Help with Guitars

[kenboy]

I can never seem to get the guitars in my mixes to sit quite well. What I mean by that is that they are either two loud (like cover up the who mix), or very dull and lacking punch. I usually don't add any compression of limiting, so after reading some threads I'm thinking that might be an issue.

My question is. Are you all compressing single guitar tracks, and then limiting a guitar buss?
I have started going this, and am not really getting the best results. Not like what I would want anyways.
I do usually have a multi band Comp on either the buss or individual tracks.
Man I have tried everything, so any suggestions would be great!!

Thanks guys.

 

[Fox Mulder]

This usually happens to me when the guitars have too much low-end and of course, low-mid. If you feel that your tone is muffled (lacking bite), instead of notching up the highs, hipass at 60-80hz And put a multiband comp till 300hz or lower if neccesary. I never use a limiter unless I'm dealing with a very untight player.

 

[ahjteam]

Here is my $.02

I usually use 12 or 24dB per octave highpass on guitars at 80-150hz for rhythm guitars and 200-400hz for lead guitars. Reason is just simple physics.

http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

If you play in for example C# tuning, the lowest note you can play is C#2, which is 69hz. So the most logical thing would be highpass there, right? Maybe, but the thing is that with rock or heavymetal you usually double or quadtrack your guitars and iyou also do have a bass player in your band so if you would put the highpass filter there you would have a massive buildup around 69hz and we don't really want that because notewise it is pretty intelligible area and eats a helluva lot headroom, so I'll just highpass it half an octave above at 138hz, but this is not something written in stone. If it seems to eat the low end too much, you just need to play around to hear at which frequency the guitar still has the low end and sounds full. For example with this one I have a the highpass filter only in the guitar bus at 100hz and the guitars are in drop C# tuning.

The highpass filter isn't a knife, atleast the musical ones; If you put it at 138hz, that doesn't mean you don't hear 137hz etc. That only means that if you are using 12dB/oct filter, the volume is dropped by 12dB at 69hz and 24dB at 35hz etc.

Also if you have too much stuff going to subs (the 0-70hz range), it will sounds cluttered, thats why I highpass everything from atleast 80hz and usually only let either bass or kick go to the subs.

Hope it helps