Quick guide to big sound — multi mic it

by Adam Steele

Forget expensive recording microphones and fancy studios; anyone can get a huge sounding instrument recording. With the same setup as I described in the last post for a few hundred bucks, here’s how to get that huge professional sound. In this example, I’ll use an acoustic guitar, but the same applies to any acoustic instrument (violins, drums, horns, etc).

Setup

With an electric-acoustic guitar, we can record one track from the direct input and the other with the vocal mic described in the last post. If you have more microphones and more inputs, all the better. Where you place each microphone depends on the instrument. Each instrument has a sweet spot to put the mic. Just experiment with it. Have someone else play while you put on headphones move the mic around until it sounds the best. If you’re using two microphones with no direct input, try putting one closer to the instrument, and the other farther away. Or for a guitar, point one at the sound hole and the other at the neck. The point is, you want each mic to record the sound from a different perspective, so you can blend the sound afterward and make it sound bigger, more accurate, or at least give you options to make it sound however you want.

What to do in the recording software

Let’s say you want a huge sound. In your recording software, pan one track a little to the left and the other a little to the right. You’ll notice that when you change the volume of each mic, it’ll change the sound of the recording a lot. So just play with the volume of each until it sounds the way you like it. Then to make it sound even bigger, add a sample delay to each track. This delays either the left or right side which tricks your ear into perceiving a more stereo sound (a bigger sound). If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. When you listen to that instrument live, the sound gets to one of your ears at a slightly different time than the other.

Example

You can hear the difference in the example recording below, especially if you listen on headphones. The first time through the guitar riff is using one microphone, and the second and third time through is using 2 microphones, one panned a little to the left, the other a little to the right, and sample delay applied to both. It’s really easy, takes just a little experimenting, and sounds awesome.