making acoustic guitars sound crispy and clean

[intro5000]

can anyone suggest a proper chain of effects or plug-ins to try out to get a nice clean sound on some acoustic guitar i played?

[Zakari Luk]

the first thing in a nice natural acoustic guitar sound is putting new strings on it. second is the mic and placement, i like condensors. i usually cut the frequencies under 150 hz and compress to my liking. i always switch the order between the eq and compressor to see which one sounds better in the mix. to make it brighter in the mix if i need to after that, i use an enhancer, it sounds more natural than boosting the higher frequencies. enhancers can even make up some for dull strings. and a splash of reverb at the end is always nice.

[Angstrom]

It depends on what you want to hear in the track. Often if you heard the full tonal range of an accoustic it would clog the mix. Most often the mid-top is where it is needed.

to cater for all eventualities ...If you can - take 3 channels in:

an accoustic pickup mounted on the guitar.
an overhead, that is somewhere near your head position.
and a mic positioned about the length of the guitar (about 1.5 metres) away from the sound hole.

mixing from these 3 channels will help get a better sound, beware of phase issues though from the differing waves.

selecting the correct mics for the job is worthwhile too. EG: Dont bother with an SM58 for the distance mic for example as it is a vocal mic that uses the proximity effect ... where the frequency graph is only flat at close distances and falls of with distance (inverse square)

[feyshay]

Great advice, which I've begun to implement.
How do you maintain the crispy, clean sound when warping a lengthy piece, though? I asked before but didn't get a bite. I figured anybody who has warped an acoustic could tell me why things sound so warbly when I am in texture or tone mode.
Any recs?

[sweetjesus]

I don't think you will be able to get much better results using Live.

Try some 3rd party product for accurate timestretching. Ableton's timestretching is best suited for small loops, audio snippets all for live use therefore not using the best algo's which are too cpu intensive.

[sweetjesus]

Sorry to keep blabbing but I should mention that guitars and vocals are very intricate sounds and rely a lot on the harmonics and little intricacies in the sound and it is often the case that anything other than a perfect initial capture of the sound is going to give you much less than desirable results.

[feyshay]

I wonder then if things would improve just a tad if I broke the guitar pieces into smaller sections and warped those.
I have Sound Forge 7.0 which may have a little better time-stretching, but don't think this will allow better time adjustments (when just a tad offbeat in a part).
Any other means of editing for minor timing problems?
Does an electric guitar do better?
Maybe I'll just have to learn to play better.

[sweetjesus]

I tend to find cutting and pasting of guitar parts into the right timing, with fades affecting the tail instead of time stretching gives me better results cleaning up my shitty playing.

[feyshay]

I didn't understand what you meant by this.
I'll definitely have to do some cutting and pasting, though.

[sweetjesus]

Basically instead of timestretching, move things to the right spots. Fill gaps by copying parts from the tail and crossfadin between them and if a tail is too long, simply trim it and fade it or crossfade it to the next part.

If I'm not making sense still, it's like 8:30am and ive been up all night so im totally sorry man.

[krusty]

Also, when tracking a condenser mic pointed where the neck meets the body (6-12 inches away) will give a clear sound and will often automatically dial out much of the nasty freqs that you would have to eq out later.

[sweetjesus]

Also double tracking is your friend.