Hi,

it always seems to be impossible for me to edit my acoustic guitar or vocal recording in a song where this is in focus of the listener like a ballad. It sounds always very unnatural, if i correct any playing or singing errors(and i make a lot) in timing or if i have rings or bad notes. Is it just my perfektion or is it difficult to edit some singer songwriter performance? Maybe the audience does not notice and it's just me..

Sometimes i play a song over and over the whole recording session and can't get i completely right. This is sometimes very frustrating.

I'll answer what I think you mean. Use separate tracks and punch in where you make mistakes. If you're recording acoustic, keep a small table right next to you with a mouse on it. If you move the guitar or change the angle it will sound different, so keep the mouse close enough to where you dont move, and use multiple tracks to record. Then edit them in to one track.

If you want to sing and play live,.... you might make mistakes because you're thinking about it. 100 years ago, they recorded straight on to a record, without the option of editing. ie; Robert Johnson. Pretend you live in those times.

Thanks. I did not pay attention on keeping the position on my last recording. Maybe this was a problem.

1.) A difference of a 1/4 Inch in any direction in a mic position changes the sound.
2.) Not recording in the same spot of the room will change the sound. A foot here or there or facing the wall instead of facing out into the room changes the sound.

I would practice until you can record it in one pass or at least in whole parts like verse, chorus, bridge ect ect

Thanks. I followed your advices and it's gettin better. I recorded the last 3 evenings. The sessions were quite long, about 6 hours each of just playing and recording guitar. Always the same piece.
On the first day, i realized, that some playing styles dont fit with my guitar. I have a jumbo lakewood, and it seems that it doesnt like strumming, and need to be finger picked.

The second day i had a bad noise on my recording which came from my RME intrrface on the analog inputs, when i have also a digital input with gain running.

The third day i realized that my breaths are way too loud on the recordings. I already found a thread here to this problem and need to see if i can position my mics to get rid of that. I have a bad nose breathing at the moment. My nose needs a nose septum correction. I tried with rx7 to delete those breaths, but it doesn't really seem to cancel those out, but cuts them out, in between parts.
I have small condensors for my guitar(sm81) in stereo. Maybe try with a ldc rode Nt-2 in figure-8. My u87ai sounds horrible with the guitar in some frequencies, so i cant use this.

Otherwise I have to record short guitar parts, where I focus on my breathing and crossfade them, or try to breath through the mouth the whole time which makes it difficult..

This is very tideous.. but I didnt lost the fun yet

You are very welcome!
Usually you point the mic toward the noise off axis to the mouth, but maybe in your case, you should have the mic pointing towards your Chin, facing up and off axis to your mouth. Try that

Thanks CJ, I'll try that next.

I'm a terrible fingerpicking guitarist (a bass player really) so the rare occasions I have tracked just fingerpicked guitar plus vocals I have cheated.
I put the guitar track trough melodyne studio to convert it to MIDI. I then use the MIDI data to "play" an acoustic guitar VSTI to enforce the weak and uneven notes. Cubase has a MIDI compressor which helps with that! Mixed correctly you don't really hear the trick - it just makes the guitar sound rounder and more even. I also sometimes use piano notes to enforce certain bass notes.

Which mic are you using for vocals? You can try a dynamic mic and cut out parts between verses. Some dynamics have such a crazy proximity effect, that if you're not right on it, it doesn't pick up much.

Nose breathing is a thing, I actually keep a painting face mask in the "studio" in case I'm recording quiet guitar.

are you playing and singing at the same time when you record?

Probably the best for mordern pop music. Pop music is very clean nowadays. Do you think this can work on intimate songs, ballads like ed sheeran - perfect, too..

When I record vocals and guitar at once, I use my u87ai and a Rode Nt-1 in figure-8, but I found it very hard to fix any playing errors. So at the moment i record guitar first with two sm81 scms and then voice with the u87ai on top.
Do you mean a condensor for singing along with guitar or for vocals or guitar solo? I don't know if i can get that poppy chart hit sound with a condensor like Sm7b. All I heard for now with condensor was a little smaller I thought

A mask sounds interesting