Please validate my Acoustic Guitar Vocal Recording Template

[wunder_musiker]

Hello, I am using Ardour 6.3 and would like to get feedback on my template for Acoustic Guitar & Vocal Recording.

I do use Stereo as it limits the amount of favourite plugins. I might switch to Mono to reduce DSP Load.

I have
2 Audio tracks (Stereo) one for Vocal & one Acoustic Guitar recording
1 Vocal Track routed into Vocal Bus with the following Plugins: Ardour High/ Low Pass Filter, Calf De-Esser, EQ10Q, Ardour a-Delay
1 Guitar Track routed into Guitar Bus with the following Plugins: Ardour High/ Low Pass Filter, EQ10Q, Ardour a-Delay and LSP Sidechain Compressor
Both busses routed into a final Mixing/ Mastering Track with the following Plugins: either X42 Compressor or MJUCjr, ZamAutoSat or Calf Saturator, Dragonfly Room or Tal-Reverb II, Sheppi Spatial Enhancer and finally Loudmax Stereo.



My Questions are:
1. Is the routing good, or is there room for improvement?
2. Are the Plugins fine or would you replace some, change the order of the plugins or add/ remove some?
3. The LSP Sidechain Compressor is in the Guitar Bus and gets the send from the Vocal Bus. The one Send is Connected to the the left and also to the right input channel of the Compressor. The SideChain Position is Feed-Back. The SideChain Type is Peak and Middle. Compressor Mode is Downward. More me sidechaining is the easiest way of getting the Vocals through after equing. Thoughts ? Are those settings ok? Is the Position of the Plugin correct?
4. Any other recommendations?

[fulltwentycharacters]

Well, I can hear a thousand people thinking: Well, does it sound good, or if not, what is the problem?
It seems like you are using the side chain as kind of an auto duck-ing effect; so that when you sing it pulls up a little less on the guitar gain, maybe just in the frequency range of the note you are singing...
You might want to experiment with setting the compressor to "up" instead of down to see if you get a nicer separation between vocal and guitar...
I always like to switch between my favorite album, done my professional engineers, and the piece that I am trying to mix and master...it's easy to hear what is jumping out, both good and bad, in your recording, compared to how, say, Kamakiriad, by Donald Fagan sounds...does it go from audiophile grade to garage band sounding when you switch to yours?
And of course, I see (I am a newbie here) that you can post audio as per the button at the top, so, I think if you post music here, someone might be in a better position to say things like "Dude, way too much compression, you sound like Enya!" (or other constructive criticisms that don't disparage Celtic artists).
Because I think a lot of people are going to ask: Well, does it sound good to you? If it does, then I have no recommendations, type of thing.
It does sound like maybe you have too much equipment and not enough time for turning knobs...it used to take me 45 minutes of messing with squash boxes and compressors and amplifier eq. before I even recorded the first note; and by then the joint was wearing off and I'd forgotten what the great song idea was in the first place. "Set it and forget it" is my motto now.
A really inspired performance with just a bit of room reverb on it is more entertaining than a half ass performance that George Martin worked on; so don't become TOO equipment-focused...

[wunder_musiker]

Wow, I am impressed. Setting the compressor "upward" did the trick. The reminder about the basics as well. Switching everything off brought me to the point that an annoying sound most likely from the E-String is going through a lot of frequencies, so impossible to cut out. So I will restring and start from scratch. By the way, using all those plugins is kind of training. And believe me, I already reduced a lot as it wasn't manageable and sound got worse.
Again, thanks a lot. Brilliant.

[milo]

One other thought: why have separate busses for guitar and vocal effects? Why not just put your effects directly on the two tracks?