Layering clean and distorted guitar ala Daylight Dies

[TeamOmega]

How do YOU layer guitars when you have distorted and clean tracks? Do you double track clean guitar parts? How do you pan them? Any other tips or tricksyou use?

I really like the production (as well as the music of course) on the last two Daylight Dies albums... any insight on how you guys did the guitars Egan?

 

[wishtheend]

I recently started micing acoustics with a M/S technique. Cardioid pointed a little bit above the sound hole, where the neck and body meet - and then a figure 8 right under, pointed to the sides. Take the fig 8 mic and duplicate it, and invert the phase of the duplicate. Then pan those two tracks hard left and right. Gives a pretty wide sound, and the cardioid can just be used to taste to fill out the middle.

 

[TheDarkProject]

With clean electric parts, I usually find myself having to put a bit of distortion on them. It still ends up sounding clean relative to the other guitars in the mix, but the added harmonics help it stand out.

I'd love to know what other people do though.

 

[egan.]

I didn't mix those records but I can tell you that we track the best clean tones we could and then worked from there. IME the two most import things are compressing the cleans fairly hard and eqing them in the mix (not solo'd). We double a fair amount of the cleans but we decide on a part by part basis as well.

 

[gorath23]

Are we talking about in the heavy rhythm sections....? I have to admit I never noticed it was layered in that way....*runs to listen*

 

[ahjteam]

Take the fig 8 mic and duplicate it, and invert the phase of the duplicate. Then pan those two tracks hard left and right. Gives a pretty wide sound

If you do that, then you are only using the cardioid mic.

 

[Metaltastic]

Nah dude, that's M/S - the ribbon signals don't fully cancel cuz each is coming out of a speaker, which sounds like crap without the cardioid, but great with it, and lets you control the stereo field width by raising/lowering the faders of the two ribbon tracks

 

[ahjteam]

Nah dude, that's M/S - the ribbon signals don't fully cancel cuz each is coming out of a speaker, which sounds like crap without the cardioid, but great with it, and lets you control the stereo field width by raising/lowering the faders of the two ribbon tracks

Nope, you would need an M/S matrix to decode it (Left = Mid + Side, Right = Mid - Side (the polarity-reversed side-signal)). If you just duplicate the fig8 track and phase invert the duplicate, you would just get an absolute phase cancellation and left with silence on it.

 

[Metaltastic]

But you're not left with silence, because you hard pan each to the opposite side, and have the cardioid up the middle, so it works out the same (trust me on this, I've heard from multiple AE teachers at my school, and while the program needs some work, I definitely have confidence in their knowledge)