Balancing flute and acoustic guitar?

[jnorman]

hmmm - i have not recorded acoustic guitar much, and when i have it was always a solo piece. but yesterday, i did a flute/acoustic guitar duo playing a celtic folk tune.

i put up a main ORTF pair about 7 feet from the players, and added a close stereo pair on the guitar (AB cards about 12" out, one pointing at where the neck joins the body, and the other pointing at the body just below the hole). i did not put a spot on the flute, as i really dont like the way close micing sounds on a flute.

the result was that the guitar was completely buried in the main ORTF pair, flute sounds fine. adding in the close mics to acheive an appropriate guitar level, the flute now sounds like it is several feet behind the guitar, which of course sounds close due to the close mics. so, they dont really sound like they are playing inthe same place - not that good.

also, i found that i really had to FX the guitar quite a bit to get a sound i liked - lots of EQ, saturation, stereo spreading, delay to fatten it up some, etc - otherwise, it was just dull and lifeless sounding. is it common to have to manipulate acoustic guitar like that?

so, anyway, how would you have done this differently? how should i acheive a setup where the flute and guitar sound like they are in the same space, rather than one souding close and the other sounding further away?

and how do you get a nice big clean guitar sound without having to eq and FX it all over the place? thanks.

[hemulen]

Delaying the guitar very slightly wrt to the main pair might help your case here (experiment!); also I'd be inclined to use a single guitar spot in the mix (or mono combination of your 2 mics assuming they were sufficiently far apart - careful with comb filtering, though) and eq to taste.

Having said that, there may be more mileage in playing with position and location when recording your duo in the first place - 7ft sounds quite close for a source that size, presumably the room isn't sufficiently large or nice sounding to get a bit further away? Did you try adjusting the position of the main pair to get a better balance?

[pkautzsch]

7ft shouldn't be too bad for that kind of ensemble. It's not an orchestra.
Too heavily processed signals tend to stick out in acoustic recordings. Probably better to just feed the guitar into a good (!!!) reverb, and maybe delaying it by about 10 ms.
How close were the guitar mics? Some hi-passing might help too.

[rumleymusic]

I recently recorded a flute and guitar duo in concert. I had many of the same problems you are describing. I used an AB main pair and single cardioid spot for the guitar. Adjusting level on the spot in post only helped a little, it was either too much or too little. Delaying the spot to the main pair was necessary for a balanced sound. I only sent the main pair to a reverb. Leaving the spot dry was critical to keeping the guitar in focus with the flute.

[NorseHorse]

If the guitar was too quiet on the recording, it was probably an unbalanced performance, right? The professor of guitar in Williamsburg ALWAYS brings a small amp with him, as well as a small mic clip that mounts to his music stand. He fills the guitar in lightly, which helps to balance the music. Using amplification for a duo like this is a way to bring up the volume without zoooming in on the guitar.

During the live recording I did with him in a reverberant room, he actually had the amp pointing backwards against a wall, allowing the baroque guitar to better fill the room without sounding amplified. It was a very good balance.

[GZsound]

I would put a pair of SDC's on the guitar about a foot away and try a single LD condenser about two feet in front of the flute.

That shoud eliminate the apparent distance between the two instruments.

A couple SDC's seven feet away won't get much of a decent acoustic guitar sound, which is why it sounded burried.

Also, how far apart are your musicians? Some bleed might add cohesion to the group.