sharke
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s...c%20%28193%29.wav?dl=0

Well, that sounds really quite nice to me. Sure, there is a sense of room, but are you sure it really takes away from your production? Used right it might even add a bit of life and grit that may do good to a largely synth and sample based production... But then I am maybe not enough of an audiophile...
Maybe do try to borrow one of these mic isolation shields and see what it does for you. Or try a matched pair of small diaphragm condensers. Do you have a music store that will trust you with borrowing stuff to try out?
 

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I guess maybe it doesn't sound as lame as I initially thought and I just need to keep beavering away. Yeah on second thoughts maybe the MIDI route will end up sounding crap. Actually last night I heard a big improvement, amazingly enough, by running it through the Waves PS22 mono to stereo plug (one of them...I forget which). I'd always dismissed this plug but it seems to be doing a great job of adding width to the part, with some tweaking. One of those tools which I've had for ages but never used after an initial bad impression. Although this week sometime I may get my ARC2 mic out and experiment with a spaced pair....

Hi Sharke,
 
Personally, if I can be honest with you....I think you are being overly anal and over-thinking things. :)
 
I like the sound of this track as it is. What I would do here.....it needs a little eq for some sparkle...high pass 200 and below...see how it sounds. If you need a little more low end "girth" try high passing at 180 or 150 Hz.
 
Next, for the sparkle....you get treble on a guitar from 3-6k. Experiment there to see how it sounds. If it literally sounds abrasive, try 8k to just add some presence. It may add a bit more of a "noise" type sound than a presence there, but try it just to see. If it's too hissy, drop down to 7k or even 6.5.
 
From there, try removing a little 640 Hz. This will take away some of the mids that may be adding to the masking or guitar congestion that you mentioned within the vocals.
 
Lastly, once you have everything where you want it, use Perfect Space and run a small room/medium room impulse. Eq the room using the PC eq or a Sonitus. High pass the low end until you no longer hear any low end "whoom" type artifacts. You may need to take the HP to 300 Hz. Leave mids alone and experiment where you want the high end in the impulse to be. Again....same set of rules as we had for the guitar eq. In this scenario though, you very well may need to use the upper end of the frequency band and may end up boosting or even cutting 7-10K depending on what type of impulse you used.
 
These things right here should give you great results. You have a strong recording.....like the frame of a house. Now it's up to you to "dress it up".
 
Now, the thing with "framing" to get a good sound depends on the mic, the placement of the mic (which I think you nailed pretty good) the guitar and the execution....how things are played. New strings is always super important as well.
 
That said, a better guitar is going to improve the sound 10-fold. Your playing is good enough do there are no issues there. A really good mic is going to make the sound more pristine unless the guitar is pure crap.
 
Most really good mic's accentuate what is presented to them. A great guitar with a great sound....the mic will make it sound that much better. Bad guitar with a so-so sound...sometimes the better mic can bring out the flaws more. It's a grey area really.
 
As far as rooms go....I'm probably one of the only recording guys that swears the room doesn't make a huge difference unless it is a horribly bad room. The reason I say this all the time is because I have recorded in some of the crappiest situations known to man and I have ALWAYS come out of them with an acceptable production. Do good rooms make it easier? It depends on what one calls a good room. The ones I have called good rooms were only good when we could utilize them and create some space with the mic's used. Even there...we had to be careful because the sound + the room (in that order of importance) is what I'm after. I never need the room to dominate the sound....so by the time I get done, there may not be that much room included in the print....even if the room is a good one.
 
When a room is bad, you use the right mic, you keep it close and after a successful print with the right execution, you manufacture a room that suits the sound. I say that because if you close mic, the room is not going to come into play unless it really reverberates or has rattles that can be heard even when you close mic. This is slim to none in a CM situation of no more than 4-6 inches. With the capabilities we have today, capturing a room sound is only as important as we want it to be. Seriously man. With the power of today with impulses and the ability to compress, eq and color a room, I'd bet all that I own that when done right...no one could tell the difference.
 
Is a room important? Only if you want it to be. See in my experience, I would only worry about a room in the case of looking for a specific sound. When we need drums to sound a certain way when using a real kit, we go to a studio that excels in drum production due to the room. That said, there aren't many bands today that are using big drum rooms....most drum sounds are in your face, hybrid sampled and the rooms are hybrid as well and half manufactured.
 
