I love the QTC 50's on acoustic guitar. SHure SM81 are very nice too.

Budget?
Single mic or pair?
Are you recording this performer in the studio or live?
One-take (guitar and vox concurrently) or tracked with guitar and vocals laid down separately?

sE showcased their the GM10 at AES. I thought it sounded pretty good given the environment of the noisy expo.

Thanks for the replys.
Boswell :
Budget? £700 ($1400)

Single mic or pair? : whatever is going to get me the best sound for my budget. i am open to suggestions

Are you recording this performer in the studio or live? : Studio

One-take (guitar and vox concurrently) or tracked with guitar and vocals laid down separately?
:Guitar and vox laid down seperately

I have a great river and a hamptone valve preamp.
Noise is going to be an issue as it is very quiet finger picking style guitar.

Any suggestions appreciated.
Great forum
Thanks

Quiet finger-picked guitar: guitars are normally the province of SDCs, but with this spec and budget, I would reach for my pair of LDC Rode NT2-As and set them up in M-S. They are one of the lowest-noise quality mics around. I use them through DAV preamps, but I'm sure they would sound good through the Great River. If your budget can stretch to a U195, you are in a different league, of course, but I think you should at least try the sound of a pair of mics in M-S on guitar before settling for a single more expensive mic.

Vocals: your choice to suit the singer, but an EV RE20 is an excellent dynamic. However, to keep within the budget you could use the NT2-A or look at one of the AT range of medium-diaphragm condensers such as the AT4033A.

Don't forget you need to budget for shock mounts, and for the vocals, a pop filter.

Thanks for that. I will look into the Rodes.

I have also been offered the loan of a single Neumann KM184 which is a small condenser. Is it possible to get a good sound from just one of these on an acoustic ?

Yes, of course. It's a good mic. I think my point relates more to the configuration of the mics once you have one that gives reasonable results on a guitar. If you just use a single SDC when laying down a guitar track in an acoustically dead studio, in my experience you get a rather uninteresting sound. The detail is there, the range is there, but I think because it's as mono as it gets, one has got accustomed to hearing more width and life in a guitar these days.

Many years ago I started miking instruments in stereo to give them more width (obviously), but also to give me more flexibility when mixing in with vocals and also other instruments. However, I found X-Y miking did not suit many performers because they moved too much during the song. Not a lot, but too much to keep a constant spatial definition when using X-Y. That's when I tried M-S, and it solved the problem. I can use the M channel as though it were a single mono microphone, and it's much more tolerant of movement of the performer. I then add a little width and presence by bringing in some S channel into the M-S decoder. Usually not as much as full M-S could deliver, but enough to overcome the excessively mono sound of a single mic.

By the way, don't forget to track a signal from the guitar pickup as well (assuming the performer has one fitted). When it comes to mixdown, to give extra sonic flexibility, you can experiment with adding in a small amount of pickup, delayed by about 1ms to get the phasing right. If you choose to position the guitar off-centre in the mix, adding the pickup in the mirror-image position the other side of the vocal can produce an interesting effect.