A first attempt.
Lágrima, Francisco Tárrega
So my first attempt was basically to try to figure out the best placement of the mic to record the acoustic. I’ve decided that being surrounded by massive piles of stuff because of having an apartment’s amount of crap crammed into a tiny room is actually good acoustically. The piles don’t let the sound bounce around as much as it might otherwise. Of course it’s not like an actual studio, but it’s not as bad as I thought it might be.
However, one of the down sides of having a space that is 95% piles is that the GP/CF ratio (guitar pick per cubic foot) at this point must be extremely high, and yet there is still never one available when I need one. And I can’t seem to do anything about it other than adding more. Is it possible there is a creature living in one of the piles that feeds on guitar picks? I guess I’ll never know. Unless it dies, but I don’t want to think about that. It’s probably better if it’s all because I’m an absentminded, lazy slob. Hmm… I’ve never felt better about being an absentminded, lazy slob.
Back to business. I did a bunch of tests from different distances and angles, and I ended up liking the mic about a foot away, angled down towards the body, at about the 10th fret. That’s not quite what I read as optimal, but that’s what I preferred at the time. I don’t like the way a lot of the notes sound on the laptop and phone (particularly the bass notes, though some of that is because of lack of talent), but they seem okay through decent speakers (or the best I have anyway…), so I suppose I shouldn’t worry about that. Or I could try moving the mic up the neck.
Anyway, without further ado, here is my attempt at Lágrima, by Francisco Tárrega. This was one of the first classical pieces I ever tried to play. While I’m better at it now than I was then (I think), there are still so many things I am unhappy with here – it’s not really that good, but at some point you just have to say this is as good as it’s gonna get. It also probably would have been better, with less string noise, if I had a classical nylon string guitar rather than my steel string, but I don’t. I’ll also admit to making two small timing edits, but since this is also about learning Logic, it’s okay. It may have required many takes, but still, all things considered, for a first attempt, it’s not too bad.
I think I recorded this back in February, and I haven’t really done anything since. Perhaps I will return to this at some point to see if I can learn to play it better. Hoping this gives me a kick to try more recording! Except now I’m housesitting so it’ll be at least a week before I can try again.