Berkley graduate Andrew playing guitar for Bay State College's Acoustic Guitar Recording Workshop
On October 18th, 2011, Audio Engineer professor Daniel Goldfine presented his methods of recording acoustic guitar to produce different sounds. Professor Goldfine also discussed with students how certain sounds are not necessarily "bad", it just is not suited for the Mix at hand. He brought up the importance of the type of guitar being played, type of strings being used, the level of expertise of the performer, and also the room in which one is recording.
Professor Goldfine first played clips from a selection of famous recorded songs including acoustic guitar, and spoke on the type of sound which was being produced and how that sound was specifically fitted to that Mix. Then some critical listening was done and he had students attempt to guess how they believed the guitar might have been recorded and why. He then presented two different types of acoustic guitars; one smaller, one larger. Then brought out three different types of microphones; a dynamic moving coil, condenser, and ribbon. His performer, a graduate student from The Berkley College of Music, then played short songs while he showed us different miking techniques while using 2 microphones at a time. He had each mic going to a different track in ProTools LE 8 and a few recordings were done. Microphones, guitars, and positioning were all changed repetitively for each recording. All with minimal mixing, with the exception of some panning of microphones.
