Interesting reading on Mike positioning.

I'm not comfortable dropping names, so apologies if this sounds pretentious!
Back in the days before the world wide web there was an online service for musicians called Performing  Artists Network, or PAN. I was unbelievably fortunate to co-sysop their audio board with Bruce Swedien. Yup, the one and only!
 
While I never did manage to sit at his elbow in a session, we spent many an hour discussing recording techniques, on and off line. The one point he reinforced, over and over again, was microphone selection and placement. It is the key to his success, or so he claimed.

His other key point was to experiment every chance I got, and that meant ignoring the rules too. We had a thread going for quite a while about desert island microphones. The answers were as varied as the contributors. There were no wrong answers!
 
Granted his microphone locker is a wee bit deeper than mine, his advice made a HUGE difference in my tracks. I (slowly) reached  the point where I wasn't using compressors and equalizers as much when I reached the mix phase, the tracks say well in the mix because I had used a specific microphone, and placed it accordingly, to capture the sound I was after.
Some 30+ years later I still experiment, my starting choices might be closer today, but it seems there  is always room for improvement. And as I (slowly) add microphones to my locker there is always more to learn.
 
There is no substitute for placing your microphones in front of an instrument, b..ut that SOS article, among others, can be a good starting point. I'd also recommend the videos from Mojave and Royer microphones. They show the details of how they record using those microphones.

Even now, with rare exceptions, I seldom start a tracking session without first experimenting a little bit with both selection and placement.

None of this is meant to suggest that there is no place for compressors and equalizers, for correction and/or artistic alterations. There is certainly ample room for both, and he certainly has a wide selection of tools to sculpt the sound during and after tracking. It's all about the starting point!

The trick - for me anyway - was thinking about the sound I am looking for, and getting as close as possible using the source and microphone, and arranging them to attain the result.

Yup - a stroke of outrageous good fortune!!!