Maintaining brutal guitar tone

[Grind-shredder666]

Hey there Neil, first off let me say that I'm a really big fan of your work, especially your work with metal Bands like Nile, Deicide and Cannibal Corpse.

I myself have been recording and producing part time for a couple years now. Mainly demos and then my own bands' albums.

The question I have is: When tracking really heavy guitar tones for Grind\Death metal how do you keep the punchiness in the guitar tone? I always find that I have to remove a lot of low end to keep the guitars from overloading the signal and causing crackling. Is it in the EQ that I need to do more work?

Any advice would be most welcome, thanks.

 

[Colin Davis]

I'm not Neil but you should try to set the amp and move the mics so that the sound you are getting live is what you will want to use. So this means if you are getting too much bass, turn down the bass knob on the amp. And if you reamp, then you can have the freedom to adjust knobs later when the guitar player is gone.

Colin

 

[NK]

Thanks a lot for the kind words.

I try not to use EQ tracking guitars if at all possible. I prefer to keep the signal chain as clear as possible, and, as Colin said above, dial the sound in from the amp. Of course, in mixing you might need to do some EQing etc., but initially I record the guitars as full as possible. I don't bother to re-amp my own projects as I prefer to get the right guitar tone we're looking for at the time of tracking, but I do reamp other projects that I'm sent to mix fairly often. That way, if the sound is not quite there on the original tracking, I can use the above process to get the most out of the actual guitar sound coming out of the amp, as if I'd tracked it in the first place, and then I can fine tune that later in the mix.

Generally speaking, the more dense the music - as with Nile - the more time you'll need to spend to make sure you get that combo of thick and brutal, and also as much note clarity as possible without losing the balls. It's a tough job, you can easily get thick and brutal, and you can easily get thin and clear, but getting both takes lots of work. The less dense or fast the music, the easier that will become, but in extreme metal where I'm usually tracking a huge wall of downtuned guitars, this can take some time to dial in.