The sound of the room only becomes more involved the further away the mic is away from the guitar. In a room there is a point where the room sound equals the direct sound from the guitar. You are on either side of this. Move the mic further away and the room sound increases, direct sound decreases. Move the mic mush closer and the direct sound increases a lot and the room sound diminishes away very quickly and is not involved with your sound so much at all.

People are scared of close micing and for some reason everyone thinks the only good results happen when you are away from the source. This is true of certain things like classical guitar, banjo and violin perhaps. They don't appreciate you getting to close with the mic.

Acoustic guitar is one of those things that can sound very good when micing up close. 12th fret is a good place to start and 10" away is also a good place to start. You will get a lovely crisp big sound. And it will require even less processing and sit very well in a mix. Try also moving further away but slowly eg 15" then 20" etc..Vocals sound good up close too. 

A single mic in these positions is a good start. Then X/Y co incident pair in the same positions and you will start hearing stereo width. No phase issues while the two diaphragms are close to each other. Then X/Y near co incident pair is another good option. Finally M/S in the same positions also works a treat with added control after the recording event. You can also try moving the whole assembly around toward the sound hole and also around towards the nut. That will give you some more tonal variations. 

I sometimes have also utilised the recording space. I have some baffles with hard surfaces on one side I can move around and form a small room with an odd shape to minimise flutter echos and combined with a tiled floor can produce a nice live room sound. Micing 3 feet or so back is also nice in this situation and stereo micing is a must in this situation too. (M/S is very good in this mode as it gives you lots of control as to how wide this overall recording ends up sounding) Obviously this is good in an overdub situation. You end up with the guitar very much in its own space and it also sits well in a mix because its own room sound puts it up front in a mix and you usually afford the luxury of turning it down in the mix but still hear it clearly.

"People are scared of close micing and for some reason everyone thinks the only good results happen when you are away from the source. This is true of certain things like classical guitar, banjo and violin perhaps. They don't appreciate you getting to close with the mic."


Why you gotta say people are scared? Maybe it's just that not everyone wants to sound like James Taylor.

:-)

Perhaps I should have used the word reluctant. It can be as if close micing is no no. But I think that it is equally as valid as more distant micing. Sometimes you do want that guitar to sound just like James Taylor. Anyway that is not a bad thing especially if it is being played as well.

I love the detail in close miced sounds. Proximity effect is easy to control. The signal to noise or signal to room tone ratio is very good too. It is great and you can also get into the concept of using less reverbs and send the closed miced tracks to same reverbs. Distant micing in different locations with all their ambiences may start to get cluttered after a while and things may not gel because there are too many different sounding rooms involved. 

There is a bit of a balance involved. Closed miced things with their own reverbs added plus instruments recorded in room ambiences. 

There's no substitute for recording well in the first place, but something else worth mentioning is removing/reducing the phase problems after the fact by realigning the tracks. You can do that by either zooming in and nudging clips (time consuming), or by using a plugin (fast). MeldaProduction's AutoAlign does this, for example (http://www.meldaproductio...ct.php?id=MAutoAlign). It's sometimes the only way to improve things if there is no opportunity to re-record a track or if an exceptional performance is too good to throw away.

Just for a couple of counter-suggestions ;)

I haven't much success with M/S on an acoustic guitar. The side is picking up mainly what comes back from the room, and in a room that's treated with absorbers, that's not much.

I like a mic at near head height, over the shoulder on the fretboard side, positioned to catch some of the front of the instrument, that's a different option to try.

Sometimes it works to spread a guitar in stereo as if it were a piano with high notes towards the right and low towards the left, but don't overdo it! Clone the track, High pass one of them and pan right, low pass the other and pan left, and you'll get some spread which (if you're careful) will collapse to mono without some of the odd effects that time-based wideners can introduce.

Nope, I record directly in front of this setup and it tastes great, lasts a long time :-) The mid is the Mojave Audio MA100 small diaphragm condenser at the bottom, and the side is the Neumann u87AI in a figure 8 pattern above it.

Ah, perfect guys - now I have a few ideas what to try! :) 

I'll have to use some time this weekend to try the different options then.

I would like to comment on Craig Anderton's approach to turning well recorded mono acoustic guitar tracks into nice stereo wide sounding images.

Here is the link for those who want to refresh themselves with the concept.

http://www.guitarplayer.com/article/stop-stereo-miking-acoustic-guitars/147557 

I have been approached by a rather talented lady who creates very interesting music. She tracks everything and is after a mix engineer to mix her stuff. I have been lucky enough to get the gig or start it at least. 

She does use acoustic guitar as a rhythm instrument a lot and it is well recorded and in mono.  Playing is excellent and unusual to say the least. As it is a main driving force I like the idea of trying to get it into stereo and put the vocal dead centre. Otherwise you are dealing with two mono point source signals to try and make some sort of stereo out of. (there is other nice stuff though which can set up a very stereo image in the final mix so the guitar and vocals are not by themselves)

I tried Craig's approach and after great experimentation I decided I definitely do not like it and for me it does not work at all. You just end up with this still mono sound but a boomy and thick sound on the left and a more treble sound on the right and something strange in the middle. You get some severe phase shifting effects around the cutoff frequencies and it messes with the sound big time. You have to phase reverse the full range sound in the middle to get things back to normal. Even then it does not collapse down well to mono either.  Not discrediting Craig either as it is quite possible I was doing something wrong. I have got good ears and know when something sounds great and right and when something sounds strange and for me it was strange. I moved the cutoff frequencies all over the place, changed the slopes and varied the balance between all three things and yes it all changes when you do that but it never grabbed me once. 

It is nothing like placing a co incident pair of microphones around the 12th fret and a foot or two away. M/S applies here too. If you are going after a stereo acoustic guitar sound then this is the way to do it.  Coincident pairs and M/S are fantastic ways to get nice stereo images that collapse well into mono as well. That is how you avoid any phase issues with stereo miking.

What I ended up doing was just using it as is, EQed it nicely and just placed in the image along to the left of centre and the vocals just to the right. With the other things involved you did not need the acoustic guitar to be in stereo anyway, it sits very well just being placed along side everything else. Also I did run it into a nice convolution reverb with a small tight room and just added a sprinkle of that back to the dry sound and it came to life and sounded like it has been recorded in a nice room in stereo!

Awesome topic!

I'll add:

1) Employ several to many takes

2) Block early reflections with clothing or such

3) Honestly, because acoustic guitar is so forgivable (compared to vocals, drums, and other delicate instruments) ... its difficult to fail, IMHO.

4) Danny Danzi (has accepted many of my 'mediocre' acoustic guitar performances in our collabs ... despite my 'perceived' inferior timbres, inferior skillfulness, etc.  ... like if it fits in the SONG as a whole, use it; performance just isn't so critical to every muse.

5) But the greatest advice I know was to given to me by that elusive guru, YEP: (iirc)  "Hire a seasoned guitarist (i.e., a rock star) to perform your guitar tracks when things get guitar-intensive".  So! 

When guitars get too confusing for my simple mind, I enlist Danny ... and things get fixed fast. :):):)  (I'm sure many here concur with this.)

What worked best?