Putting an electric guitar in the same room as a string orchestra creates a problem with no clean solution. Amplified guitar leaks into every string microphone. With eighteen open mics, that bleed is unfixable, and it will limit every mix decision you make later.
Here is the approach used on Yvette Young's 3 Pieces for Strings and Guitar, where the guitar and an eighteen piece orchestra were tracked in the same room on the same day.
Keep the guitar out of the room
The guitar was recorded direct, with no amplifier in the space. The orchestra heard it through headphones. This gives you clean string microphones with no guitar in them, at the cost of the guitarist not hearing an amp in the room.
To do this you need a cue system that actually works. On this session that meant multiple headphone amplifiers providing eighteen channels, and twenty pairs of identical headphones so every player heard the same thing. Do not mix headphone models across an ensemble.
Split the guitar signal
The guitar was captured in two places at once:
- A clean DI, taken before the pedalboard. Raw guitar, no effects, no amp modelling.
- The full wet output, in stereo, taken after the pedalboard.
That split is the whole insurance policy. If a performance is good but the tone is wrong, you re-amp the clean DI through the same chain later. If the tone is right, you already have it. Fab set this up specifically so the overdub session the next day could punch in against either version.
The problem nobody plans for
Partway through the tracking day, a problem surfaced that no amount of preparation would have caught: the mechanical click of the guitarist's boot hitting her pedalboard switches was printing into the string microphones. Not the guitar signal. The physical noise of the switch, picked up acoustically by eighteen open mics.
There is no processing fix for that. The decision made on the floor was to track the guitar almost completely clean with minimal delay, and rebuild every effect the following day as overdubs.
If you are recording a pedal heavy player in a live room, think about switching noise before the session, not during it.
Overdubbing against an ensemble with no click
The orchestra on this record was tracked without a click, which makes guitar overdubs genuinely difficult. There is no grid to lock to and the tempo breathes.
Two techniques made it work:
Move the ensemble to the player, not the other way round. Asking the guitarist to chase a scratch track that was never on a grid destroyed her feel. Her words: "instead of focusing on feel, I'm focusing on following." So the pizzicato string notes were nudged around her phrasing instead. Do this sparingly, because moving notes recorded by eighteen microphones moves the ambience too.
Use the scratch guitar as a rhythmic anchor. In call and response sections where the guitarist is answering players who are not in the room, pushing the original scratch guitar up in the cue mix gives her something to lock to. It noticeably changes how she plays.
Building the guitar in layers
Rather than chasing one perfect pass, the overdubs were built as layers: a sustained shimmer faded in underneath, a pitch shifted sparkle pass, a feedback layer, sub octaves for weight, and hard cut noise transitions between movements.
One rule governs the pedalboard layout in a session like this: stereo effects go last in the chain. Anything stereo placed before a mono stage gets summed back to mono, and you have wasted it.
The full session, including the pedalboard walkthrough and the re-amping decisions, is in 6 Strings and Classic Strings on Puremix.
