Recording Acoustic Guitar and Vocals Simultaneously

Recently I've been trying to record vocals and acoustic guitar at the same time in order to get some ideas together. I wanted the simplest (and quietest) setup possible so I decided to rescue my old 16-bit Fostex MR8-MkII and a trusty old Alesis 3630 dual compressor out of the spare room and setup some mics.

I've tried recording acoustic guitar and vocals together before but I've always ended up with too much spill from the vocal onto the guitar mic ending up with awful phasing sounds and less ability to mix and eq the two tracks independantly.

I was aware of figure of 8 pattern mics and hypercardioids but opted to purchase two Rode NT-3 hypercardioid mics. I think figure of 8 pattern mics might give better rejection if the nulls are aligned properly but I was a bit put off with the rear lobe pickup issue (I don't want any room ambience) and thought that the Rode NT-3 microphones would be more usefull for other future projects.

From the photo above you'll see that I positioned both mics almost at right angles to each other to minimise spill from guitar to vocal mic and vice-versa. The guitar mic was aimed at 12th fret around 2-3 inches away and I warbled into the vocal mic at equally close distance too.

The NT-3's have a very focused pickup pattern and substantial rejection from the sides and suffice is to say that I'm very pleased with the results (although I'm very out of practice vocally and guitarwise at the moment as you'll hear)

Anyway, here are the end results of a test recording of a snippet from the Crowded House track 'Fall at Your Feet'. I aim to get back into practice and record a proper full length version of the song sometime but as always I've enjoyed the technical challenge and hope this information might be usefull to anbody trying to record vocals and guitar simultaneously. I must say it was also a joy to record to hardware - I haven't done that in ages!


Vocal and Guitar Tracks Together

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Guitar Track Only

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Vocal Track Only

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Update: 12/02/2010

Vocal Mic

Since recording this test when recording vocal and guitar at the same time I've moved back to using my Rode NT1-A for vocal, but I still use the more directional NT3 for the guitar angled down in the same fashion. This is because there's generally more spill from the vocal onto the guitar mic then there is the other way round - mainly because vocals are usually louder then acoustic guitar - so I don't need the vocal mic to be too directional and indeed I can get away with pointing it straight at my mouth (not angle upwards). The large diaphragm NT1-A mic also seems to suit vocals better (as may be expected) and is more forgiving if I need to look down at the guitar occasionally (singing at a slight angle to the vocal mic). In conclusion for me the very directional NT3, positioning it angled downwards and it's good side rejection characteristics seems to be the most important factor in producing good isolation between vocal and guitar. Nevertheless, if the NT3 produces a vocal sound you like, you don't need to look down at the guitar too much and if getting a very clean vocal track is critical then using the NT3 angled upwards is definately the way to go...

Also see my article "Recording Acoustic Guitar and Vocals with the Kodak Zi8" here

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