The first time I put the R-12 on my Martin, I fell in love. It sounded like the guitar sounds when you're sitting in front of it, full in the low mids, detailed up top, and never harsh. So I packed up a small rig and started taking it around my East Nashville neighborhood to record friends on their guitars. We're calling them micro-sessions, and this is where they'll live.
For years, when I recorded steel-string acoustic, I used two mics: a ribbon for the body and a small-diaphragm condenser for the articulation. That works, but it means two stands, two channels, and a phase relationship to babysit.
The R-12 does both in one mic. It uses the same 2.5-micron ribbon element as the R-121, so you get all the body of a ribbon. Its active electronics give the ribbon a consistent load and plenty of output, so you get the pick and string detail I used to need the condenser for. One mic, one channel, no phase games.
Everything fits in one bag, and there's no laptop in it. Here's the full chain:
The Grace Design ROXi is a perfect companion for the R-12. It's a clean, quiet, high-headroom Grace preamp in a pedal you can set on the floor next to the player.
The Lynx Mesa is the other half of what makes this work. Lynx is the highest-quality conversion I've used, and the Mesa also records straight to an SD card. I don't have to lug a computer from house to house. I plug in, hit record, and pull the files off the card when I get home.
I monitor every recording through my HEDDphone D1 headphones for ultimate confidence. What I hear on location is what I get when I bring the files home.
The R-12 is a figure-8 mic, so it hears equally from the front and back and almost nothing from the sides. A good starting point is about a foot away, aimed where the neck meets the body. Move toward the soundhole for more body, toward the neck for more detail. If the player is singing, turn the mic's side, its null, toward their mouth to keep the vocal out of the guitar track. If things get boomy up close, the R-12's 100 Hz high-pass switch tames the proximity buildup.
Shout-out to my Base4 Stands Shorty here: wherever I place the mic, it stays. No droop, no creep mid-take, so the sweet spot I found is the sweet spot I record.
"This has been my favorite lately on acoustic guitar."
— Anthony Da Costa
I'm going to keep recording these micro-sessions and posting them here, so check back.
And I want to hear yours. Record your own acoustic guitar on an R-12 and share the video. Tag @royerlabs and use #R12Acoustic, and we'll feature our favorites here on the blog and on our socials.