Sup guys! Just curious what everyone uses for acoustic guitars these days. In my experience, the only thing that really brings them out to shine is the Waves Maserati...and that thing is a CPU hog. I have an Ovation, so I'm going direct, which makes me suspicious and I've never been crazy about the sound in the first place. But anyway. Do you typically run an acoustic through something, let's say Amplitube? Or do you just EQ, compress, reverb and call it a day?

Here's a couple examples what I'm looking for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO8GzpUvMsw
please don't let this turn into a Conor Oberst-bashing thread, I'm just using as an example And I know the sonnuvagun uses vintage microphones thanks to his nerd producer...which I obviously don't have access to.

And here's a more strummy example. They're obviously double-tracked? And panned opposite each other?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJQvf1LZofY

Thanks guys! Hope this helps others, too.

 

It's pretty much a matter of eq and compression, then delay and reverb. You need to really clean up and control the bottom and low mids, this is the most important aspect of getting that clean, smooth guitar sound you're looking for. You need to cut out those low mids and booming lows (especially around 150-200Hz) as much as it takes to get it to sound clean, don't be afraid of cutting even up to 5dB or more to get it to clean up.

After that you need to brighten up the guitar with good boost to bring out the strums of the guitar and make them more prominent if they need to be, and usually they will need to be brought out a bit more. Use an EQ to do this and boost as much as you need to. Remember that to get a guitar to sound like you want you have to shape it's sound and get creative with it, so do whatever you need to do. You could also use a tube emulator to give it some warmth and a tiny bit of distortion

Then, you need to control the peaks. Use one compressor with a quick attack and release time to catch the peaks, followed by a limiter if needed to make sure the peaks are completely under control. Then I alot of times use a multiband compressor specifically to control the low end and smooth and tighten it up even more, and I also use the multiband compressor to readjust the gain of the frequency bands if I need to, to further shape the sound. Then you can follow that by one final compressor with a medium attack and a medium release with a ratio of 2-3 to bring everything together.

The final step is to widen up your guitar and make it fill the stereo field. Here's a free plugin that will do that for you. It will pan your guitar left and right and then delay one of the sides to give you that really wide guitar sound and it does it very quickly, just choose a preset and you're done.

Here's the newest song I produced and I mixed the acoustic guitar just like I explained above. The guitar was recorded in a room with no treatment and the mic was not even that good. But with creative mixing and hard work you can get it to sound just the way you want it

Let me know if there's something that doesn't make sense because it can get confusing at times.



http://soundcloud.com/householdproductions/bruce-harrott-make-yourself

 

Sorry forgot to mention the reverb part, just use your favorite reverb, cut the really harsh highs and cut the lows up to 100 or 150Hz from the reverb and just give the guitar a little bit of it so that it fills out the rest of the space. You can use delay to taste.

 

Wow, thanks so much for the comprehensive explanation! What you said makes total sense. Oftentimes I'll EQ an acoustic...be unhappy with it...and then cut so much off the low end sheerly out of frustration...and it sounds good! But then I'm like, "No, that can't be right," and roll off half as high as I'd come. Guess I really should trust my ears

I'm really glad it's not just me after all. I mean, I'm almost glad it's a lengthy process and I haven't been missing that one important something. Lately I've been almost quadrupling my acoustics...hard left, medium left, medium right, hard right...because I really like that full acoustic sound. Maybe overkill, haha. The acoustic in your song sounded really good, just the right amount of punch and warmth. Sometimes I'll hear an early acoustic Beatles song, and it makes me go, "rRRrrghhH!", because it's so clean in the mix yet so unobtrusive.

 

I know exactly what you mean, it gets really frustrating at times,and it's because we think there are "rules" when it comes to producing or mixing music. There are no rules, you gotta do what you gotta do to get it to sound the way you want it to