Recording Bluegrass Flat Picking

I spent some time chatting with David Grisman in his home studio. FWIW, his preferred chain was pretty much Km84 > console pre (MCI) > 1" 8 track. Cliched, but at that level so much of the sound is the player/room/instrument.

It’s a tragedy that most or all his KM84s were lifted from his car while parked in Portland, Oregon last year 😢 I’m not big on capital punishment but stealing a man’s tools is pretty damned low.

I assisted on a Peter Rowan recording last month and we used an original U48 vocal , My Samar Mf65 on acoustic gtr both into GML pres a touch of Cl1b on vocal and no eq .
Samar was really nice on acoustic, of course the U48 was awsome .

I’ve also had great results with the Mf65 on upright bass and mandolin.

If you are recording someone who is playing and singing than taking advantage of figure 8 microphones and their nulls to help reduce bleed between the guitar and vocal can be a lifesaver. I'm sure a Samar or a Beyer M130, which are inherently brighter ribbon microphone, could work. However, if it's fast picking, I'd be curious if they'd pick up enough detail. Smart choice to use on the Bluegrass Buddha!

There's a reason a lot of Nashville bluegrass guitar players (Bryan Sutton and Cody Kilby, for example) have their own KM86's and often bring them sessions. They've heard their guitars recorded a hundred different ways but liked that sound enough to buy KM86s themselves. And there's a reason we have 6 KM84s at the studio...they just work on everything.

Yet another placement option is I'll use two very different microphone with the capsule/ribbon element aligned and blend those to taste. I do this most often with banjo (U87 or U67 and a Coles or Royer, for example) and fiddle (KM84 and a Samar/Coles/Royer, for example) but it works for anything. If you have a player who moves around a lot doing the spaced thing can be a nightmare because their position, and in turn the phase between the two microphone, changes constantly. You don't have that problem with this mic placement.

Yeah you always have to go in with options, most bluegrass players know what they are doing and if you work with them it is pretty easy. Of course the worst is bluegrass live when someone is using a cheap pickup and slow amplification, sure you can get by without comp limiters, but if your watching a good player it sounds like 1/2 the notes are missing. I think that should be a general rule with anyone who is a finger picker watch while you listen if you can’t hear what you see you need a faster mic!

You're like the clairvoyant voodoo priest of audio. That's EXACTLY the issue. Notes go missing! What's faster than an 84? And still has 'that' sound?

Nothing that sounds like an 84, but I know this sounds so wrong but if an 84 isn’t working, think DPA or Earthworks, sometimes that Beyer Mc834 will work, the way it gates the trailing decay can make the notes stand out rather than blur. I’m not saying think gate, they are either to slooooow or will chatter.
From live world bluegrass guys can work off of any monitor mix, but the results grow exponentially as the quality of monitor mix increases. Remember most of these guys at one time or another learned to the tricks to playing together on one mic live, this usually meant at some point being way off axis of a single narrow cover wedge, or at some point standing in the worse spot of 2 wedges that were designed not to array. Bluegrass is where I learned to love coax wedges, because they will work as an array. So spend time finding the right phones and building the cans mixes.

KM53 - right up close. Insanely detailed.

Yeah Sanken is a prime example of a mic that can be perfect in every way, except it ends up sounding clinical. I knew a guy who swore by them through GML pre’s but then ( not that he would say this) had them each go through this huge single chain to dirty them up and slow it down. It was one of those just grab a different mics situations, plus it was live so it was also if chose a different mic it’s one less 24 space rack!

I have been using a 67 and 4038 together for acoustic guitars. Do you align the 2 mics next to eachother horiztontally, or vertically one on top of the other? I found the best results with the Ribbon on the bottom, and LDC upside down on the top. If they are side to side, if the guitar gets angled while playing, one mic becomes slightly closer to the guitar while the other slightly further, which can lead to subtle phase changes. Stacked on top, I can have the mics perpendicular, or slightly off axis, and the phase relationship/distance stays the same.

The only caveat, is while this works best for blending the LDC and Ribbon in mono, I do find that if I want a wide hard panned stereo acoustic guitar, I prefer the LDC on the neck/body joint and the ribbon near the bridge/lower bout. This gives a wider and more natural stereo presentation, as you're getting two different areas of the guitar, so there is more difference between the sounds of the mics...perhaps more phase anomolies if summed to mono, but when listening in stereo, this sounds really good, and better/wider/more interesting than the capsule aligned LDC and ribbon at the neck body joint setup.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this.