Recording acoustic guitar again

Recording acoustic guitar over the past 2 days has, as expected, been both satisfying and frustrating. The Fostex gave me a real scare first thing yesterday morning as when doing a simple return-to-zero the right reel suddenly went berserk and ended up ripping off about a meter of tape! I tidied up the end of the reel and everything’s working fine but since then I’ve kept a close eye on it while moving around the tape. It’s tried to do it again on one occasion but pressing the stop button did the job.

Before making a start on recording I moved everything out of the front room and into the studio, setting the desk and preamp up on a futon with the Fostex on the floor to the side. I made this decision as the front room has a short slappy reverb and I’ll be using outboard reverb when mixing so I thought it’d be best to go for a nice dead sound.

With everything hooked up I set my level on the preamp and instantly noticed that the level registering on the Fostex was completely different, seeming twice the strength. This is because the nominal level of the Fostex which utilises RCA inputs and outputs is -10dBV, whereas the balanced GAP preamp has a nominal level of +4dBu. This difference in signal is explained well in this article.

With the level pushing into the red on the Fostex I started recording, and what a different experience it was. Without a click I instantly felt more relaxed, not focusing on rhythmic perfection but just aiming for a take I liked the sound and feel of. I got through 5 of the 7 tracks making note of their start and finish points on the timer as I went, something I’ve never had to do before. With these times listed I can easily skip to the start of whichever track I require. I did stop and start again quite a few times, leaning down to rewind the tape in order to record from the same point. This is more time consuming than hitting the space bar on a keyboard, but sometimes that space bar is a little too easy to nudge if you feel something’s not perfect and most of the time you don’t need to. Recording single takes is a breathe of fresh air in this respect as you quickly learn to accept the little blemishes that ultimately add character to the performance, but when working to a fixed tempo these can easily be seen as mistakes.

I was really pleased with my day’s work until I got up this morning and listened back to the takes. Unfortunately the LF nob on the desk’s channel had been down and I hadn’t noticed that the low end was distorting slightly, so instead of finishing the last 2 tracks and moving on to something else I was back to square one! Mornings don’t seem to be kind to me at the moment..

However I’m pleased to announce that acoustic guitar for all 7 tracks is now done which will provide a solid bedrock to start building on tomorrow. I am slightly concerned about the amount of hiss present but I guess that’s part of the charm of tape and with it EQed out it still sounds lovely..