With instruments that we mic....we really need to cover all bases at all times so that we always have a safety net. If it's for yourself, you can experiment until the cows come home. When you have someone paying by the hour, you can't afford a bad take due to a room so you mix and match for the situation. Most times in my real life recording experience (based on genre of course) we wind up using LESS of the room and use more of the direct recording sounds at all times. In some instances, the client liked more room sound and wanted more synthetic added in as well. The reason being...some people don't like to be so up front and naked. They feel room or effects help to mask their flaws when in reality though some of that may be partly true, they are degrading the recording with washout.
 
So in my opinion brother, unless you get a new guitar and a super sensitive mic (or use a completely different set up) you got what you got....and I happen to think it's quite good. With a few little tweaks, I see no reason how this sound would not stack up against anything else out there. But that's just my opinion. :)
 
-Danny

As for the midi thing you were talking about. I have been trying this for years using all different software and though at times it has been semi-successful, I'd not spend any time on it. If you tried to make it work, you'd have to play so clean you'd STILL have to remove artifacts. Every string squeak counts as a midi note. Every little thing you do counts as a midi note. What you could do that would sound similar is to layer your tracks and use different eq and mic positions. The thing there is, you'd need to track them perfectly. The thing with midi....unless you had a midi guitar set-up on your acoustic, you're doing way more work cleaning up notes. If you DID have a midi rig on your acoustic, you could do the stuff you mentioned but you'd still probably have to keep the midi end of it lower in the mix as it's not perfect and would bring out some artifacts here and there. Even the samples....though great, sort of always fall short in my opinion.
 
This is why I'm saying...record a few tracks using different positions and eq curves. Then mix them all together to where you're doing orchestration parts. You can even have one guitar play an octave higher and just lightly mix that in. So many things you can do here....but you have to really be a "take monster" as I like to call it, and play your parts perfectly. That's one thing I cannot do that I wish I could. It's much harder than people think. But that's what I would do man....the other reason being, nothing sounds better than a load of layered guitars done right. You'll get more sound/instrument size this way than anything else you can try. :) Good luck!
 
-Danny
 

Thanks for that Danny, that's some excellent advice. You're absolutely right about a cut at 640Hz making room for the vocal, and I quite liked the sound of a little 5.5K boost. It's definitely sounding better now.
 
I haven't been able to try running it through Perfect Space because wouldn't you know it, Sonar does not recognize my Perfect Space .dll! Ain't that a drag? In fact I have quite a few plugins that Sonar has just stopped acknowledging and I really need to get to the bottom of it. I've heard good things about that plugin though. 
 
You're right about me being too anal about this, of course. I get really fixated and obsessed with some things when I just need to learn to relax and leave well alone. Of course this is why I have 10+ projects that are forever in the "tinkering" phase and have been for ages. Sometimes I'll be just about to hit the hay and think "hmm, I think I'll have one last listen to that project I've been so happy with tonight" - and of course 2 hours later, it turns out I haven't gone to bed at all because I started tinkering again. LOL! And then the next day I have another listen and think why didn't I leave the hell alone? Thank God for Gobbler! 
 
I think tomorrow I'm going to experiment with some closer mic positions. I like your advice about rooms man, I guess that was something I really wanted to hear. If it's possible to get a good recording in a not so good room then I will pursue that. I'll take it down from 12 inches to 6 and see what kind of difference that makes. If that takes a little more of the room out then I'll be very happy. 
 
I've done a lot of the guitar to MIDI Melodyne thing, but usually for converting guitar to synth. And yeah it can be a real pain - it takes a LOT of tidying up and sometimes I listen to the notes Melodyne has created and think "there's no way in the world I played that" - I'm not even talking about the ghost notes and overtones, but sometimes a note which is definitely part of the piece will show up before or after when I played it. So then I'm moving it back to where it should be, but that kind of defeats the whole point of converting guitar to MIDI, in that you want to retain the timing and feel of what you played. So what usually ends up happening is that in the course of all this fixing and editing, I end up with a totally new piece of music for the synth. And often that's worked out great, in fact I've ended up with some really lovely synth parts just from applying Melodyne to guitar and then sculpting something out of the resulting MIDI in the piano roll. I think if I was trying to recreate a realistic guitar performance with Melodyne and a guitar library, I would get very frustrated indeed. So I'll skip any sample purchases for the time being. 
 
I did try recording a double take of the part, and actually it wasn't that bad - I surprised myself with how accurately I could play the second part along with the first part. But there were still the odd notes which were slightly out and it starts to sound like a sort of slap back delay effect...which could work in another context I guess, just not this one. The vocal was very nicely recorded - lots of warmth and detail. I'm just trying to record a guitar part that'll do it justice. I'll get there in the end! Thanks once again for your advice man...excellent as usual!

