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It’s the age-old problem – how to get a good recording of an acoustic. The gold standard is to buy a good condenser mic (I use a Rode condenser mic) and send that through your Scarlett into GarageBand. Garageband has almost nothing to do with the sound, unless you are choosing some special amp or effects from the Garageband options. The thing that will alter your basic sound the most is the equalizer included in Garageband. I use it sometimes (but not always) to boost the bass to get a fuller sound, or boost the treble to get a brighter sound. Try some of the equalizer presets to compare.
And there’s another issue people forget about: Your speakers are what your ears are hearing. If you are going to be serious about recording, you need some seriously good studio monitors plugged directly into your Scarlett. The most popular in the music world are the RKR Rokit 5 or 6 – the ones with the yellow cones. You see them in almost every Youtube video of a recording studio.
One interesting fact: It’s actually possible to get a recording that sounds better than your guitar.
Sunjamr Steve
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My guitar is an acoustic electric would I still plug my guitar in to one channel and Mic the guitar through another channel? Like I said I’m new to this recording stuff thanks for all your help.
I have 3 acoustic electrics, and I have done what you suggest many times: Plug the guitar cable into Input 1, and the mic into Input 2. Then in my DAW, I set Track 1 to Input 1, and Track 2 to Input 2. Then after you make your recording, you can send the audio from Track 1 to the Left channel, and the audio from Track 2 to the Right channel. While you are listening, you can shift the speaker balance back and forth from Left to Right and get a really good comparison of the sound quality of each method.
From doing that, I learned that in all cases the mic sounds better than the electric input to my ears. Also, there is a significant difference in the quality of the pickups in my acoustic electrics. The best pickup is the one in my Martin, and it combines a piezo with a small built-in mic. My Taylor GS Mini uses a humbucker pickup, which is actually pretty good, but it’s really just picking up the string movement, not the resonance of the whole acoustic body. And my Walden guitar uses a piezo pickup, so it’s picking up the vibration of the wood underneath the bridge.
Sunjamr Steve
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