Credits include: Mark Knopfler (solo and with Dire Straits), Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Wynonna, and George Strait. See the Appendix for Chuck Ainlay’s full bio.

For Vince Gill’s album High Lonesome Sound, we used Alison Krauss’ band for the title cut. They played on the country version with drums and everything, and we also did another version, which is bluegrass. Both versions are on the album.

If you are talking about bluegrass, the players really like to hear and watch each other. That is how they perform live. So when we did the bluegrass version, I basically used baffles laid out like a spoked wheel, where the baffles were radiating out from the center like spokes. This created compartments where each person could look toward each other in the center, and the mics would be back sort of closer to the center, pointing toward each player. That way, you could use the directional characteristics of the cardioid microphones to reject the instruments of the other players at other areas in the spokes. Cardioid is generally what I use. I rarely ever use omni microphones.

You don’t want to get the mics too close to any sort of wall, because that would change the character of the microphone, too. So they are not right into the point of the pie, so to speak. I used baffles, because I wanted a real clean, tight sound without a lot of ambiance from the room.

Generally, for tracking the acoustic guitar, I’ll usually use one mic sort of near the twelfth fret out maybe 6 inches from the guitar. Then I’ll have another mic, generally shoulder height and out maybe 2 feet from the guitar, probably kind of above the bridge or the general vicinity. If I then decide to double the acoustic guitar, I usually go over the far mic because it is just too big. The doubling already gives you that extra warmth.

I love a Neumann KM 56 or KM 54 on an acoustic. That is usually my choice of a close mic. They have a nice top end, and the bottom end is rolled off pretty well on them. I will also use a KM 84 Neumann. For the second mic, the one that may be located about shoulder height, I would start with maybe a Neumann U 67.

On Vince’s acoustic, I will use a 452 AKG because the isolation is better. The polar pattern is tighter, so I can get away with using that microphone and still use the tracking acoustics. The problem with those microphones on acoustics is sometimes that they can be too brittle-sounding, so you add some warmth to them in the midrange area. Yet you will need to roll out on the bottom, because when you have a vocalist, you have to mike close.

U 67s are great on acoustics if you are going for that bashing acoustic-guitar sound. If you are using a Gibson acoustic that is being played hard, you can take a U 67 and mike it farther away from the guitar, just straight out from the hole of the guitar, and get a great sound. Naturally, it all depends on what the player is doing.

The quality of the guitar also makes a lot of difference. For just pure strumming, a lot of guys have gone to kind of cheap guitars like Takamines because they don’t have a lot of bottom end and a real rich character to them. What you are really looking for is a percussive strumming sound, rather than a filled-out acoustic sound.

I’m not a big fan of DIs, and I’m also a very big fan of uncomplicated sources. That is also why I say that I’m not a very big stereo miking fan. For fiddle, I really like the C 12. It works great. Mark O’Connor, who is one of the greatest fiddle players, always carried with him an AKG C 24, which is the stereo version of the AKG C 12.

Also, the Neumann M 49 is a much warmer microphone, and when you get them farther away from the instrument, they are going to sound very real.

For upright bass, I use two microphones. Usually there is one microphone about a foot and a half away from the double bass, about bridge height, and then the second mic is usually closer to the bass, maybe about 8 to 10 inches, looking at the left shoulder of the bass. That way you get the percussiveness wood plunk from the bass there. You get your bottom end from down near the bridge.

Sometimes, depending on the bass, you have to get it closer to the f-hole, though some basses will have certain notes that really stick out if you get too close to the f-hole.

Upright bass is one of the hardest things to mike. Your two microphones can cause some serious cancellation on bass because of the low frequencies. I still try and put the upright bass in a separate room because it is not a very loud instrument. You still want to have control, and you are going to get leakage with it.

For mandolin, I rarely mike with two mics. It is just too small of an instrument. Then again, I have actually used two mics. [Laughs] Again, it all depends on the mandolin. Some mandolins are richer and warmer than others. Generally the favorite position is near the f-hole. But getting too close to the f-hole can be too thick. If you are looking for that “woody” sound, that is where it comes from.

