Fire and Rain (James Taylor cover)

recorded with Rode NT4 stereo mic direct to two tracks in Home Studio 7; e.q.'d out the highs and middles, and added stereo reverb.
 
I welcome your constructive criticism.
 
http://soundcloud.com/da-colonel/fire-and-rain-james-taylor

You've got a good handle on this tune - nice fingerpicking.  I agree with adding compression and mic placement, although the signal from the guitar seemed to get stronger toward the middle of the song.  I think you need to add more reverb - the vocals seem dry.   A tube compressor would help add more warmth.

Hi Steve, enjoyed listening to this , especially the guitar playing. Vocals could use a bit more reverb. I mainly use a compressor on my di'd guitar to tame spiky sounds, so I use a very fast attack, to catch the spike, pretty fast release,I only want the spike to be tamed not kill all dynamics and for the same reason I put the threshold so high that it only compresses the spikes not the whole note, ratio at 2 or 3. If on the other hand I want to beef up a thin sounding guitar, I use a bit slower attack, so it leaves more of the attack in place and works more on the sustain part of the note but doesn't kill all attack dynamics, slow release so the compressor has more effect on the sustain part of the note, ratio 3 or higher, threshold set so low that more of the sound is affected. You can also use New York or paralel compression where you put the compressor on a bus, compress the heck out of it and mix it with the original dry track so you have the original dynamics still there and can mix in the compressed sound to beef things up.

Greetings, Rik