Industrial/gothic guitar tone?

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Thared33

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Aug 16, 2002
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Now, I'm not saying I'm trying to achieve this, but I'm curious. The tone is rather... peculiar. Almost like it's not guitars, but some weird distorted synthesizers or something. Or maybe a combo of the two!

Do you guys know what I'm talking about? It's a bit hard for me to explain. I'm thinking it might be recorded direct for the most part and heavily processed, and I think it may be realllllly huge on 'fuzz' pedals.
 
You're right. Usually the guitars are done with (older) digital pedals on purpose, because it sounds completely different to a regular guitar tone. There's really no other "trick" to it :) Sometimes they like to add some permanent effects to it, such as chorus or very slow flanger. Check out the Sansamp PSA1.1, that should get you a really industrial tone right off the bat. Zoom 505 (or it's contemporary relatives) will also get you a very similar sound to many albums.
 
skeksis268 said:
An example of a band and track?
Click to expand...

Here's my recommendations for checking out The General Industrial Guitar Tone:

Flesh Field - Reflect the Storm
Pain - Nailed to the Ground
Cyanotic - Transhuman
Die Krupps - LCD
Front 242 - Crapage
Front Line Assembly - Provision
Havoc Unit - Vermicide
Laibach - Message from the Black Star
Ministry - Just One Fix
Steril - Egoist
16Volt - Motorskill

and so on..
 
More modern industrial tones tend to be heavily gated as well. For most of the early stuff, most tones were tweaked from pedals and recorded direct instead of through an amp. There's a certain high end that gets lost the moment it goes into an amp/cab.
 
go find a zoom pedal and you might pull a horrific enough tone out of it! lol i heard that too, industrial tones often go digital, i hate to recommend it but look for a boss metal zone, it should give you that tone your looking for but if you do it wrong like i always say its gona sound like a bee in a jar
 
I have a Zoom 505 and a Zoom 510. Both are older than Jesus.

I think I may be up for some experimenting.... but, really, how in the hell can something so cheap like a Zoom pedal be on recordings that've sold that many records? I was thinking it was much more complicated than that.
 
Industrial rock/metal and "sold that many records" don't really fit into the same sentence :lol: There's only a handful of bands that have sold more than about 1000 - 5000 copies of each album world wide. Ministry and Rammstein being the best known ones, and even Rammstein hasn't been industrial rock for a long time.
 
and NIN ? :rolleyes:

Trent used to record some old zoom pedal at twice the speed and then digitaly slow it down half the speed to get even more digital artefacts into the tone
 
Thared33 said:
I have a Zoom 505 and a Zoom 510. Both are older than Jesus.

I think I may be up for some experimenting.... but, really, how in the hell can something so cheap like a Zoom pedal be on recordings that've sold that many records? I was thinking it was much more complicated than that.
Click to expand...

The true spirit of industrial music back in the day.I miss those days dearly, metal with dance beats is NOT industrial.Listen to Matthew Schultz aka Lab Report/ The Division for some sick guitar mangling.He built the A.T.G aka anti tank guitarhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_Tank_Guitar
 
Also remember that industrial tones were usually ran through SEVERAL pieces of equipment. Something like a Zoom or other preamp ran direct (no cab sim) and recorded - and then ran back through some external eqs/filters/fx and tweaked to taste.

Industrial is all about machines. Don't be afraid to just run it through about anything. I'd wager to say most tones are made accidentily
 
Industrial-wise, a lot of bands seem to go for a distortion that has no definition string-to-string - so when they play a chord, it sounds like one noise rather than several notes. Digital pedals will help with that, as will lots of gain (hence the gates).

As for the straight-into-the-desk thing - thinking about it, I reckon with impulses you could get some great industrial types sounds if you record your nasty pedal direct, run it through PristineSpace etc. and play with the wet/dry signals, so you get a touch of cab sound with the electric bee tone.

Steve
 
Suicide_As_Alibi said:
Industrial-wise, a lot of bands seem to go for a distortion that has no definition string-to-string - so when they play a chord, it sounds like one noise rather than several notes.
Click to expand...

You've hit the nail on the head with that one! I'm sitting here listening to some of the tone I was talking about and there's seriously no note separation whatsoever in it.

I guess intentionally making your guitar tone sound worse is part of the style. I'm going to try fooling with this Zoom 505 and Zoom 510 pedals and see what I can do with it. I'll just process the hell out of it, tweak it and see how well it'll sit in the mix.
 
xFkx said:
and NIN ? :rolleyes:

Trent used to record some old zoom pedal at twice the speed and then digitaly slow it down half the speed to get even more digital artefacts into the tone
Click to expand...


I have heard of that... BTW, Chris Vrenna had stated in the past that they (NIN) also used crappy mics through really nice preamps.

I think that when working on industrial tracks, one must consider the origin of the music. It is steeped heavily in experimental roots and if you buy into a specific format based on other bands sounds you are defeating the purpose of the movement itself. You know that it took some of these bands like KMFDM, Skinny Puppy etc, years to develop a trademark guitar sound.

For distortion, try running it into various things it's not supposed to go into normally. Back in the day (when I was in Wrack Process) we used to plug our drum modules into the ceramic inputs on our radio shack DJ mixer to get distortion. It gave it a nice analog square wave when playing 808 kicks through it.

We also used to slam tracks into cassette tape decks for distortion. Nothing beats tape compression :)

Now I use a ton of plugins so I end up playing clean into a preamp, dumping it into PTLE or Ableton and effecting it from there. I use bit downconverters and slam it into a preamp in while pulling back the overall output gain among other things.
 
theunforgiven246 said:
I'm more interested in the different synths in industrial. I dont know exactly know what to look for.
Click to expand...

If you want outboard gear: Dave Smith makes kick ass synths at various price ranges. Also, the Access Virus is a staple. Stay away from boards with sampled presets like Roland, Korg etc. unless it is a modeling synth. Korg makes more affordable modelling synthesizers now along with Alesis.

Software: Rob Papen Predator is way cool. I also think Waldorf has a great starter bundle with the old PPG and Attack plugins. I use Ableton's Operator but you need the Ableton Live client to use it ;) I also downloaded a ton of free VST plugins from various sources and I like to stack them up (I'll write a bass line and then copy it to other MIDI tracks and run other synths on those tracks to fatten it up or tweak it the way I need it to sound.) Sometimes I'll run a sidechain EQ or just EQ it inline to clean it up... but with industrial, it's all about experimentation. Remember, this music came as a result of people getting fed up with the mainstream label requirements!

- Bryan
- In Virus Tandem -
 
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