Few instruments reward careful technique like the steel-string flat-top, and if you want to record acoustic guitar at home the good news is that a modest setup gets you 90% of the way there. The remaining 10% is almost entirely microphone placement and room control, not expensive gear. In this guide I’ll walk through mic choices, exact distances and angles, sensible level targets, and the small acoustic fixes that make an untreated bedroom sound intentional rather than boxy.
Choosing a mic to record acoustic guitar at home
A small-diaphragm condenser (SDC) is the classic first choice because it captures the fast transients of the pick and string with detail. Workhorse options like the Rode NT5, sE Electronics sE7, or a matched pair of Line Audio CM4 pencils are affordable and honest. A large-diaphragm condenser (LDC) such as an Audio-Technica AT2035 or Rode NT1 gives a rounder, fuller body and is more forgiving of a bright guitar. If a condenser exaggerates room noise in a lively space, a dynamic like the Shure SM57 will reject more of it, at the cost of some air on top.
- SDC: detailed, articulate, great for fingerstyle and strumming clarity.
- LDC: warmer and bigger, flattering on thin-sounding guitars.
- Dynamic: the budget/noisy-room fallback; darker but usable.
Mic placement: distance and angle that actually work
The single biggest mistake is aiming the mic directly at the soundhole. The soundhole is a bass port, so you get a boomy, unbalanced low end. Instead, start with the mic pointed at the 12th fret, roughly where the neck meets the body, about 20-30 cm (8-12 inches) away. Angle it slightly toward the soundhole rather than pointing straight down the neck. This gives a balanced blend of string detail and body resonance.
From that starting point, adjust by ear:
- Too bright or thin? Move toward the body, past the soundhole edge, or increase distance to 30-40 cm.
- Too boomy? Move back toward the neck, away from the soundhole, and pull back a few centimetres.
- Want more air and space? Increase distance, but expect more of the room in the sound, so treat the room first.
For a wider stereo image, add a second mic. A simple, mono-safe approach is an XY pair (two SDCs with capsules nearly touching at roughly a 90-degree angle) placed at the 12th-fret position. If you want more width and don’t mind checking phase, try a spaced pair: one mic at the 12th fret and one near the bridge or over the player’s shoulder, 40-60 cm out. Watch mono compatibility by summing to mono and listening for hollow cancellation; nudge one mic a few centimetres if it thins out.
Levels, interface settings and latency
Set your preamp gain so the loudest strums peak around -12 to -6 dBFS. Acoustic guitar has sharp transient peaks that are easy to underestimate, so play your hardest passage while setting gain and leave clear headroom below 0 dBFS. Digital clipping on an acoustic is ugly and unfixable, so err quieter. If your track is peaking at -3 dBFS or hotter, back off.
Because you’re not monitoring an amp, latency matters less than for electric guitar, but you’ll still want a comfortable buffer. A buffer size of 128 or 256 samples while tracking keeps round-trip latency low enough to play in time; push it to 512 or higher only if you hear clicks and pops. Engage direct/zero-latency monitoring on your interface if playing to a click feels laggy. Use a proper cardioid condenser on a stable stand, and always work with a pop-free signal chain: no phantom-power surprises, cables seated, gain set before you hit record.
Taming an untreated room
Your bedroom is the reverb unit whether you like it or not. The closer the mic, the less room you capture, so proximity is your first line of defence. Beyond that:
- Record away from parallel bare walls; a corner stuffed with soft furnishings behind the mic kills slap-back reflections.
- Hang a duvet or moving blanket on the wall the guitar faces, or set up a couple of absorption panels behind the mic.
- Kill obvious noise sources: fans, fridges, laptops with spinning fans, and phones on do-not-disturb.
- Put a rug on hard floors to reduce the reflection bouncing up into the mic.
A dead-ish recording is far more useful than a roomy one because you can always add reverb later, but you can’t remove a bad room.
Performance tricks that beat any plugin
Fresh strings transformed dull recordings more than any EQ move; change them the day before, then play in for an hour so tuning settles. Mute string squeaks by lifting fingers rather than sliding, and keep a light touch on the pick to control transient spikes. If you strum hard and soft within a take, a slower attack and a hair more distance evens things out naturally. Double-tracking, recording the same part twice and panning hard left and right, creates width that a single stereo mic can’t match, and it’s the trick behind most polished acoustic productions.
Light-touch mixing
Once tracked, resist heavy processing. A gentle high-pass filter around 60-80 Hz removes rumble without thinning the body. A small dip around 200-300 Hz clears boxiness, and a soft lift above 8-10 kHz adds sparkle if the mic was dark. For dynamic control, a slow compressor at a 2:1 ratio catching 2-4 dB of gain reduction keeps strums even. If harshness lingers on bright picks, a dynamic EQ or a tool like soothe2 tames resonances surgically without dulling the whole track. For clean surgical EQ and de-essing of pick noise, FabFilter plugins are a reliable go-to.
Nail the mic position and the room, and your acoustic will sit in a mix with barely any processing. If you’re building out a home rig, our home recording setup guide covers interfaces and monitoring, and the free audio tools hub has tuners and metronomes to get takes tight before you print them. When you’re ready to blend the guitar with a vocal, see our vocal mixing walkthrough for how the two sit together.
