hi I'm Ryan West I'm a dungeon Beach in Williamsburg Brooklyn
you know acoustic guitars are used in lots of different ways and different
kinds of music oftentimes if I'm tracking the project I
might have the guitars double track the acoustic guitar so I can pan one left
and one right and have them sort of moving on the sides of the mix when I'm
mixing I don't always have that option I can't get the acoustic guitar player
back in to do another track I may just have to set that up for
myself and I'm going to show you a trick on how to do that but also you know I
want to process and and and fit those acoustic guitars into the mix in a very
natural way acoustic guitars are one of those finicky kind of instruments where
if it's Mike the wrong way or if it's inserted in the mix or EQ it in the
wrong way and it sounds unnatural people pick up on that pretty quick because
almost everyone knows when acoustic guitar is supposed to sound like so what
do you do in that case well a lot of times you can solve that with a little
EQ and a little compression in this mix that I'm working on right now which is
the white line remix by Chandra Darrow we have an acoustic guitar track that is
doing sort of like this rhythmic chug kind of thing so the first thing I'm
going to do is go ahead and reach for the grande channel plug-in because
that's got it both a compressor and an EQ on it and I need both of those in
this case I'm going to put the plug-in up and I'm going to bypass it so we can
listen to the acoustic guitar just as it was given to us with no processing at
all so take a listen to this
but acoustic guitar sounds pretty good it was recorded fairly well in a small
room and there's not a whole lot of early reflections or you can't really
hear the room sound around it which is great in our case we want that to be
relatively dry at least until we decide we want to add something to it what I
was hearing was that I wanted to control the dynamic range us a little bit so I'm
of course naturally going to use a compressor for that but the first thing
that I want to do is I think I'm going to use a low-cut filter or high-pass
filter down the bottom of this plug-in you have two choices they have a low-cut
filter that works in one of two different modes right now it's in a
detector mode in this case though I'm going to use this an input mode the way
it works here it's really just removing those frequencies from the signal
altogether it's not just the detector circuit it's removing them from the
entire signal I'm going to start turning this thing up and I'm going to turn it
up to the point where I start to feel like I'm losing some of that nice bottom
end in the acoustic guitar and then I'm going to back it off just a little bit
to taste take a listen as I roll it off you're
not going to really hear anything change dramatically until probably I get past
100 Hertz check it out
did you hear that right there once I got up to 148 Hertz you really you know lost
the low end of that acoustic guitar I don't want to lose all of that that's
nice it has like a really nice natural quality to it so I'm gonna start backing
it down until I feel like it's in a good place right about 100 Hertz I mean
that's usually case with acoustic guitars that were recorded with a large
diaphragm condenser microphone which I suspect this one was one of the next
things I want to do is I want to control the dynamic range a little bit and I
want to do that first so I want to have the compressor before the EQ in this
particular instance because I want to control the dynamic range and then I'm
going to use the EQ to add a bit of sparkle on the top end on this plug-in
because it's a channel strip there's you know signal operates in a certain order
but you can actually change that order on this one down on the bottom right
there's a switch where you can choose EQ before compressor or compressor before
EQ that's where we want it unfortunately that's selected already so we're gonna
leave it right there so what I'm going to do I'm going to choose a medium
attack time because I want the transients on the top of the guitar to
come through but I want a faster release time because that guitar is chugging
along as I want the compressor to respond to that so I'm going to choose
fast release and then I'm going to start turning the gain reduction knob up until
I feel like it sounds good till it starts making me happy
you can also tell that I adjusted the gain output knob and that's the level
matches so that when I'm listening for the compression I'm not hearing a
difference in the volume I'm just hearing the effect of compression I'm
going to do that one more time I'm going to put it in bypass first and we're
going to lose the filter and we're going to lose the compression and we're going
to hear the difference the combination of the two we pulled out everything
below 100 Hertz and we're getting a couple of DB worth of gain reduction
with a medium attack and a fast release you're going to hear more click on the
