Home Recording a 12-string

Recording a guitar is said to very difficult, yet you can often hear great sounding recordings of steel 6-strings and classical guitars recorded in modest studios using home equipment. There are fewer 12-string guitarists, but one can sometimes hear a good acoustic sound from a home-recordist. For 3 or 4 years I've felt very frustrated trying to get a good sound from the 12-string in my home studio, but for a little over a year now I feel that my recordings are starting to capture the sound correctly. I don't know enough to generalize to anyone else's situation, but perhaps this run-down of my setup and the reasons behind it might help another 12-stringer to come up with a great sound.



Here is my idea of a great sound for a 12-string, the opening to Leo Kottke playing Busted Bicycle. He is playing a 1963 Gibson B45-12 with fingerpicks fit with heavy strings tuned several steps low. I happen to have a 1963 Gibson B45-12, modified, and with heavy Elixir strings tuned down a third (E strings down to C, I've never had the guts to go to C# with heavies), I can hear a bit of that sound given that, one, I don't use fingerpicks, and two, I'm not Leo Kottke.

I once read once that his guitar is surrounded by microphones during a recording session; this was in a music group comment and I can't confirm this, but if you listen to the "6 & 12 String Guitar" album you can hear various guitar sounds coming from several directions which seems to substantiate that comment. The album was originally released by Takoma, and I don't know who did the original mastering. The CD was remastered by Joe Tarantino, Fantasy Studios. So given that, as a home recordist, we probably won't have an array of expensive microphones (each of which can cost thousands of dollars), let's see how close we can come.

What I like about this sound is the emphasis on the artifacts of a 12-string: the picks hitting the strings and the low action strings bouncing on the frets. Most guitars try to emphasize the notes themselves, but in this snippet the soundhole boom and the fundamentals are de-emphasized. This is actually very close to the live sound of this guitar, so we shouldn't need to change the signal to get this sound.

Recording an acoustic guitar can be thought of as a chain with these links: the performer, the room, the guitar, the microphones, the preamplifiers, the soundcard, the recording software. Each contributes to the overall sound, but some are very, very important, and some much less important to the final result. Most important is the performer, then I think the room, which is usually not given the consideration it should be, then the instrument, then the microphones. I think these things contribute so much to the final sound that you should spend almost all your available money or effort on these items, and in that order. In other words you should be spending your time and effort mainly on performing skills, the instrument and the room, and spend some time and effort on researching and obtaining microphones. Each one of these items is probably worth its own thread.

Later.