2025 - 11: Hear the Difference: Acoustic Guitar Recording Tips That Actually Work
- Jan 'Yarn' Muths
- Nov 30, 2025
- 5 min read
Mix Artist Studio Newsletter November 2025
Dear Artists and Music Creators,
Musicians often ask me the same things: "Is my mic good enough for recording my acoustic guitar?" or "Which plugin will make my guitar sound amazing?" The surprising answer usually has little to do with gear.
Gear matters, of course - but the truth is, most of what you hear in a great acoustic guitar recording is shaped before soundwaves even reach the microphone.
This month, I share my personal acoustic guitar recording tips and tricks. Read on to the end, and I’ll show you how to hear -and feel- the difference for yourself with a free, no-obligation session.
Now, let me walk you through how I approach recording acoustic guitars at Mix Artist Studio:
The Acoustic Guitar Recording Pyramid
If you want great acoustic guitar recordings, you have to approach the sound starting with the elements that make the biggest audible difference and working your way up to the subtle refinements.
I like to think of it as a pyramid:
Level 1 - The Biggest Difference: The Player & The Instrument
The acoustic guitar itself, plus the hands playing it, account for the majority of the sound - and the quality. No microphone or plugin can compensate for unprepared instruments or inconsistent playing.
Cover the essentials:
New strings, ideally installed the day before so they’ve settled but still shimmer.
Get the action right! A clean, accurate setup: no fret buzz, no dead spots, proper intonation.
Relentless tuning discipline. Tune before every take. Sometimes between sections.
Rehearse for hours. Your playing will gain comfort, confidence and consistency.
A well-practised guitarist on a well-maintained instrument will always sound better than a mediocre performance captured with expensive gear. That’s the truth some people don’t want to hear - but it’s a proven fact that leads to great recordings.
Level 2 - The Second-Most Powerful Tone Shaper: Room Acoustics are The Magic Sculptor of Your Sound
The room you record in shapes the colour, clarity, and natural resonance of an acoustic guitar in enormous ways. If the room is boomy, fluttery, echoy or noisy, stop and fix it now! Otherwise, you'll fight an uphill battle in every production step that follows.
Acoustic guitars are especially sensitive to room tone, which is why perfect isolation booths often sound too dead, and untreated bedrooms often sound too messy. Great acoustic guitars need a “just right” room with tastefully controlled acoustics.
At Mix Artist Studio, I almost always record in Live Room 1. To enhance the natural liveliness of the guitar, I often flip the wall panels to the reflective side for extra reflections and openness.
I even remove the rug, because I can genuinely hear the difference between rug vs wooden floor reflections. The extra life from the timber floor can be beautiful.
Level 3 - Small Moves, Important Changes: Microphone Technique & Placement
Once the instrument and room are dialled in, I choose the right microphone for the desired sound and place it accurately.
If the acoustic guitar needs to sit inside a full and dense arrangement, I often choose a single mono condenser mic and place it about 1 ft, aimed towards the 12th fret. This creates a focused, stringy sound that cuts through an already busy mix.
If the guitar is the central foreground element within a sparse arrangement, stereo microphone techniques deliver stunning results.
An XY configuration with pencil condensers can be a great choice. Place it so that one mic aims more towards the body, and the other more towards the neck. This gives you plenty of options:
Pan the mics hard L/R for the full stereo width. If set up correctly, XY is fully mono-compatible.
Pan them central and use the "faders as EQ" to level the fullness of the body against the brightness of the neck
If only a darker (or brighter) sound is needed in the mix, you can even drop one mic all together, and continue with the other.
XY is clean and focused, but it can lack depth and space as it focuses on what's in front of the mic and rejects the room sound from behind. In imperfect rooms, this can be beneficial, but in acoustically perfected rooms, it lacks that natural beauty.
That's why I like to use the Blumlein stereo technique at Mix Artist Studio. Based on Alan Blumlein’s famous technique, this uses two figure-8 microphones stacked and angled 45° outward. This captures both the guitar and the room in a wonderfully natural and three-dimensional way. It has all the advantages of XY with the added space and depth of the live room 1 acoustics.
A fun fact:
The British engineer Alan Blumlein also invented the equilateral triangle speaker layout still used in studios today.
A word on microphone types for acoustic guitars:
A friend of mine swears by a single SM57 mic placed near the player's right ear - but in all honesty, dynamic moving-coil microphones rarely work to my satisfaction when it comes to acoustic guitar.
To my ears, those mics tend to lack the quiet details. That's where condenser mics have the upper hand and can absolutely shine on acoustic guitar - but be aware of the harsh and brittle top end that some budget condenser mics are notorious for. I sometimes use studio condensers, such as TLM or FET47 models, but my favourite choice is a pair of Royer R122 active ribbons. They have a silky smooth top end, no harshness at all, and beautiful transient response. The slight tonal difference between the front and rear lobes of the R122 is something I use deliberately for a warm and rich room tone.
Level 4 - Subtle & Lovely: Preamps & Compression
For acoustic guitar, clean gain matters. I usually reach for my stereo ISA preamp, as it does a tremendous job at providing the significant gain needed for quiet picking performance - without adding any perceivable noise. It also adds a slight bit of extra harmonics when gain-staged just right to saturate its Lundahl transformers gently.
A final touch may come from subtle analogue compression. My most common choices are my SSL-style stereo VCA compressor, or sometimes my Drawmer 1978 FET compressor if tonal shaping and character is needed. Either way, I apply to-tape compression subtly and tastefully - not aggressively, with gentle ratios and long attack time, often just reducing a dB or two.
If recorded like this, only minimal processing (if any) is needed in the mix.
Why I Don’t Record DI Pickups in the Studio
"Do you record the pickup as well as the mics?" I get this question all the time. My answer is simple: "No, I don't record the pickup".
Because DI pickups never sound as good as real microphones in a treated room.
They’re brilliant for live gigs - absolutely essential. But in the studio? Compared to proper miking, the DI always sounds plastic and unnatural.
I’ve tested it countless times: Microphones win. Every time.
Want to Hear the Difference Yourself? If you’re curious how good your acoustic guitar can sound at Mix Artist Studio, I’d love to show you.
I’m offering a completely free, no-obligation 1-hour acoustic guitar test session.
Bring your acoustic guitar (with or without pickup). Let me show you what I can do with my mic setup, and judge for yourself.
I promise you'll hear the difference.
Reach out if you want to book a spot. I'm looking forward to discussing guitar sound with you.
Warm Regards,
[House Engineer & Studio Manager]
Mix Artist Studio
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