front of the acoustic guitar because we're letting that initial transient
through with the medium attack time you hear that it's not a huge change but
once we sneak this into the mix that a little bit of extra attack time and a
dynamic control on that acoustic guitar is going to really let us put it in a
very specific place in the mix and let it sit as a rhythmic element and just
hold down our tempo the other thing that I want to do with this is I want to use
the EQ to add a little bit of sparkle back into the guitar I'm not exactly
sure where that frequency range is going to be but I find with acoustic guitars
it's often in the 3 to 4 kilohertz range the reason why I do it there and not
much higher is because the vocal is going to have its presence in the range
just above that the vocals presence range is somewhere around four and a
half to five or six K and I want to let the vocal live in that area of the mix I
don't think the guitar should be brighter in the vocal so naturally I'm
going to go for something just a little bit lower so let's add a couple of DB
worth of gain with a wide Q bandwidth on the EQ section above to add a little bit
of sparkle add a little Sheen back in so I'm going to select this band right here
I'm going to put it in peak mode instead of shelf mode because I don't want
everything above the frequency I'm operating on to be you know raised in
gain and of course I'm going to have this in the boost mode not the cut mode
I have three point three selected right now that might change but let's see what
it sounds like with oh let's say a medium - you know
2/3 of the bandwidth here and I'm just going to start playing it back listening
to it as I add gain at 3.3 K now interesting I usually make pretty small
moves with the accuse but I really felt like it started to sound good once I get
up towards 6 or 7 of course you know we have to listen to this in context and we
have to make sure that it fits into the mix but right now in solo that sounds
pretty good to me this is a subtle kind of EQ it's based on a pull tech design
and having it at the wideband with that we have it set at right now it's going
to sound more natural if I had it at a narrow bandwidth we would hear a peak in
the center frequency at 3.3 K that would be much more obvious doing our low-cut
adding a little bit of compression just to keep the dynamics in check and then
adding a bit of sparkle back in with the EQ section has added up to a nice change
for this acoustic guitar we're not done yet but what we're going to do is put
this in bypass listen to it raw and then halfway through like we always do we're
going to put it back in and hear the difference check it out
I think that's going to make a big difference it sounds already more
exciting to me as we discuss when we started this video sometimes you have an
acoustic guitar and it's just a single acoustic guitar but you'd like it to be
you know to work like a double tracked acoustic guitar and like I said when I'm
in the studio recording with acoustic guitar is even if we don't end up using
it I ask the acoustic guitarist to double their tracks so that I have the
option later in the mix to push the stuff out to the left and right and
start you know chugging along on the sides of the mix in this case we have
just the one we don't have the option of getting the tourist back in so what do
we do fortunately we have a little trick for
that and it's called a doubler plugin it's called the fixed doubler I'm going
to choose the stereo version of it I'm going to put it right on the track as an
insert and right off the bat I know that I want this to be stereo so I'm going to
select a stereo option what this is going to do is it's going to put some
distance between the left and the right it's going to modulate and maybe even
delay a little bit one channel and make it sound different from the other one so
my goal here is to make it sound like there are two acoustic guitar tracks
playing very tightly with each other I don't want this to sound unnatural or
affected I want it to sound like it's a double tracked acoustic guitar so let's
take a listen to it with this plug-in just in the default setting it has the
auto double setting on which is obviously a doubler and it's set to be
stereo so that instead of the effect going right behind the mono track it's
going to put it one on the left and it's going to put a dry one on the right we
have it set in a mix position at fifty percent between the input and the
effected signal so it's kind of like it's 50/50 it's like one guitars
affected and one's not take a listen to see what this does
so that sounds pretty effective that's not really what I'm going for I'm going
for a more natural effect so what I'm going to do is I'm going to mess with
this mix control knob and then I'm also going to play with the delay offset the
sweep and the rate of the sweep so I can see if I can get it to sound a little
bit more natural I want it to sound exactly like two guitars or as close to
