Homebrewed Music

Traveling to and from Hawai`i involves big changes in humidity, and this is a recipe for trouble with an acoustic guitar. I’ve suffered from rising action and even finish cracks from the wood swelling when I travel to the islands. Friends who have brought instruments from Hawai`i to California have experienced just the opposite – [...]

I’m enjoying some time in Hawai`i and part of the fun is getting back together with my Epiphone Masterbilt EF-500M. This is the first Epi EF-500 I bought, it’s a “second” that I bought used (second squared, I guess). For that last few years I’ve left this guitar in Hawai`i so I don’t have to [...]

Four more mic comparison clips, this time including large and small diaphragm mics and a wide range of prices.

I record solo acoustic guitar almost exclusively, but a couple of months ago one of my buddies wanted to lay down a few tracks with vocal and `ukulele. And he wanted to sing and play at the same time. I remembered reading about an arrangement of figure 8 or bidirectional mics that gave maximum separation [...]

The Zoom H4n includes a Mid-Side decoder. I connected a pair of figure 8 mics to the H4n and compared Mid-Side recording to a Blumlein array.

I love the clean, natural sound of an acoustic guitar, but when it’s time to play for a room full of people in a coffee shop, restaurant, or club a pickup inside the guitar comes in mighty handy. There are several different styles of pickups, but they all need a jack so they can be [...]