I want to share something I learned about recording ths week. It's all about phase alignment when recording tracks,

When I’m recording acoustic guitar and a vocal at the same time, I get bleed of the guitar into the vocal microphone.  This causes some nasty audible “flanging” effects and distortion in GarageBand between the leaked guitar in the vocal track and the guitar track. It becomes even more noticeable when effects are added to the vocal.  While the volume of the guitar in the vocal track is much lower than the vocal itself, it is still audible.  Of course, when there is no singing, the guitar can easily be heard in the vocal track.  I tried a number of ways to fix this: Using various microphones; building shields around the vocal mic; using phase inversion to cancel out the leaked guitar in the vocal track.  I’ll discuss more on all of these in the document below.  The bottom line however, was none of these ideas solved the problem. But in thinking about the issue and doing some research, I believe the cause of the problem was phase misalignment between the guitar and vocal tracks.  I’d like to share more about the problem and what I think is a solution.  I hope this will help you in your recording projects. Until now, I never knew phase alignment was an issue.

The bottom line is if you align your vocal and guitar tracks in GarageBand, you get a noticeably improved recording.

Attached is a Word Document I wrote about phase alignment. It's not short, but I hope some folks will find it interesting and helpful. But, I'm a geek. So things I think are interesting will bore most everyone else!