If the person I am going to record turns in a Strong Performance, I usually don't even want to add separate effects, edit, punchin and all that jazz.

Nor is it needed in most cases.

Also - that performer very likely has not spent a lot of time recording in the multitrack process and you can easily throw them off enough that their Strong Performance is lost.

So -- If they are very used to playing their guitar and singing their song at the same time, I don't attempt to change that by suddenly inserting a brand new process on them, just so I can use some fancy plugins.

Instead, I use my single stereo channel input soundcard with two mics, one in each channel, simultaneously, placing one mic close to the guitar (but NOT in front of the soundhole where it will pick up the air rushing in and out) and the other mic in front of the performer's cakehole.

When tracking like this, I just want to capture their performance from beginning to end.

I might do three or more passes like that, though, looking for the best performace at mixing time. I usually don't attempt to even edit parts from one pass into another in an attempt to try to derive a "perfect performance" either. Most of these artists are adept at "telling their story" and you may just find that each pass is a different retelling, different enough that attempts to match pass number 1 with the second verse from pass number 2 can be heard.

Instead, I listen for the full beginning-to-end performance that has the most sonic and emotional impact. Sometimes that is the performance that does indeed have a slight mistake in it somewhere. If the performance outweighs the little mistake, I just leave well enough alone. Of course, this is the REAL job we face when "wearing the many hats" of the home recordist - that of MAKING DECISIONS like these.

Once it is time for mixdown, I don't try to create a wild stereo field by leaving the guitar on the hard left and the vocal on the hard right, either. That's dumb. Instead, I pan them both more towards the center if not dead center, such that the playback emulates what you might hear if that performer were sitting on a stool directly in front of you, playing their guitar and singing, telling their story.

As for reverb, I find no need to establish a separate instance of reverb for the voice than the guitar on a recording such as this. Matter of fact, that can easily be *detrimental* to the performance for applying a different ambience to the vocal than that on the guitar can create an artificial situation in which the voice and the instrument can sound like they are in two different spaces. Yuck.

When recording like this I find that the EQ is important, as well as the Compressor plugin. Reverb can be applied on the AUX bus so that you are using the same reverb on both tracks, using the Mixer to adjust the amount on each - just don't end up with way more on one than the other, that "two different rooms" aspect.

Applying reverb separately also has another undesirable aspect -- one can make a great sounding acoustic guitar track start to sound like it was played through an electric guitar amplifier that has its reverb turned on... (another Yuck in most instances like this, save that stuff for the larger Rock Band's album where this kind of thing may work as "artsy").

If the performer is good, that is all that you need capture.


--Mac

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