A quick note about guitars with on-board pickups. They’ll have a mini-EQ built into the side of the guitar. If these EQ settings are bad, the guitar will sound terrible. Flat line the mixer EQ for this guitar and spend an evening with the guitarist and tweaking the guitar’s on-board EQ for the best setting. The other option is to run it flat—all EQ settings at 0. Don’t lower all the EQ controls on the guitar, that applies cuts to all frequencies.
Mic it
The final method of miking the guitar is with an instrument microphone. In this case, place it around the 12th fret, a foot away. It means the musician can’t move around much, but it will sound great!
Acoustic DI boxes and effects pedals
The musician can either plug into the system from here, if not directly miked, and go into a passive DI to convert from their unbalanced instrument cable to a balanced XLR, or go through their choice of acoustic guitar DI boxes or pedals. This can drive you crazy or make you very happy. In short, what they think sounds good and what you think sounds good can be quite different. I’ve experienced both.
At this point, you have two options:
- Capture the sound as it comes out of their effects/guitar
- Capture two sounds, the dry signal raw from the guitar and the wet signal coming from the effect box.
Wet and dry are terms used to indicate the modification of a signal, or the lack of modification. In the latter, use a splitter pre-effects and run these two signals into two separate stage jacks. This means you can blend these two signals on the mixer.
Blending signals can be beneficial because a wet signal can lose frequency distinction. Imagine a strummed guitar with a lot of reverb. Add in some of the original sound and you get both the brightness of the raw guitar as well as the reverbed sound. How much the two are mixed is up to you. These two channels provide more opportunity for creative mixing to get the intended sound.
It’s time to consider WHERE the acoustic guitar will sit in the mix.
Where it sits
Years ago, Jeremy Blasongame told me the bigger the band, the tighter the sound of each instrument. It’s true. Let’s say the only person leading worship is a guitarist. In this case, the guitar should be full, occupying as much of the frequency space as possible. This can be through EQ work and effects.
As the band size grows, the more the core frequencies of the guitar should be emphasized. Better put, minimize what’s not needed and then boost where appropriate. Otherwise, you might have too many instruments fighting over the same frequency space, and that’s not good!
How do you know where to draw the line?
Look at all of the instruments on stage and where their core frequencies are located. For example, the kick drum might be in the 80-200 Hz range and the toms overlap that a little and you move on up through the bass, keyboards and other instruments. Some overlap is OK. However, you don’t want the low end of the guitar to be heard if you’ve got acoustic drums and a bass guitar. It will only blur the lower part of the mix.
