The most stripped down you can get is acoustic guitar and vocals. Something about the intimate nature of the combination of a voice accompanied by a single instrument has resonated with people for centuries even to this day. Even though the pairing of acoustic guitar and vocals is much simpler to mix than a full band with dozens or hundreds of tracks, it’s not without its challenges. There isn’t any room to hide anything when you’ve just got the two instruments, so let’s talk how to mix acoustic guitar and vocals.
How to Mix Acoustic Guitar and Vocals
As someone who likes to make acoustic guitar and vocal based song covers, I’ve mixed hundreds of these types of mixes over the years to the point that I just use a template which I’ve found works very well with pre-made tracks that I drop the audio into.
The first thing to consider is how many tracks you have. When you’re mixing acoustic guitar and vocals, you’ll likely have anywhere between one and four tracks.
If it’s a single microphone picking up everything in the guitar and vocals and you’ve just got one track, this will obviously be simpler. If you have up to three microphones (one for vocals and two for the guitar) plus a possible DI for the acoustic guitar, it gets a little more complicated.
We’ll address each possible configuration as we go through the types of processing.
One last thing to mention before we get into the tutorial; if you used more than one input to record your vocals and acoustic guitar, check out my tutorial on fixing phase issues to ensure the audio’s in phase to ensure you get the fullest sound.
Now let’s talk how to mix acoustic guitar and vocals, beginning with EQ.
EQ
When you’ve got a single track, I like this setup for my track EQ, which essentially equates to the entire mix’s EQ:
Note that if you have individual tracks as mentioned above, check out my guides on acoustic guitar EQ and vocal EQ to apply to apply them to the individual tracks. Once you’ve done that, you may still want to apply the above acoustic guitar and vocals EQ cheat sheet to your master bus, albeit with small adjustments at each point.
Getting back to said cheat sheet, let’s cover each move in a bit more depth.
High Pass at 70Hz to Remove Noise
The fundamental of the human voice doesn’t begin until around 150-200Hz.
As I covered in my acoustic guitar frequency range overview, the practical range of the acoustic guitar begins at 82Hz starting with the low E:
As such, applying a high pass filter at 70Hz is a safe point to remove everything below that while knowing we’re not sacrificing anything on our acoustic.
Normally I’d pass higher if we were just doing acoustic guitar EQ, but because this guitar represents our entire instrumental, I’m leaving everything intact.
I recommend a slope of 24dB/oct to ensure we don’t take anything from the practical range of the acoustic without getting too sharp. This still cuts out all of the room noise, air conditioners, computer fan, outside noise, etc.
Boost at 150Hz for Body
I like a small boost around 150Hz to bring out more low end and body in BOTH the acoustic guitar and vocals as both can benefit from a boost here.
Remember that this is the entire low end of your mix here, so approach it accordingly. That’s not to say that you should boost just to boost; if the flat response here feels adequate then leave it as is otherwise you’ll make it sound needlessly boomy.
Cut at 400-500Hz for Clarity
I like a small cut at 400-500Hz to clean up some of the muddiness in this unflattering around on both the acoustic and vocals. This adds a bit of clarity via subtractive EQ.
Boost or Cut at 1.5k for Character or to Attenuate Boxiness
The character of the acoustic comes through in this 1-2k region, so we can bring out more of it with a small boost at 1.5k.
Alternatively, there’s a kind of claustrophobic feeling which can build around here, depending on the room/setup. It’s not always an issue, but if you find a small cut here benefits your mix, that’s what it is.
Don’t make a move here just to make a move here. That’s a good lesson for anytime you’re using EQ and listening to a frequency range, but leaving this region flat is perfectly fine.
High Shelf Boost at 3k for Added Presence, Vibrance, and Transients
A high shelf allows you to cut or boost ABOVE a certain frequency point.
In this case, I like to add a small high shelf boost at 3k to bring out more presence and vibrance, not to mention the percussiveness of the strings themselves.
A low pass filter isn’t necessary as this is your only track(s), so you don’t have to worry about creating space for anything else.
Compression
As I mentioned in the EQ section, if you’ve got individual tracks for the acoustic guitar and vocals, consider my individual guides on acoustic guitar compression and vocal compression.
