Main issue was untight, soft playing. Guitar and pickup were good (Blackjack with JB), though for this style EMGs would've made my life a much lesser pain in the ass. Gonna take some pointers from Andy on that one and really push further metalcore bands to track with em. I totally see where he was coming from with Trivium and battling a 2k peak the whole way.
The issue with soft playing is that you have to use more gain than you'd like for a tight, clear tone. But there are some things you can't get around when you double-track rhythms for 5 songs in one day.
The cool thing about Possessing is that there are tons of leads hiding the rhythm tone, but on the other tracks I'm really gonna have my work cut out for me because it's much more sparse. GH did a great job here, no doubt but due to not being able to fiddle with mic position and stuff the initial tone was still fairly far from where it needed to be for this project, so about 6 EQ plug-ins, 1 limiter, 1 multi-band and 1 tape saturator went into the tone you here there currently. It's at the breaking point, where any further work just causes them to turn into a phasey, smeary mess. So I'm just hoping the tone will work for the rest of the tracks!
One thing is true though, a real cab tone is a much better basis for a final record tone because it holds up much better under heavy EQ. Impulses just fall apart completely and if they didn't sound lifeless to start with, they certainly do afterward.
