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“Your microphone is the most important piece of equipment in the acoustic guitar recording process,” says Byrds co-founder, solo artist and longtime recordist Roger McGuinn. “Find that perfect sweet spot between the last fret and the o-hole, about two inches away, without picking up too much ‘boom’ from the hole.” McGuinn found his sweet spot with The Byrds, and hasn’t let up since.
He has recorded eight solo albums since the band broke up in 1973, yet many
fans don’t know about Roger’s early ‘60s folk roots. A young
prodigy in Greenwich Village who wrote folk songs for Bobby Darin and was in
’63 the music director on Judy Collins #3, he also played with the Chad
Mitchell Trio and the Limeliters before forming The Byrds with Gene Clark and
David Crosby in 1965. But every folk music lover today is well aware of McGuinn’s
Treasures From The Folk Den in 2001 and his newly released The Folk Den Project:
1995 – 2005, the former a Grammy-nominated collection of rare remote sessions
recorded in the actual dens of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and other folk icons;
the latter a 4-disc box set of exactly 100 folk classics Roger recorded in the
McGuinn’s Florida “den”—his home studio.
ROGER: No, actually I didn’t. David Crosby had an aversion to the banjo and actually made me sell mine, then I bought my Rickenbacker 12-string. I love the banjo and think it’s a great sound, but I can’t take a steady diet of it. I love hearing the contrast between a 12-string acoustic song followed by a banjo song: the 12-strings booms and sounds so big and full which makes the banjo sound all the more sharp and crisp next to it.
ROGER: The banjo is such a loud instrument that I stand about 18 inches away from the mic with it. If you get any closer with a banjo, you’ll get way too much of it [laughs.] Just placing a microphone in the general vicinity of a banjo picks it up great—in fact, you really just need to be in the same room as the microphone. A foot-and-a-half away is optimum for me, with a good condenser microphone aimed at the head. The capsule is vertical and parallel to the head of the banjo, creating a kind of shotgun effect that gets the whole sound of the room.
ROGER: I’ve got a handmade large diaphragm tube condenser mic I use for guitars and vocals. Sometimes I have to EQ the lows off it when I use it for my voice. There’s also a 19mm diaphragm phantom-powered condenser mic I use for acoustics, as well, and a lipstick-sized studio condenser mic I use for a particularly warm guitar sound. For the acoustic guitar, it’s just a matter of proximity.
ROGER: No, for that I go direct into the computer without an amp through one of my three I/O interfaces. I got into recording the 12-string electric this way back in The Byrds when we always went direct with it in the studio. That’s the clean part of the jingle-jangle sound with no hum or ambient room noise. It’s a very compressed sound, of course, and I achieve that by running the Rick through a pair of Jangle Box stomp boxes I love. Those are based on the compressor circuit built into my custom Rick model [Rickenbacker 370/12 McGuinn Limited Edition 12-string.] Once I’m in Adobe Audition with it, I don’t really need to compress the Rick any further because the two Jangle Box’s have already nicely compressed it. But I do like to hard limit the track once I’m in Audition to really punch the Rick to the edges of the envelope.
ROGER: I close mic all the time. I have a metal popscreen filter that I place about 2-3 inches in front of the capsule. I sing about three inches in front of the screen, so I’m about six inches from the mic. A metal popscreen is easier to clean than a foam one because you can wash it with soap and water, and I’ve never gotten any f’s or p’s through it, either.
ROGER: I have a variety of methods of getting guitars and vocals into the computer. I bought Pro Tools just for the Mbox because Audition 2.0 now supports it and I like the Mbox’s two Focusrite mic preamps for guitar. I also have an Edirol UA-25, a two–channel XLR interface with phantom power, and a Lexicon Omega which has eight inputs so I can track drums here. I’ve used laptops, desktops, Macs, PCs, all sorts of ways to get my guitar and voice into Audition. I don’t use plugins for processing mics at all, just for post-production sweetening with reverbs, delays and other effects. The Omega has built-in compression, and I believe the Edirol UA-25 does, too. But, beyond using the Jangle Box for the 12-string electric, I pretty much just record flat into the computer and deal with the sound after that. As long as there is a nice, clean signal into the computer that isn’t clipping, then I’m happy.
ROGER: Yeah, I think so. From that day on we recorded the Rickenbacker that way, and the jingle-jangle sound was born.
ROGER: Well, this is very memorable, if not the most memorable one. It happened in East Berlin in 1987 before the wall came down when I was opening up for Bob Dylan and Tom Petty on their European tour. I went out there, just me and my acoustic guitar, and played “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the whole place lit up with cigarette lighters—140,000 people, all with their lighters lit and held over their heads. They all seemed to do it all at once, spontaneously, right in the middle of the song and I got chills. It was a very rewarding moment. They probably thought I was Dylan [laughs]. After the concert Dylan was talking to Camilla [Roger’s wife and business partner] and he told her, “Roger really saved the show—with the first song.” Actually, I have a picture of that moment hanging right here on my wall.
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