The same advice applies as before; you may want to use those compression settings, albeit at lighter rates (ratio especially).
If you’ve only got one track, or you want to apply some compression to the master bus, I like glue compression in either event.
As the name suggests, this is about creating a sense of cohesion (glue) between multiple tracks or, in the case of an acoustic guitar and vocal combination on a single track, multiple instruments/sources.
Above pictured are my glue compression settings for a single track setup or the master bus when mixing acoustic guitar and vocals.
I’m using the Waves SSL G Bus Compressor, though you can apply similar settings to whatever glue compressor you’ve got.
My Ableton Live has a nice built in glue compressor named… Glue Compressor.
Ideally you had a good microphone position which was equidistant between the guitar and vocals so that you have a decent mix dynamically to begin with.
Speaking of which, check out my tutorial on how to record acoustic guitar and vocals for tips on how to get the best results from the recording next time.
In this case, a ratio of 4 on that glue compressor should be all you need to create a little cohesion between the guitar and vocal. Combine this with an attack of 3ms and an automatic release.
Lastly, set the threshold so that it’s capturing the quietest practical moments of the performance. In other words, the quietest picking or vocal – not so low that you’re getting the air conditioner in the background.
I should mention there’s a plugin I like to use time to time on acoustic guitar called I CLA Unplugged from Waves which is a little all-in-one suite for controlling the bass, treble, and dynamics of your acoustic guitar (with time based effects, as well).
This can be used in place of the EQ and compression, or alongside to further tweak to get just the right balance, but I love this plugin on acoustic guitar in particular.
Reverb
I like a little room reverb on the master bus to give the performance a touch of depth.
I don’t get too fancy here; I like my stock Ableton Live reverb (check out my overview of every Ableton stock plugin).
I’ve got 15ms of predelay to reinforce that illusion of separation and with it depth.
I’m running a relatively long decay at 3.6 seconds to give it a lot of depth, but there are a couple parameters reining that in.
This includes the high and low pass filters. I’m high and low passing around 600Hz and 6k (also known as the Abbey Road Reverb trick) to ensure the low end stays clean.
The key controller here is the Dry/Wet knob. Because we’re using this as an insert directly on the master bus, this is the sole controller to determine how much of that reverb is blended in. 15% means that 85% of what we’re hearing is the dry, original signal. The 15% of the signal which is the reverb is light enough to just give us a taste of that reverb to know it’s there.
This is one of those things I wouldn’t do as much on a busier mix, but on this simple acoustic guitar and vocal combination and paired with the rest of the reverb’s settings like that relatively long decay, I love the results.
Multiband Compression
This one is optional, but I typically like to apply a multiband compressor on the master bus regardless of how many tracks we were working with.
Multiband compression allows you to nudge the entirety of the acoustic guitar and vocals mix in a slightly warmer or brighter direction by added a little band dependent compression in the 2-5k region or 300-600Hz region, respectively.
Even if I don’t want to favor one characteristic over another, I still like multiband compression to create a little more glue between all of the different tracks. Splitting the master audio into four bands, I like a band between 0-200Hz, 200-1.5k, 1.5k-10k, and 10k and up.
A 2:1 ratio with slow attacks and releases (30 and 60ms) set to achieve 1-2dB of gain reduction on each band tames the dynamics and nurses a little more cohesion across the entire mix.
Stereo Width
One last move I like to make is to apply a stereo imaging plugin at the end of the chain. This allows us to control the width of the different frequency bands in our mix.
Because we don’t have a lot of instruments to pan around to create stereo width, I like to utilize Izotope’s Imager plugin to make the audio we do have wider.
I particularly like to increasingly spread out the mix with each subsequent higher band, keeping the low end in the center but giving the higher bands that extra bit of life. This is especially useful when we only have a single track to work with.
That’s about it for how to mix acoustic guitar and vocals outside of optionally adding a limiter on the end to get the volume to a more competitive level.
We’re not going to the lengths that I normally do on my master bus in part because much of the appeal of acoustic guitar and vocals is the transparent, stripped down nature of it, so we want to reflect that in the mix with a less is more approach and keeping the production relatively minimal.
All that said, these adjustments should make your acoustic guitar and vocals mix sound a lot better.