I love reading Danny's posts.... I agree with him on the rooms issue. ( and other stuff too)
 
As a musician who has played every sort of room and space.... yeah, there's good ones and there's really bad ones.... you just gotta learn to deal and figure out how to make them sound good.
 
Now that I record rather than gig.... same rules apply. My space here serves double or triple duty as an office and more. The old house I live in is in a neighborhood with a train track 3 blocks down and a busy road one block over. Between trains, trucks, dogs barking, lawnmowers and neighbors yelling, getting a clean recording can be a bit of a challenge. Compound that with the fact that the room itself is not designed to be a studio..... and my wife says that it must retain some semblance of a room in her house and not a recording studio..... I'm limited on the acoustic treatment I can do.....essentially nothing. I work in the corner of the room.... not even set up equal distant to the walls beside me. Just the carpet on the floor, acoustic squares for the original ceiling, and scant furniture with wallpapered walls..... get the picture? 
 
Still, I have no excuses when it comes to getting a good recorded sound for guitar and vocals. If I'm doing work for commercial purposes, it has to sound decent. One simply learns to compensate. I don't place any huge importance on my room. I'd probably become severely depressed if I did.  I simply compensate for the weaker areas as I mix.  As Danny mentioned... I create my own "space" digitally.  I mic close to the mouth or the instrument and take a break when the train is passing through town or the lawn serve guys are cutting the grass nearby.

sharke
 
 
I think tomorrow I'm going to experiment with some closer mic positions. I like your advice about rooms man, I guess that was something I really wanted to hear. If it's possible to get a good recording in a not so good room then I will pursue that. I'll take it down from 12 inches to 6 and see what kind of difference that makes. If that takes a little more of the room out then I'll be very happy. 
 
I did try recording a double take of the part, and actually it wasn't that bad - I surprised myself with how accurately I could play the second part along with the first part. But there were still the odd notes which were slightly out and it starts to sound like a sort of slap back delay effect...which could work in another context I guess, just not this one. The vocal was very nicely recorded - lots of warmth and detail. I'm just trying to record a guitar part that'll do it justice. I'll get there in the end! Thanks once again for your advice man...excellent as usual!

Play around with the mic positions. I find that on acoustic guitar 12 to 18 inches works well but on mandolin, I need it really close in to the sound hole.... maybe 6 inches or so. I've actually banged the mic a time or two recording mando.
 
On the doubling.... yep... that's always a cool thing and yes, you should be able to play it really, really close once you know the song...... NOW.....as far as the notes that are out of sync or time very slightly..... do not accept the out of sync/bad timing as "OK" .... fix it.
 
USE MELODYNE. This is an area where ME excels.
 
Melodyne will let you edit those notes on it's time line to move them very precisely to where they are close enough to sound as one.  I used it for this purpose just 2 days ago.  In a song I'm working on, the B3 took the second part of the solo to the guitar taking the first half. To my ear, it didn't sound right so I edited them to swap.... B3 first half and the guitar picked up the second half... Sounded better but, now the pickup notes to the guitar were not exactly right. Sounded like the player was hesitating. What worked in the original didn't work in the edited.  I simply opened melodyne, grabbed the first measure of the guitar pick up notes, adjusted the timing by the slightest amount and processed it. That resulted in the timing being dead on.
 
 
 
 
 

Never a problem sharke, glad it was helpful. Also, experimentation is great. It teaches you lots as long as you are focused on what you are doing, log your failures and of course the times where you feel you've gained ground.
 
The problem with experimenting is we sometimes lose focus and wind up doing more lab work than we should. That's one of the problems with this field...the addiction side. It usually happens to us when we know we may not have the right gear, so we try anything and everything to make what we have work. This is truly how you learn and it will take you further than most people know.
 
I learned the stuff I know from being thrown out in the field because I was the only guy that knew a little more than the others in my world. And when I say "a little more" I'm not kidding. Decent ears and a few pieces of gear was all I had. But, it's how you use the stuff that matters....and I came out with acceptable sounding stuff no matter what the circumstances. Part because my ears were decent, the other part...I knew how to use the crap gear that I had.
 
All that came from lab work. Reading certain books were helpful, but most of the time, books aren't as helpful as people may think. They don't teach you how to use YOUR gear in YOUR situation. So that leaves you with saving the money to get better stuff so the books make more sense (most of them are always using gear and rooms none of us can afford...I mean, c'mon, are they serious with that whole thing?) or you bust your hump to use what you have until you exhaust it.
 
