Critique my acoustic guitar please

First, I really like the song and the excellent performance by the vocalist. I personally would not add much to this song at all, it has a nice sparse sound to it which I think fits the song perfectly.

As to the recording; I think the guitar is a little boomy in places. Mic placement, mic placement, mic placement........ I find recording my steel and nylon string acoustics to be the most challenging thing I do. I started with with a mic pointed at the 12th fret, 6 inches away and got boom. Down by the bridge and got boom. Back at the 12th and rotated it about 20degrees toward the nut; perfect.! Doesn't work on my other guitar; go figure. With my nylon guitar I got the best results with a Rode NTK about 2 feet away, pointing right at the bridge (check the solo in my White Bird post on this forum). So my suggestion is to experiment until you find the right thing, then write it down (unless your memory is better than mine.)

I'd be careful with cloning a track and nudging it; I've done this and been successful some times, but other times it generated phasing. I personally record mostly mono tracks and let the reverb (on a bus), generate the stereo image for me.
Same for the vocal. I thought I might have heard a bit of phasing in the vocal; did you do the clone/nudge technique there too?

Also a little hump in the lower mids on the vocal here and there; that may be your room? Mic? You didn't say what mic you used for the vocal.

The above are just suggestions to help make what is already a very, very good song, better. If you re-record it, please post.!

Hey Jeff - Not bad for a rough take. I'm listening to this on phones and I can can hear some "artifacts" on the vox. I'm assuming it's the room. She has a good voice, but I don't like the ambience from the room. Your guitar sound is good, but I think you can take it a step further by using 2 mics. One near the 12th fret, and 1 a little past the bridge. This way you'll pic up two seperate tones and the imaging will be much wider. The trick is trying to make the song larger than life when one voice and one guitar is all you're recording. This is not a critique, but some suggestions that I've applied to my own stuff. Now if your acoustic was being used along with a lot of other instumentation involved, this would work as is. I do like the song.

Larry: Thanks for the listen. The vocal track is problematic vis a vis the ambience. I am working with Jess to develop a better mic technique so I don't have to pic up so much room noise just to hear her vox.

I had the inputs almost wide open and the mic set to the -10 dB setting. I'm not certain what that means, but in effect it is much more sensitive.

Thanks for the gtr suggestions.

JD:

Thanks for the compliments. I use a standard Yahoo hosting package for jeffreysykes.com and use MovableType blog software to publish. I'm a former journalist, so I still do a lot of writing and use the blog to stack dump what's on my mind from time to time. The layout is a template I got from Style Contest.

Thanks for listening to Grounded by the Bomb. That song needs a lot of work and is from a set I did last year. I'm still working on my recording technique. I'm not at the point where I can get my ideas down the way I want them, but I had to try that one to see what I could accomplish.

Peace.

I can't offer any micing or room advice but I can say that I really like the composition and the flow of the piece. Very nice and would stand well with a sparse minimal arrangement, maybe with just some subtle soft padded percussion ... of course, JMHO. Singer has a great voice. I am hearing a little sibilance here and there. Not sure of that is due to micing or maybe a de-esser would be called for. Great song. Keep us posted !