https://vimeo.com/151420539
We had a lot of good feedback when we featured Apogee’s How To Record Drums with Two Microphones, so it’s worth pointing to another entry in the same series: a demonstration of recording acoustic guitar and vocals at the same time.
Bob Clearmountain, the mixing engineer behind decades of records for Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, and the Rolling Stones, walks through a two-microphone setup built to keep the two sound sources from bleeding into each other. A Neumann U87 sits close to the singer’s chin, angled upward and set to a cardioid pattern that rejects sound from below, which keeps the guitar out of the vocal mic. A Neumann KM84 handles the guitar, pointed down at roughly a 60-degree angle toward the sound hole and positioned close enough that it picks up almost none of the voice. Clearmountain skips the KM84’s built-in pad, preferring to roll off some low end afterward with a high-pass filter in the DAW instead.
Both mics run into an Apogee Duet, the two-channel audio interface the company built as an affordable home-studio option. It’s the same setup Apogee uses across this instructional series, which makes sense: keeping the gear list simple is part of what makes the demonstration useful for anyone recording without a full studio.
It’s not Apogee’s only guide to the instrument. A separate video, How to Record an Acoustic Guitar, covers single-mic approaches to the same source. Between the two, they cover most of what a home recordist needs to get a usable acoustic guitar take, with or without a vocal happening at the same time.
The result, by Clearmountain’s account, is a clean separation between guitar and vocal that would otherwise take isolation booths or separate takes to achieve. The core idea, using mic pattern and placement to do the isolating rather than the room, holds up with any pair of directional condensers.
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