vocal separation from acoustic guitar

[Paul Michael Ash]

Hello,
I have a bleed problem from acoustic guitar to vocals when recording both at the same time. How to prevent this? Not a soft or hard ware problem but perhaps mic placement.

Thanks from the Newbie side of the tracks.
Paul

[Vulconizer]

A few things to try:

Record them separately.

Practice until you can do both at the same time without any flaws, then record.

Don't worry about it.

[TonyB]

It's really tough to prevent it the bleed between the two. I know that some singers can't sing without playing the acoustic guitar and engineers need to do their best to minimize bleed.

Bleed is not necessarily bad if you happen to have a good singer who's a good player with a good guitar. Why? It means you won't have to do much tweaking in the mix if they're all already working during tracking.

However, if anyone one of the three is a little off, it'll be tough for both the tracking and mixing phases (i.e.., tracking = re-record the entire song, mixing = trying to some minor surgery to fix some vocal pitchiness won't quite work with the guitar in the same track).

What I try to do is minimize the bleed into the vocal track as much as possible by using a LDD (e.g., SM7b) pointed up toward the singer. I'll have a SDC (e.g. NT-5) pointed in the typical direction (around the 12th fret), but will pick up quite a bit of the vocal. Not much I can do about that, but the vocal track should be predominately vocal with little guitar bleed.

[Paul Michael Ash]

Thank you. Will try that now.