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we were recording a gaggle of acoustic instruments the other day in the Historic RCA Studio B. The "Father of Hillbilly Jazz",Vassar Clements was there, and the occasion was a tracking session with his Little Big Band. Guitarist Lee Owen played my Gibson J-30 acoustic into an Earthworks SR71 close mic, with an Earthworks QTC-1 omni set at a distance to pick up some ambience.

When I was mixing the session later, I panned the two signals and got a pleasing sense of space on the stereo monitors. To fatten the sound I started putting compressors on the two signals when it hit me: there's a way to set the two compressors so that the signal pans across the stereo matrix with each note that Lee strums. I know that this runs contrary to most of the conventional thought about how we're supposed to behave at the console, but so does most body piercing. Hold onto your lip stud, here we go.

The close mic is panned opposite the ambience mic to create space. The close mic signal contains all the precise audio information about attack transients and harmonic color ( the "brightness&quor; stuff ), so I chose a very fast attack/decay setting for a compression effect that would feature the earliest moments of each note, while not influencing the natural decay. Since the other mic deals more with the reflected sound of the J-30 and the natural "bloom" of the room reflections, I put a compander on this signal that has a very long attack and decay, so that the initial strum is semi-gated, and the blooming effect of the resonation of acoustic guitar in the room is accented.

It took a while to tweak it for maximum effect, but what we ended up with was an acoustic guitar part that constantly swam around the stereo matrix. How much it did that depended on Lee's playing: the louder sections panned more to the room ambience, and the quieter parts panned closer to the guitar. Depending on the genre of music you're recording this could induce nightmares, but since we were recording a trippy kind of piece, using the dynamics devices to induce a dynamically driven panning effect added some great ear candy to our tracks. Have fun!

Producer and multi-instrumentalist Fred Bogert is the owner of Studio C Productions. which operates out of two facilities; the Historic RCA Studio B and the old RCA Studio C. Both facilities are located in the heart of Nashville's Music Row. Fred invites you to email him questions about recording techniques at fbogert@gibson.com>