamic and why a lot of solo recordings of guitar are sort of flat.

The human ear processes sound coming in from several directions and creates and amalgam from these various sources. A microphone processes sound at a given point. To more accurately capture the sound that the human ear hears, I wanted to work with different perspectives simultaneously.

Here's how I setup the mics to get what I wanted out of these recordings. I'm using the beginning of Etude 14 because it quickly covers a range of dynamics and timbres. (Click to enlarge the image.)

Here are the specifics for the gear-heads out there:

Close mic: Neumann TLM102 through a UA TwinFinity 710
Far mic: Studio Projects T3 set to omni through a dbx386
room mics: matched pair of Rode NT1As through a Focusrite TwinTrak

You can see the positioning of the mics in the photo. The tlm102 was set about 9 or so inches from the sound-hole and just below center. The T3 was back around 2 1/2' and was pointed more at the 10th or 12th fret. The room mics were an additional 12-18" back, about 5' apart, and close to 6' high, but aimed down at the guitar.

This gave me the range of different perspectives that I wanted to play with. You can hear what each sounds like here. These are all completely dry. No EQ, no compression, no nothin':

close mic
far mic
room mics
all together

In my next post, I'll walk you through the mixing process and explain how I thought about each of the mics as I pulled together a cohesive sound.

Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher