I've explained this method before, perhaps it is time to go through it again:
1) It is a very good idea to have someone else playing the instrument (or singing or whatever) when getting your mic placement down.
2) I always start with nothing but my ears. Good to know which ear is your "good" ear. Yes, we are right and left-handed, and if you are attentive to your listening situation you will find out that you are either right or left-eared, too. Don't expect the same side as your hand, either in every case. Close your eyes and listen by turning your head towards a good sound source that is not loud and you will soon find out which ear communicates with your brain the best.
3) I will walk up to the instrument while it is being played in the studio setting, turn my good ear towards the business direction and move my head around the thing as if the good ear were a mic. I'm listening for the hot spots. Finding them first makes mic placement and selection a whole lot faster and easier to do. This technique works very well on acoustic guitar and I feel it is an absolute must for acoustic upright bass fiddle recordings. And no, I don't use the same setup twice, each instance and each day requires going through the process again. Changes in the air pressure, humidity, whatever, can easily make yesterday's great sounding setup not so great sounding today. Have learned over the years that unless there is a good climate control in a studio that measured mic placements and such in order to duplicate yesterday's tracks to fit into today's may often require a bit of tweaking on the placement and maybe levels to match well, here again the ear and the brain are the only pieces of test equipment I trust and they are the best, too, if you take the time to develop them when listening.
4) Very Important: The person playing the instrument should be playing it pretty much exactly in the same manner that you will be playing it for the recording or all bets are off. Imagine someone playing very loudly but you are intending to record a soft passage, or worse yet, the other way around...
5) Once I find the area(s) around the instrument that are interesting, then I use that information to make mic selection.
6) Be aware that the area around the soundhole of an acoustic guitar may sound the loudest to the ear but a mic placed too close there can pick up "pumping", the actual air moving in and out of the guitar. Close proximity to the soundhole can also pick up too much bass response which translates to the muddy sound.
7) Avoid the use of cardioid mics on acoustic stringed instruments if at all possible. Take this with a grain of salt, for the lowly SM-57 type mics can indeed turn in a rather good performance if placed outside the PE area of pickup and far enough back from that soundhole. Omni's are better for the silky sound, though.
The more sensitive the mic, the better the room acoustics must be. LD condensers can sound very fine on acc guit but only if the room is in pretty good acoustic shape, for the LD will also mirror much of the sound of the room. Our ears and brain are used to filtering out such room anomalies, but once you learn that they are there because you hear them in a playback, you will also suddenly be able to notice that better with the "naked ear" when it is happening.
9) At home, quite often the common livingroom or bedroom has enough hard and soft surfaces in it already to pass for an ersatz acc guitar recording room. Use things already present in the room to good acoustic advantage: couches, beds, etc. that are big and padded can be pulled out from the wall anywhere from 1 foot to about 3 feet to create a bass trap between them and the wall. Wood bookcases on walls with books plus spaces in them can perform the same duty for you at midrange freqs.
The common piezo bridge pickup sucks. If you have one in your guitar, consider forking out a hundred bucks for an I-beam pickup and attach it to the guitar's preamp in place of the undersaddle bridge pickup. Quack goes away and the I-beam can record direct injection. Add one omni stick mic to pick up the highs and such and its a done deal.
9) Your friend the EQ plugin can solve a lot of acc guitar track problems IF you know how to use it. Mud can go away using this method. I always pare off everything below 80hz to zero on these tracks, for the lowest string on the standard tuned guit is 82Hz, anything below that is NOT the guitar, don't fall for the "subharmonics" line of BS. Somewhere around the 5KHz mark is the spot to place a small spike in the EQ to yield that silky sound, don't be heavy handed with this, though. "Air" can be added with a small boosted area at 10KHz. The mids are the trickiest and where you should spend the most time. When using acc guitar in a mix along with other guitars and instruments it is not uncommon for me to use the EQ to almost remove all bottom end and low mids or at least subdue them, they will only clash with the other instruments in that area and are not needed to get the point across. Of course, this would not be the ticket with a solo acc guitar track.
10) A so-so mic through a great preamp will always sound better than the best mic in the world through a so-so mic preamp. This applies to ANY source, guitar, vocals, drums, horns, whatever. Putting resources into the preamp is never a waste of money. But you don't have to spend beaucoup dollar on boutique preamp to get great results, either these days. The RANE solid state mic pre makes a beautiful preamp for a lot of uses, the Studioprojects VTB-1 is right in there also and a bit more versatile in sound. Often the mic preamps in older stereo cassette decks and reel-to-reel recorders sound very good on guitar tracks, too. Ignore the tape and use the thing as a preamp. Stereo means you have two preamps in there. Most of the earlier ones employed discrete transistor designs that often outdo the little home recording mic preamp imports specification-wise.
--Mac
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