I don’t think there is anything all that special that we do. I always like to point out that it comes from the musicians and the music. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat there and pulled up levels, and it just sounded awful, and I’m tweaking knobs like crazy, trying to get it to sound good. Then all of a sudden it sounds good, but it isn’t because I tweaked the knobs like crazy. It is because the performance came together, and all of a sudden everybody was listening to each other and they were playing tight. I think we are important people in not ruining this and making it comfortable for the musicians, but it still gets down to the players.

Credits include: Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Del McCoury, and Lonesome River Band, as well as many solo albums. See the Appendix for Jerry Douglas’s full bio.

I like the live performance vibe and keeping everything as organic as possible going down on tape. I always do first takes, because that is when all the energy is up and it is the scariest for everybody. I don’t erase anything. I don’t punch into live tracks. I do adjacent tracks for instruments.

If we need to fix something, then great. But if there is a chance of leaking, then we do another take or another edit possibly. This is because you don’t want the chance of “ghosts,” which is what you get a lot in acoustic music. When you over-dub, you run the chance of still hearing the old part off of someone else’s track. So it is worth doing another take.

When you are working with a bluegrass act—like Del McCoury, for instance—whose band plays really dynamic bluegrass, I would try and cut live without much isolation and get some tight mics on everybody. I like to sit everybody around, so everyone can hear and see each other and not be completely dependent on headphones, but can use them if they want to.

For picking out the mics in this kind of situation, I would shy away from the bigger-diaphragm microphones. It is a give-and-take situation because I love the old big-diaphragm microphones for when these instruments are isolated, because they capture the whole sound of the instrument and not just a spot on the instrument.

We often use these big foam baffles. It is amazing how much isolation you can get from one of those things. Then it becomes easier to replace parts if something goes wrong.

Bass and fiddle are kind of hard to track in the room. Fiddle just takes off all over the room sometimes, and bass goes to the floor and shows up in the strangest places. I try to isolate the fiddle out of the room, like I would the vocal, too.

If we are going for a real live situation, I just do two takes and edit. But if we were trying to isolate everyone, I would put the fiddle in a different room and try and have an iso booth for fiddle and one for vocal.

Credits include: James Taylor, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, Michael Brecker, Yo-Yo Ma, and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as solo albums. See the Appendix for Mark O’Connor’s full bio.

When I’ve done bluegrass recordings, often people will want the option to replace their solos and fix parts. Obviously, it is harder to do that in recording sessions when you are all playing in the same room. So when you do a democratic project, such as Strength In Numbers, you want to leave the studio knowing that you got what you wanted on tape. As a result, it made sense to be isolated. So before we were done with the song, we got the solo we wanted on there and we left, and that was it. End of story.

When I did The New Nashville Cats album, I put everybody in the same room and said, “Trust me. I’m going to edit together pieces from different takes.”

I am a much greater fan of editing because [as the artist and producer] I can listen to takes and find out the parts that have the best musical energy. If the players got a really great solo section, but they completely botched the last head, then I can have the freedom to experiment with editing on a head from a different take, for instance. That kind of flexibility is actually more musical than overdubbing.

When you overdub, the other instruments are not playing with you anymore. They are playing to another solo. So what the soloist does on the overdub is not complete musical communication. So even though to a novice recording musician the editing might sound harsh in approach, it is actually more musical, especially if the tempos are fine and the energy and intensity match up. Then you can interchange between takes. That is what I do on most of the things that I do. It depends on how complex the music is. I think the more complex the music is, the more that you have to rely on editing.

I’ve recorded almost every solo performance I’ve done for years, trying to get better and better with it. When I finally realized that I was ready to record an album of these performances for real, I picked one of my favorite places I’ve performed solo—the old Shelton Hall in St. Louis, which was built in 1875. I rented it out and got the great mics up, my old M 49 Neumanns and the old AKG C 24, and played in front of a live audience and really did it right.

For the Midnight on the Water recording, I used my two old Neumann M 49s in a stereo configuration. The C 24 is very good for close miking, but not as much for accurate ambient miking, whereas the M 49s are almost like the human ear. So when I recorded my solo performance, I was actually achieving the instrument sound and the sound of the hall, the ambiance and everything all at one time with those two mics. It really worked out.

