Recording Acoustic Guitar

Move a microphone two inches and you’re recording a different instrument. That’s the strange reality of acoustic guitar — it radiates sound in completely different ways from different points on its body, and the mic has no idea which version you actually want.

Most people start at the soundhole because it’s the obvious source of volume. It’s also usually wrong. The soundhole produces a boomy, uncontrolled low end that sounds nothing like the guitar you hear sitting in the room with it. Point a condenser directly at it and you’ll spend an hour fighting a muddy, airless recording that no amount of EQ will fully rescue.

The more reliable starting point is the 12th fret — where the neck meets the body. This position captures a balance of string definition and body resonance that sits well in a mix without fighting everything else. From there, you adjust. Angling the mic slightly toward the body adds warmth. Rotating it toward the headstock opens up the high end and brings out pick or fingernail detail. Each centimetre is a decision.

Distance and Room

Close-miking tightens the sound and reduces room ambience — useful in untreated spaces, but it also exaggerates proximity effect on large-diaphragm condensers, thickening the low end in ways that can quickly become a problem. Pulling back to six or eight inches lets the guitar’s full projection develop before it hits the capsule. The trade-off is that you’re now including whatever the room sounds like.

In a good room, that’s fine. In a bedroom with hard parallel walls, you’re capturing a particular kind of flutter and smear that no plugin convincingly removes. Soft furnishings, bookshelves, an open wardrobe full of clothes — these genuinely help. Recording in the corner of a carpeted room with a duvet behind the guitarist is unglamorous but effective. The alternative is double-miking: a close mic for definition, a room mic pulled back several feet for air, blended to taste.

The String Noise Question

Finger noise — the squeak of skin sliding across wound strings — is always present in acoustic guitar recordings. The question isn’t whether to eliminate it but how much is right. In a folk recording, it’s part of the intimacy. In a polished pop production, it can feel like a distraction. Coated strings (Elixir being the obvious example) reduce it significantly. So does adjusting mic placement away from the neck. But completely clean recordings of acoustic guitar often feel oddly sterile — the noise is part of what tells you a human being is playing.

Similarly, fret buzz and body thump from enthusiastic strumming can feel like flaws in isolation, but they contribute to the sense that the performance has weight and physical presence. The instinct to fix everything sometimes works against the instrument’s character.

One Mic or Two

Stereo acoustic guitar recordings are seductive in solo contexts — something like an ORTF pair a foot or so from the instrument creates a wide, enveloping image that sounds expensive. But in a full production, that width tends to create problems. A guitar spread across the stereo field competes with everything, and the phase relationship between two mics means mono compatibility is never guaranteed.

For most production work, a single well-placed microphone is easier to work with and often sounds more focused and natural. The choice of mic matters less than most gear conversations suggest — a small-diaphragm condenser like the Shure SM81 or AKG C451 gives articulate, detailed recordings that cut through a mix cleanly. Large-diaphragm condensers add a flattering sheen but require more care with placement to avoid building in problems. A ribbon mic, pulled slightly back, produces a warmth and low-frequency response that suits fingerpicking and jazz voicings particularly well.

The real variable is almost never the microphone. It’s the room, the instrument, the strings, and whether you spent ten minutes experimenting with position before you hit record. A mediocre mic in the right place beats an expensive one pointed at the wrong part of the guitar every time.

Experiment with recording chain ideas and signal processing on acoustic guitar using the tools available in Resonillator’s production modules.