I am a serious but purely amateur classical guitarist. I want to begin to record myself and also use such a device to record other friends in small performance settings (not in studios!).

The guitars are typically very high quality nylon-string instruments, with beautiful tonal possibilities (if played well!).

I wonder if anyone has any experience or advice pertaining to this idea, specifically:

1) Would one device capture the guitar sound better than another? And would any of these devices do a really wonderful job, or, do I seriously need to consider something much more costly than a "PDR"?

2) Should I plan to use an external microphone and, presuming so, would something like the RODE NT4 be a good option?

thanks for any thoughts!

Hi Pragueguy,

You can expect to achieve excellent results with a PDR. However, as you hint at in your second question, the main difference in quality will depend upon the mic and the way you engineer with it. I haven't used the Rode NT4 but I've heard good things about it and would love to try one myself. You could also mount and place the PDR on a mic stand like a microphone and get better results this way than by simply placing it on a table or something. And of course the room acoustics will obviously play an important role and will affect the desirable mic position - so experiment.

Let us know how it goes and if you have a link to your recordings, please post them.

Greg

Our digital recorder reviewer, Mark Nelson, is an accomplished guitarist himself and includes acoustic guitar examples in almost all his reviews, often both with and without external mics. For links, see our Portable Digital Audio Recorder Comparison Chart.

Thanks for the tips. I did listen to all the samples but the guitar samples are of course all steel-string acoustic and since the sound is so different from a really good classical, I am not sure how to evaluate them for classical guitar recording.

Mike

Hi Mike,

You can find various audio examples of different recorders at wingfieldaudio.com. Although there isn't a classical guitar example, they did record a cello which I think will give you a good idea of what you can expect.

Also, if you have an audio editor with some good plugins you have to the ability to greatly enhance the shape of the sound you're going for. For me, this is the other "half" of the recorder just as the the toys in the control room enhance a studio recording. The great news, is you can get almost all of the same capabilities of a recording studio for a fraction of the cost - and all within a computer you can carry around!

Though I don't play the classical guitar professionally or as a profession, I'm a top-class CG player and I can consider myself an expert on classical guitar sound. I've heard several classical guitar recordings on some of the digital recorders at some other sites and I can say that the two Zoom models, namely, the H2 and H4, do a very good job on recording classical guitars with their built-in mics (I haven't heard them using other mics yet). Though, they are definitely not the best among the portable recorders, when it comes to classical guitar recordings, they do surprisingly well, and even better than the others. Where most others, including the edirols and the tascams, tend to sound a bit 'tinny', the Zooms sound more full-bodied and almost non of the 'tinniness' common among portable digital recorders. I've noted the deficiency in high-frequency area on the H2, which was confirmed by one 'expert' at a minidisc site, that didn't seem to adversely affect its overall performance when it comes to recording classical guitar. I'd say if you want better overall recorder, get an edirol or a tascam, but if you want a better recorder for the classical guitar, especially if you're limited to using the internal mics, get either of the Zooms - they can't go wrong.

One more bit of advice. If your recorder has one of the those automatic volume control type options, don't use them. It's better to adjust the recording volume beforehand or use the limiter than using one of those.