What a wonderful festive season treat! Stopping by and finding this from you, Pam. Always delightful to listen and watch you play and sing.
I’ll add to the chorus … no muddiness or issues with guitar tone that I can hear.
Loved the chorus, you are a whole vocal ensemble all on your own deliving on lead, backing, harmony. Sounds wonderful.
Also liked the video insert for the chorus.
Lots to love.
As you say, a single track with guitar and vocal recorded through one mic (I assume a condensor) makes achieving a voice accompanied by guitar rather than a voice sitting softly behind the guitar tricky. And I am often teased when I say it, saying it so often that it’s somewhat a Community meme, I do prefer the former over the latter.
If using a condensor you could work on mic position to influence the balance but better is to either overdub the vocals or record with two mics. The former obviously can be done with a single mic (if you have just the one) but sometimes something is lost when overdubbing vs getting into the song as you play and sing.
Not sure if you have a second mic? If not maybe worth getting a dynamic vocal mic. Alternatively, if the guitar has built-in pickup you could try recording the guitar direct on one track and setting up the mic just for the vocal, even though with a condensor some guitar bleed is inveitable.
Gosh, here you are and getting war and peace from me ![:rofl: :rofl:](https://community.justinguitar.com/images/emoji/twitter/rofl.png?v=12)
As I listen, I am hearing everything in the middle.
I am guessing that track 3 was the same strumming and chords as track one. Add the forth as a duplicate of the third, and you have three guitar parts that are so similar that the ear combines all three and it ends up sounding all in the middle.
This is likely the case even if you use different settings on the reverb and EQ. A trick on the EQ is to boost frequencies on one track and make a mirror cut on the other. Repeat on the other track and you may begin to hear some width, extra fullness.
Ideally, rather than duplicating track 3, you could record another take. That would add some small difference that would likely still end up heard in the middle but add fullness through the small differences in ‘identical’ playing.
One magic trick you can try is to make use of the Haas Effect. Pan the duplicated tracks hard left and right as you did. Then add a slight delay to the start of one track. As I recall you use Reaper, so you can use the time delay JS plugin. Start with say 30-50ms. What you are looking for is just enough delay to confuse the hears. Too much and it sounds like an echo, too little and you hear nothing. Tweak the levels of each track relative to each other and the delay, until you like what you are hearing, the width. You can also experiment with the panning. Do this with track one and two muted.
Once you like what you are hearing, then you can bring back the main track and blend tracks 2 and 3, maintaining their levels relative to each other, until it sounds full and wide.
Another thing you might try is playing track 3 and 4 as A D and E barre chords, using the E and A shapes. The barre chord voicing with the open chords may sound good? Similarly you can put on a capo … now hope I get this right … at the second fret and play open G C D.
Lots of fun to play around with these ideas now you have got the hang of the multi-track recording.
I’m reading between your lines, so can look forward to what collaboration may happen in 2024 ![:wink: :wink:](https://community.justinguitar.com/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=12)