First time recording acoustic lap steel, advice please!!!

[Chris_Lovegrove]

Hi all,

I've been getting into home recording for a little while now. I've made a couple of short CD's and I'm slowly picking up the basics. It's a very rewarding hobby when you get a good end product!

I've decided to record a few lap slide tracks and make a small EP, just for friends and family who have enjoyed listening to some of the songs I've learnt (poor souls). I'm finding this a very different beast to mic up compared to a standard acoustic guitar or a set of drums.

Anyone in the know; how would you mic an acoustic lap slide guitar for the ideal sound? How many mics would you use? What types? Distances etc.? My acoustic lap slide is hand made from solid mahogany by Pete Gosden in the kona-style and has a fantastically rich tone. That sound just isn't coming through on my test recordings at the moment I understand room acoustics and quality of mics will have a part to play in this.

For my test recordings, I'm using my Shure SM58 over the main body of the guitar and a Red Audio RV4 small diaphragm condenser mic (actually an overhead mic from my drum mic set, the manual says can be used for acoustic instruments and friends have used such mics in studio before) over the neck. I wasn't aiming the mics at the guitar directly above it at a 90degree angle, probably offset from the body , about 7-8" away set at 45 degrees. These were very much tests but I just wasn't getting anywhere!

I'm running these mics into a MOTU 8PRE studio interface, which runs through firewire into my iMac. I'm just recording into GarageBand as it came with the computer and it's user friendly and easy for me to get my head around!

Any help from the more experienced out there would be much appreciated!

[Jif]

Hi Chris,

As you may have noticed in my floored video, I'm using a combination of the internal piezo pickup through a Boss GT3 effects pedal (preset uses amp simulation & a touch of delay/reverb) and a Audio Technica AT2021 small condenser mic, recording each line onto two seperate tracks and mixing the two after recording to get the best sounding balance.

I bought a audio technica studio pack which includes a large condenser mic, AT2020 and the smaller AT2021. I've tried using a combination of the two mics but the above seems to work better for me. I have the mic at about 6-9 inches pointing at the neck end of the soundhole. May try experimenting with the two mics again when I've got the time.

I use a M-Audio 1010LTE PCI soundcard in a quad processor PC with 8Gb memory. I record at 96Khz 32 bit sampling rate, mix at this rate and then master down to 44Khz 16 bit. I find that working at the higher resolution sample rate noticibly improves the sound quality of the finished product, even though it is eventually @ CD quality.

A bit of EQ, compression & just a touch of reverb (in that order) improves the result considerably.

I'm using Cubase, on the EQ I've been using the the inbuilt Cubase EQ, which is basically a high pass filter (bass cut off starting around 80-100hz), low pass filter (cutting starting at about 15Khz) and two parametric EQs, mid low and mid high. On the mid high parametric, I initially put a large boost on and then sweep the frequency value until I find the sweet spot, then cut the boost back until it sounds natural. On the low mid parametric, sort of the same thing but sometimes a large cut on the gain, sweep to find where I get the best sound from cutting a section of frequencies. Then adjust the gain until it sounds right. A finer adjustment can be had by increasing or decreasing the Q value, (bandwidth of frequency being adjusted).

A pretty general compression, maybe 4:1 ratio and tweek the other values until it sounds good. I try to level out the sound without squashing it too much to retain the natural feel of the playing.

Reverb is a dangerous effect, people tend to use too much and this puts the sound into the background where it can be a bit muddy and unclear. When I'm mixing vocals I very rarely use much reverb and prefer to use a stereo multiple tap delay plugin with very short delay times and around 5 taps spread across the stereo spectrum. One tap centre with one pair about 40L & 40R, the other 80L & 80R. Each pair has a slightly different delay time, as does the centred tap. Shortest delay at centre, increasing the delay slightly as it gets wider over the stereo spread), this has the effect of the delay starting centre and pushing out left & right, (it's all about perception ). I use this on a FX channel rather than an insert and feed a bit of the vocal to it so that it is not obvious in the mix but gives the impression that the vocal is coming from over the whole stereo spectrum. It keeps the vocal prominent in the mix over any other instruments being used, and maybe just a touch of reverb to give it depth.

I use this same technique with guitars sometimes and it works well, it gives a nice big sound without being too obvious, but the secret is definitely less is more.

I've never used Garageband so I hope you can relate the above to it.

I hope you find this helpful, there are some good books out there, The Mixing Engineers Handbook has some great tips in it from professional guys, for me the most useful section is one called Magic Frequencies, an excerpt of this section can be read at this link.

http://digitalprosound.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=8953&afterinter=true