Recording separated Voice and Guitar at the same time

[zemlin]

Figure-8 mics are your friend here.
A figure-8 on vocals with the dead plane of the mic pointed at the sound hole on the guitar will give you great isolation on the vocal. If you're getting too much room echo on the back side of the mic, a gobo or small acoustic baffle stuffed up to the backside of the mic can ease that.

If you want to mono-mic the guitar, another figure 8 down there with the dead plane oriented to the sound hole of the singer works fine. Stereo micing can be a little trickier, but I've done find with XY, and MS.

The main thing you want to avoid is significant coloration of the other source in any one mic. I tried the baffle thing between mics once and ended up with colored vox bleed in the guitar. It was light, but the off-color sound was hard to mix into the vox mic.

You're much better off with good sounding bleed, so when placing your mics focus on only on reducing the bleed, but making sure the bleed that's there sounds OK.

a cut and paste from another forum long ago

The big lollypop is a baffle. It helps a little, but the difference with the baffle in place was not dramatic. When setting up the instrument mic I try to have the axis of the body pointed right at the singer's mouth. The vocal mic is horizontal with the dead plane pointed at the guitar sound hole.

Here are a couple of untouched samples from the latest session. (185K each)

http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/Davi...Fig_8_Demo.mp3
http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/Davi...Fig_8_Demo.mp3

In later sessions I learned that the round baffle is much more effective just a few inches from the back side of the instrument mic. Here is a track from the completed CD:
http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/chea...d_o_sample.mp3

Here's another clip
http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/kiser_guitar_sample.mp3
This one done with XY AKG Blue Lines on the guitar. A little color in the VOX from bleed in the instrument mics, but overall a pretty good result. The guitar mics were pointed downward a fair bit to minimize vox bleed.

The LD mics in all of these clips are Studio Projects C3s.

[joelpatterson]

Wow! I have those exact same packing blankets! Same dusty dark blue, same baby blue trim, same stitching pattern even!

[Andraes]

Hi Karl,

What you are showing is great. The thingie, it's position... spot-on. We expect to be needing here and there a little pitch correction. This (and possible other per channel unique processing) is reason why the bleeds should be little as possible. Thanks for picking up that pic!

[Andraes]

Joel,

I think Kylie Minogue used the same blankets recording her first hits in the garage of previous Sweet guitarist. Did'nt you hear that?

[7rojo7]

That's about as good as it gets.
For pitch correction do alternative takes of the parts that are out of tune and get out the scissors, it wll sound better too.
A dead gobo is a must in my opinion

[joelpatterson]

Originally Posted by Andraes

Joel,

I think Kylie Minogue used the same blankets recording her first hits in the garage of previous Sweet guitarist. Did'nt you hear that?

I KNEW I'd seen them somewhere....

[Andraes]

7rojo7
We are a bit worried that the vocal bleeding on the guitartrack will be audible out of tune with the pitch corrected/new take. It is the kind of singer who is not out of tune when he is but at some moments we should be able to balance.....

[zemlin]

any retakes would have to be done with both guitar and vocal. Fixing one track is not an option.

[Andraes]

Inserting both guitar and voice from a retake? Is it possible to insert a strumming guitar? And a smarter question: As we will not use a click track, will we use the first recording as a guidetrack for the inserts?

I like the suggestion to fix pitch with inserts instead of melodyne....

[zemlin]

I would punch in, letting the performer play along with the original take for a few bars to get in gear, then play/sing through the punch-in region. You might need to tidy up the edges, but if the performance is reasonably consistent punching in should work fine.

[brubart]

The link below has some other tips on preventing phase interference when recording a singer/guitarist:

article

brubart