Acoustic guitar recording

Hi

I'm miking my acoustic 12 string up for recording into sonar but it's recording at about half of the volume i want ? is there any way to increase the volume of the play back without affecting the quality of the recording..i've been going to process / audio and increasing the volume by 3db but i'm worried it's going to affect the quality as i'm getting red numbers in the panel when i do this ? any ideas

Thanks Fred

So your saying mike up a pre amp rather than putting a compessor mike near the acoustic guitar do you still get that acoustic sound your way ?

Hi Fred

Just listened..the acoustic sound is crystal clear..that's great..just so i'm clear as i'm only getting used of recording myself and not having someone else do it.....you mic up your pre amp and plug the mic into the in line of the sound card ?

Hey Fred - I listened to some of your stuff - sounds really good!

Some questions for you: Once you record your acoustic guitar, what are some typical compression and EQ settings you use for it?

Also, the vocals sound great - are you using the same mic and preamp for these? What kind of EQ/de-esser process are you using after you record it?

Thanks...
I'm at work, can be more specific tonight.
I don't use a great deal of eq, I use the Sonatus:fx eq and for vocals drop off the bottom (60 or 80hz?)with a high pass filter to help remove pops, there's also a little dip around the mid range area. It's modeled after a template that Jonas posted and he had an eq curve for male vocals.

For compression, on the guitars I use PSP Vintage warmer with settings that I can't remember enough about to post now (I'll do it tonight). For compresson on everything else, I use the Sonatus:FX compressor, mostly using the vintage dbx (I think) preset. On bass I adjusted it differently.

I use the SonatusFX:reverb in a buss with, again, with settings that I got from Jonas' template. I use the settings he called long reverb.

I don't use any de-esser.

I use the same mic and preamp for most everything. Usually just one mic. On bass, and the bass tracks are all acosutic upright bass (double bass), I double mic it with a small, cheap, Behringer B-5 attached to the tail piece and then the AT-4060 at waist height a few feet away. I do this because the guy that does my bass tracks moves a lot and the B-5 does a pretty good job and with it attached to the bass he can't move away from it! Several of the cello tracks were recorded the same way, but for them I pan the two tracks hard left and right and then alter the volume of the tracks to position in the stereo field (the bass tracks I leave in the center).

Hope this helps. I try to post some actual settings tonight.

Fred

You should have your mic plugged into the preamp, and plug your preamp into the soundcard.........

You can download this zip file that contains the presets I use, some based on the presets that Jonas provided.
I've put in presets for
Sonitus:FX EQ,
Sonitus:FX Reverb,
SonitusFX: Compressor,
PSP Vintage Warmer, and
Ozone isotope

I have a P4 precessor that's really prone to normalization problems, so I always load www.digitalfishphones.com's normalizer in the track bin first, then the SonitusFX:compressor or PSP vintage warmer, and then the SonitusFX:EQ (I don't use the built in EQ in the track because it's before the normalizer).

I put the SonitusFX:Reverb on a bus and route each track to it and adjust the send levels.

Once I'm happy with the mix, I mixdown (bound to tracks) and put Ozone isotope in the fx bin of the mix down track, solo that track and adjust Ozone starting with the preset that I've included. You'll need to copy the Ozone xml preset file to the Ozone/isotope/preset directory under program files. Oh, and for those that don't know, you import the Sonar presets using the Sonar Plugin Manager, I'm not sure it loads with Sonar, but it's on the install CD.

Presets Zip File

I don't pretend to be all that good at mixing and mastering... in fact, I plan on sending my songs to Jonas to mix and master once I finally finish them - he has some really nice outboard analogue equipment that sounds really, really good.


Fred