I have learned a few things that have really made a difference over the years. Though cheaper gear works us, pushes us and teaches us...it also wastes a lot of time and for most of us, we don't have the cash or the room to do anything but use what we have.
 
But now that I'm in a position to sort of go nuts with buying new gear, SOME of it makes such a huge difference, I shake my head at some of the stuff I thought was good. Some gear is all hype though too, so you have to be careful.
In certain areas, it makes all the things we work so hard to achieve....so easy it makes you laugh. Other times, you work a little harder with better gear because it can be too unforgiving. That's just the nature of the beast though. Anyway, as much as the new gear I've purchase this year has helped me, it's made me want to experiment even more.
 
But like I said, we get so wrapped up in that...the drug takes over. So I've been really trying to control my "lab experiences" so that I am not doing it any more than 2-4 hours 1-2 times per week. This way I can get some stuff done also and it gives me a sense of accomplishment....even if the final print may not be where I want it. We can go on and on and on with production and still never be happy. That's when the drug is out of control. That said, at least we're not getting into trouble out there on the street. So heck, if this is your drug of choice...do it well. :)
 
-Danny

Ha yes that is one of my biggest problems - knowing when to stop tinkering, but not just that, making the best use of my tinkering addiction. It's so easy to spend a whole night trying endless combinations of endless parameters and at the end of it thinking "well, what have I learned?" Unless you're concentrating on WHY certain combinations of parameters sound the way they do, and making mental notes of the results, it's like you're just groping around in the dark hoping to fall on a great sound by accident. And of course sometimes it happens! But if you didn't keep track of what you were doing to make it happen, it's not going to be easy to repeat in different situations. I do this a lot with synths that I don't really understand, like Prism - I can spend whole evenings tinkering with that thing and come up with some pretty cool sounds, but I've never really isolated what each knob does and why. Which makes it virtually impossible to create a sound that's in your head from scratch.
 
Part of my problem is that I think I have a mild case of ADHD (or "look, a squirrel" syndrome as I like to call it). My whole life, my head has gone off on different tangents every five minutes. I learned to play guitar very haphazardly like this. I think it's just how my mind works, but you adapt to it and use it to your advantage when you can 

Guitarhacker

sharke
 
 
I think tomorrow I'm going to experiment with some closer mic positions. I like your advice about rooms man, I guess that was something I really wanted to hear. If it's possible to get a good recording in a not so good room then I will pursue that. I'll take it down from 12 inches to 6 and see what kind of difference that makes. If that takes a little more of the room out then I'll be very happy. 
 
I did try recording a double take of the part, and actually it wasn't that bad - I surprised myself with how accurately I could play the second part along with the first part. But there were still the odd notes which were slightly out and it starts to sound like a sort of slap back delay effect...which could work in another context I guess, just not this one. The vocal was very nicely recorded - lots of warmth and detail. I'm just trying to record a guitar part that'll do it justice. I'll get there in the end! Thanks once again for your advice man...excellent as usual!

Play around with the mic positions. I find that on acoustic guitar 12 to 18 inches works well but on mandolin, I need it really close in to the sound hole.... maybe 6 inches or so. I've actually banged the mic a time or two recording mando.
 
On the doubling.... yep... that's always a cool thing and yes, you should be able to play it really, really close once you know the song...... NOW.....as far as the notes that are out of sync or time very slightly..... do not accept the out of sync/bad timing as "OK" .... fix it.
 
USE MELODYNE. This is an area where ME excels.
 
Melodyne will let you edit those notes on it's time line to move them very precisely to where they are close enough to sound as one.  I used it for this purpose just 2 days ago.  In a song I'm working on, the B3 took the second part of the solo to the guitar taking the first half. To my ear, it didn't sound right so I edited them to swap.... B3 first half and the guitar picked up the second half... Sounded better but, now the pickup notes to the guitar were not exactly right. Sounded like the player was hesitating. What worked in the original didn't work in the edited.  I simply opened melodyne, grabbed the first measure of the guitar pick up notes, adjusted the timing by the slightest amount and processed it. That resulted in the timing being dead on.
 

 
Yeah man I really need to work with Melodyne more and learn how to get good polyphonic results from it. I've still to grasp the timing side of it. Like the quantize macro. Sometimes I'll have a bunch of 16th notes that I want to quantize to machine accuracy, but Melodyne seems to botch it up in hilarious ways. Damn, I need to go back and watch the Groove3 course again.