that as possible let's try playing with those a little bit I'm going to turn
this mix knob all the way down to input and then we'll just start raising it
from there and see if we can get a better setting
okay that's definitely getting closer you know I started to turn the sweep
control up a little bit and I think that's a little bit more of an unnatural
sound I want you to listen to how that works basically that's using this
triangle waveform and you can switch it to the sine or two random but in this
case it's on triangle and it's modulating the sound just a little bit
for an acoustic guitar we don't want to modulate it too much but a little bit
might actually work so let's try it out have fun with it you know that's what
these controls are for you know what I'm turning that sweep control all the way
off because it sounds a little bit like a chorus and that's not something that I
want to put it on a cruise ticket or like I said I wanted to sound natural I
wanted to sound like a double guitar not like something that's got an effect on
it so I'm going to turn that rate and that sweep all the way down I'm going to
play with this delay offset just a little bit more and see if I can get it
to do a little bit more natural sound
you know in isolation I think this this sounds a little bit like a delay but
once you sneak this into the mix it's going to sound a lot more like two
acoustic guitars so that's definitely one way that you can take a single
acoustic guitar and push it out to the sides basically what that's doing is
it's getting it out of the way the vocal and all the other stuff that's in the
center of the mix and just allowing that rhythm to chug along on the sides give
that one a try I think that'll help your acoustic
guitar tracks hold down the rhythm so one last tip for making acoustic guitars
sound natural put them in a natural space how do you do that well you can
use a reverb I'm going to go ahead and write on this track I'm going to add a
reverb plug-in and I'm going to choose the sar1 reverb I said I want a really
small room which I've already got selected here I want a load of fusion I
want to hear like the little snaps the little echos coming back off the walls
in the room the pretend room that I'm in and I said I want it really short so I'm
going to take this time control and probably back that down to around 500
milliseconds or so and we might change that and I'm going to actually add a
little bit of pre delay so that that reverb is not sitting right on top of
the guitar let's say I don't want to be in a glass room so I'm not going to put
that on bright I'm going to turn that down to be a little more dark and maybe
even a little bit of high cuts below 5k the reason why I'm going to do it below
5k is because I don't want that interfering with the vocal or any of the
other stuff that's going on in that frequency range than the mix so I want
this to sort of sit below the vocal remember where we boosted the acoustic
guitar on the summit grande channel we boosted it a 3.3 K and I want to keep
this kind of in that range - I don't want it to the reverb to be too bright
also on this plug-in we have the handy dandy wet and dry mix controls I'm going
to turn it all the way to dry play back the acoustic guitar and start adding in
more reverb towards the wet direction until I feel like it's occupying a
natural space so take a listen to this
now I kind of like what this is doing but it's I'm having a little bit of hard
time telling when that doubler is on there so what I'm going to do is I'm
gonna go ahead and bypass the doubler what I might end up doing is adjusting
the doubler taking a little bit of that off so I can use this reverb to make it
sound like it's more natural space let's take a listen without the double rock i
like that for the space i'm going to go back to the doubler and i'm gonna start
with that mix all the way down again and just add it in until i feel like it's
it's doubling it naturally
it sounds great at her and solo but of course I've got to get this back into my
mix and here in context to make sure it's working the way that I want it to
work let's just really quickly go back and bypass everything that we have on
here let's bypass the reverb the doubler and the grande channel which is the
compression in the EQ listen to it raw and then I'm going to start putting
these things back in one on one and we'll listen to the difference between
what we started with and what we ended up with don't be afraid to try things
like this to make acoustic guitars richer and make them shine a little bit
more controller dynamics so they sit in a nice place in the song especially if
there are no rhythmic elements like this with they're just chugging along and
they're gonna push the rhythm of the song forward try to control them as you
would anything else and keep them right there so that they're pushing the rhythm
forward alright I hope these helped you guys out good luck
you