I also used the M 49s on my Heroes album, so I could have completely matched sounds between me and the other guest violinists. The only difference that you were hearing between the violin sounds was the actual player and the instrument, and not the way it was recorded. So each violin had one M 49, each of which was evenly matched from the same vintage year.

Temperature changes the sound and it changes the instrument. My violin is very sensitive to humidity. My violin sounds better in a warmer, humid climate. There are some violins that start to sound muddy or like they are stuffed with socks in a warmer, humid climate, where mine just sounds lush. Whereas when I get in too dry of a climate, it sounds too trebly and scratchy and squeaky, and it just drives me crazy.

As a matter of fact, one of the halls I considered recording in for Midnight on the Water was a beautiful hall in Aspen that is underground. When I performed my concert there a couple of years ago for the Aspen Music Festival, I loved everything except the sound of my violin. It was too dry. I thought about humidity problems and I went, “You know, I’m going to record this in the South during the summer in humidity,” and so I did it in September in St. Louis at Shelton Hall. My violin sounds so rich on that recording, like it almost covers me. It sounds like it reaches out and embraces you. That is what I dreamed about. With humidity, I can make my violin sound like that.

That said, the humidity in this concert hall completely changed at night from the day. In some instances, it was as drastic as having an audience in there and not having an audience in there. It was that extreme. In most studios, you don’t have to worry about that as much. But in concert halls, it’s a consideration. So I realized that when I perform some of this stuff, I had to do it now in this time period, or I’d have to start all over. [Laughs] That was a little added pressure.

The biggest thing is to make sure that you can play your best. If the climate is changing, but you are in a place where you feel you can play your best, then that more than compensates for the problem.

Credits include: Alison Krauss, Charlie Haden, Jerry Douglas, Ralph Stanley, Bela Fleck, James Taylor, Doc Watson, Mark O’Connor, and Alison Brown. See the Appendix for Bil VornDick’s full bio.

I pick the musicians for the song, instead of just working with a normal rhythm section. I like everybody to be going down on tape at the same time. I want as many pieces to the puzzle working with each other and playing off of each other as possible, instead of starting with a click track. I go for the overall feel of a take. I’m a guy who still believes that people buy records because they feel good.

A good example: I had a number-one song on a group called IIIrd Tyme Out, and the B string was out of tune. But the person who was singing the lead vocal was doing the guitar at the same time. That was his best performance, and we couldn’t redo the guitar, because of the leakage. Maybe six or seven people have come up to me and said, “The B string is out of tune.” I would say, “Yeah, we cut it quite a few more times, but the feeling and emotion weren’t there.” I went with the best-feeling performance that had the emotion within that helped sell the song. It still went to the top of the charts. There are some people, especially in Nashville, who would go redo the vocal and the guitar and do other things to deal with the B string on the guitar. I knew it was out of tune. Hey, it didn’t hurt them. It was one of their biggest selling albums.

Currently, there is a now-successful acoustic artist whose roots were in bluegrass cutting tracks with a click and then going back and replacing everything. As a result, you’ve got all of the nuances that originally went on with the little inner licks and dynamics of the song disappearing in order to be precise.

Most of the albums I have done that have won the Grammys are all albums recorded on budgets between $10,000 and $20,000. These are not $250,000 albums. Alison Krauss’ first Grammy-winning record, I think, cost $12,500.

I mike everything in stereo normally, so that within those two mics I have a depth perspective on each instrument.

I’m a pretty hardcore analog guy. I would much rather paint in oils than in acrylics. You get the whole waveform in analog, and in digital there are still quite a few overtones that the sampling rates are not catching. I can still hear them, but a lot of people don’t care. I normally cut at 30 IPS with no noise reduction. If I can get into a facility that has Dolby SR, I like to cut at 15 IPS with SR noise reduction. Digital may be cheaper, but analog is still the art form.

Credits include: Dixie Chicks, Alison Krauss, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Dolly Parton, Riders in the Sky, and David Grier. See the Appendix for Brent Truitt’s full bio.

