4th August 2025
Yes, yes no blog in three months… [Insert excuse here].
In fairness, I do actually have a bit of an excuse: I’ve been doing a lot more recording and music stuff recently than I have been for a few months. And during the course thereof, I have had cause to record an acoustic guitar. The only problem therewith: I don’t have one. I do, however, have a lovely Tele. Electric guitars aren’t generally much use when they are not plugged in to an amp, or so I thought, but it turns out that foregoing the pickups can actually give you some pretty interesting results if done with a bit of forethought and technique.
Speaking of technique, mic selection is something I have begun to question a little. A bit like guitar selection too - I think people become attached to certain ways of doing things, and whilst I agree that certain tools do certain specific jobs very well, I generally also take the view that the best mic is the one that you have to hand currently. For me, that’s a £10 knockoff of an SM57, which might sound like a bad idea, but since owning that microphone I’ve tried to upgrade it a few times, and I’ve still not found anything that quite matches it! I’ve tried far more expensive condenders with various sizes and styles of capsule, different dynamics, and yet my 57 remains on the mic stand. Maybe it’s that it handles my voice (which is what I am most often recording) very well, maybe it’s that I know exactly where it falls short and what parts to highlight in it, but that 57 has become my mic of choice for the time being.
Anyway, I placed the 57 about the right distance perpendicular to the neck pickup on the Tele, angled slightly towards the bridge because (perhaps purely psychologically) that gave me the impression I’d get the brighter “bridg-ier” sound that I was looking for. My Tele does sound nice just listening in the room when unplugged, it has a lovely chorusing between some of the harmonics, and I hoped that by aiming there I’d capture some of that.
I should also add that I was recording through a Behringer MDX2100 compressor (again, another one of those lucky finds that was stupidly cheap second-hand but which seems to make anything I put through it sound better (except guitar D.I.s. It sucks with guitar D.I.s for some reason)). I pressed record and proceeded to do a number of takes until I had one with acceptable timing. I ended up double tracking and panning slightly left and right too.
The recording sounded about how one might expect: Lots of high end, barely any low end, oodles of attack and basically zero sustain. In fact, it is these very complaints which I will now use the aforementioned forethought and technique to solve, because I suspect that this is what puts people off recording electric guitars acoustically - processing them to sound nice is a bit difficult.
This is the raw sound:
Perhaps the most obvious thing is the transient-ness of the sound. In order to deal with that, heavy compression might do the job, although one of the disadvantages of the 57 knockoff is it can be a little noisy with the heavier end of the compressor’s reach. Instead, transient processing might do the job, although when I tried that, it sounded a little too like limiting, everything suddenly felt hugely dynamic in the lower volume parts, but anywhere over the threshold sounded limited. Perhaps it was bias, but I was excited to try AnalogObsession FetDrive. This is a transient processor based on the 1176, known for extremely fast attack, and which applies saturation to the signal over the threshold, rather than adjusting it by a factor of the gain over the threshold or simply limiting it.
And this turned out to be just the ticket. With a surprisingly small bit of tweaking, this signal no longer sounded harsh, but almost compacted and more solid. It wasn’t like an instrument being thwacked, it was like an instrument being played, and what’s more, the lack of a distracting transient really drew attention to the chorusy sound of the tele’s harmonics. This is easily the most important plugin in the chain, everything after this point makes it sound better, but without this processor, the whole thing falls apart.
Next up in the chain is an IK Comprexxor. It’s not actually doing any compression (though I think it was at one point), it’s actually just adding gain and a little more saturation using the tone section. It does slightly thicken the sound up when you isolate the gain stage and A/B it, but it’s not the most important plugin in the chain by far, just a little tasteful saturation.
The next biggest problem after the transience of the signal (which is all but solved now) is the frequency response. It’s all high end and no body. This would not be a problem if this was a layered element, and in fact I’ve left it at just the above processing on other songs where I’ve used this trick to create the “phantom acoustic” (where you’ve got an acoustic playing the same part as an amped electric to give the whole part a little more shine). But this is a lead acoustic part playing big open chords, and I want them to resonate and fill the whole mix up.
The EQP-1 is a tool that is mostly known as a bit of a one-trick pony. It does that cool bass thing, but I’ve never really seen anyone use it for much else particularly. The Pultec actually has a whole high-end section which can do similarly cool things to the low-end section. Because (as I understand it at least) the original hardware (and thus the software clones simulate this) had two different signal paths, one for attenuation, one for boosting, the two different signals would be mixed together and sound… interesting. I should really research the technical side of what’s going on there, it’s probably something to do with phase differences and transient-dependant circuit components reacting differently to the differently processed programme material (which does sound the exact sort of thing I’m interested in), but suffice it to say, the settings I used on the guitar sound good.
The high end attenuation felt like it took away something a little lower in the frequency domain than the high end boost added back, meaning the piece got more sparkly, but the harsher sounding sibilance was gone. This is a technique I’d applied to vocals before too. I also boosted the low end and did not attenuate it at all. This added in a bit of body to the sound which was otherwise missing, and compensated for the lack of a resonating hollow body in the guitar. One of the important things I set on the EQ was opening up the bandwidth to its widest setting so that the filters would be very gentle in their response, and could influence a wide area of the spectrum.
I finished off the chain with a bit of reverb. This added back the sustain which an acoustic might otherwise have had. I used The Farm Stone Room which is a fantastic sounding room reverb based on the Phil Collins drum room apparently. I used it to add a bit more of a stereo image, and accentuate some harmonics too, and as it has the compression in the famous gated reverb console, it is doing some light dynamics processing too, as well as a little EQing. This plugin was more of a stylisation for the particular mix I wanted to add the element into, rather than something to make it sound more like an acoustic, although it sort of does double duty as I would recommend some sort of a room reverb for this kind of thing.
This is the final element, isolated.
I think this sounds fantastic, perhaps it’s not 100% identical to an acoustic, but in the context of the mix I think it leads the entire song despite managing to not interfere with the vocal. Have a listen to the final mix of the song (which isn’t getting released I don’t think), and see what you think. Excuse Logic’s janky technique for cutting off the end of files - do you really think I can be bothered to trim it properly?!
I’ve got some other songs I’m really happy with at the moment so will hopefully release them very soon!
After considering some things, I have decided to remove the screenshots of the plugins in this article, as I felt they were questionable copyright-wise. I realise nothing would probably have come of it, but better safe than sorry, and anyway, I can do one better than that and give you the actual preset files anyway! I’ve uploaded them below in Logic Pro’s AUPreset format (sorry to people of other operating systems)
Tagged as: thoughts technology music creative ideas problem-solving