Microphone Placement (Lesson 6) - Posted on 2017-08-29 by Mike-Cole

One of the coolest things that I have learned over the past few months came in the form of my mentor telling me a simple thing about the way I was recording. I told him that many of my tracks that I record in my apartment use acoustic guitar and he then asked me how I mic up my acoustic guitar. I told him I just put the microphone at the sound hole and press record. He then explained to me that to get the optimal sound out of an acoustic guitar professional audio engineers really don’t mic up their acoustic guitars at the sound hole. That simple statement changed the way I thought about every single recording that I had ever done or will ever do. Simply put because there are some things you can’t fix in the mix (that rhymed). I always thought that the reason I wasn’t getting the professional sound that I wanted out of my recordings was because I didn’t know how to properly edit them. But simply put much of recording is not about the editing. If you get a bad take there is only but so much pro tools can do in order to fix it. The way I think about it is like autotune. Many people have the misconception that autotune will just make a bad voice sound brilliant but in reality it just fixes some slight things. Just like mic placement, if you mic something up wrong (there are no rules to recording so technically there is no wrong), it could have a drastic impact on the overall sound of the recording. In fact any way you mic it up is going to affect the way the recording sounds.