Recording Acoustic Guitar

Since 1999, I have owned a very nice Martin OM-28V. I bought it new from Mandolin Brothers in NYC. I’ve recorded with it a bit in the past, but that was always touch and go. I am not very good at microphone recording and don’t have many to choose from. Plus, my studio is just my living room with no soundproofing and I have a large and loud German Shepherd who has been known to bark at inopportune times.

So, after all this time, I purchased a setup to allow direct recording. It is a Fishman Ellipse Aura, which combines an undersaddle transducer pickup with some digital enhancements. This setup required only minimal modification to the guitar and could easily be completely removed leaving nothing to reveal it had been there except for an enlarged strap-button hole. I had Mannella Guitars install it for me.

I took the output from the guitar and ran in into my Yamaha AG Stomp, which provides good EQ control and also allows a little reverb and echo to be added. This went straight into an Mbox and into the MacBook Pro to ProTools.

This entire process took about two minutes. I spent zero time tweaking. I think the sound is very good. I would not hesitate to put this “out-front” in a recording. See what you think:

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