For recording acoustic music, let me also say that hopefully the person sitting in front of the mic has a good instrument. Common sense tells you that if the guitar sounds bad and won’t play in tune, a great mic isn’t gonna help. If I’m producing a band that may not have any real studio experience, I make sure they have their instruments tweaked up and ready to go before we get into the studio.

Sometimes people have a hard time recording the fiddle. It’s easy for a fiddle to sound shrill, especially going to hard disk. My favorite fiddle mics are KM 86s. I almost always use a stereo pair in cardioid and run them through a couple of APIs, smooth and warm. I usually place the mics on each side of the fiddle, maybe 10 or 12 inches apart. Try to leave plenty of room for bowing. In most cases I don’t compress fiddle tracks going to tape. It seems to add that little extra harshness that you really don’t want. Actually, too much compression on any acoustic instrument can be a bad thing. Use it sparingly going to tape.

As far as I’m concerned, the best mic for acoustic guitar is the KM 54, hands down. They aren’t cheap or all that easy to find, but they are well worth searching out. I like to run a pair of these through a couple of Neves or APIs and then into a pair of Urei 1176s. I get great results with that signal chain.

If you can’t get the KM 54s, get a couple KM 84s. Even the newer KM 184 will do a great job for you. If you don’t have the Neves or APIs, the Avalon 737SP is a quality mic pre/comp/EQ that is affordable and really sounds wonderful on acoustic instruments. Mic placement on guitar is once again something to experiment with. I usually put one near the twelfth fret at an angle toward the sound hole, being careful not to get too much boom. The back mic position is almost never the same from one session to the next. Try moving the mic around while listening through the phones. The thing to watch out for is the midrange; sometimes that back mic can add an overly nasal quality to the sound.

Concerning the upright bass, this instrument is the reason my left eye twitches. It can be one of the most difficult beasts in the world to record, especially if it’s not a very good bass.

By the way, there is a huge difference between a bass with gut strings and a bass with steel strings. Steel strings have more of point to the sound, more sustain, and definitely cut through a mix a little easier. But sometimes a gut-string bass, which usually has less point and more of a big bottom, is more fitting to certain kinds of tracks. For instance, I would probably go for steel string if the session were leaning more toward the progressive or modern side of acoustic music. But if the songs had more of an old-time or hillbilly vibe, I would probably lean toward a gut-string bass for that older sound.

I have been very fortunate over the years to have worked a lot with the late, great Roy Huskey, one of the greatest bass players ever. He was a gut-string man. Here are some details on how I cut his bass. I always used two mics on Roy. One of my favorite combos was a UM 57 [tube Neumann from the mid ’50s] on the right side, or low E side, maybe 10 inches back from the f-hole. On the high side I put a KM 86 at about the area where he plucked the string and approximately 8 inches back. Both mics in cardioid and off-axis or pointed kind of off-centered from the sound source. Now here’s where you can use some common sense. In case you don’t have those mics, or that exact mic position may not sound good in your room, go out with headphones on and try moving the mics around the instrument until the sweet spot hits you. You’ll know it when you hear it.

As far as mic preamps on Roy, I tried different preamps on different sessions, but I always used a Tube-Tech compressor at the end of the audio path. It always sounded great.

Another awesome bass player I’ve recorded is Todd Phillips. Todd is no stranger to anyone who knows acoustic music. He was a huge part of the early David Grisman sound. Todd is a steel-string man. We usually cut Todd’s bass with a KM 184 on the high side, near the area he plucks, along with the UM 57 on the low side, kind of in front of the bridge and down a few inches. Both mics are in cardioid. From there we’ll go into two Avalon 737SPs. The result is a very large and clear tone. Of course, Todd is a great player, giving me excellent tones to begin with, which makes it so very easy to record.

That’s all great, but chances are pretty good that somewhere along the line you’re going to end up recording a not-so-great bass. You might want to keep some pieces of foam handy to place in the tailpiece to help eliminate rattles and maybe some of the boominess. You might even try a small piece in the f-hole to help with the boom. Sometimes you’re basically just going to have to hunt down some rattles and buzzes.