Need Help - Mixing bad guitars and need drum samples

[ADRSean]

Hello! I need some help! i'm currently mixing and mastering an album where the guitar was recorded horribly. All guitars were SINGLE tracked. They were recorded also by micing a line 6 spider III 120 watt combo amp. That' shorrible! The tone is so muddy and roomy sounding. I need to know what to do. The chugging spikes so much with big old low end booms. And not to mention, they recorded the guitarist playing right next to the mic so you can hear his pick noise. The band is gone and is not re-recording and I can't just bail. I gotta make this the best I can without using magic powers. I dont have an audio clip of it yet, I didnt want to bounce anything till I did something to it ya know? any help would be great.

They also don't have a live drummer. Their drums are EZdrummers basic kit in multi-track form. So they loaded a guitar pro made midi of their drums into Ezdrummer and bounced out each layer for me. They want me to resample the drums, so I need to find samples like Killswitch Engages kit or Megadeth.

 

[Skinny Viking]

EQ the hell out of the guitar, post clips 1st so we can have an idea of your starting point thus making it easier to point you in a good direction (I really just wanted to use the word "thus") and tell them to be a bit more realistic about their expectations considering the source material they supplied you with. Unless you told them you can turn chicken shit into chicken salad in which case YOU are the one that needs to be a bit more realistic about what you can do for them. Is it a paying gig? If not, tell them to deal with it and next time go to you for tracking as well so it can be done correctly from the start. If it is a paying gig, as long as your prices don't exceed your abilities they should still have nothing to complain about

 

[ADRSean]

It is a paying gig. But the guys dont have a lot of money. I didn't tell them I could do anything but give them what they've heard me do with a local band. I told them to record DI for me at least and they didnt. So I'm stuck with this. And I told them I'd do the best I can. I'll post a sample in a few minutes here for you guys too.

 

[crosstalk]

Maybe multiband compress to take care of of those booming lows.

How many songs are we talking about? I don't think there's an excuse to not go back and retrack the guitars. Single tracked? Pick noise in those tracks? Why would anyone even bother?

"Hey, lets record an album and not put any effort what-so-ever into it. It'll turn out fricking AWESOME!"

You said the band is gone... did you record these guitars? Would be better off using the headphone/line out of the Spider.

 

[ADRSean]

No I didn't record them. They did it in a studio in Lansing (Michigan) and they are gone meaning like on a mini tour. A fucking stealthplug running through the headphone jack woulda sounded better than this.

 

[Skinny Viking]

post the clip man, maybe something can be salvaged but like I said before, this is more their problem than yours. You can only do so much with source material that sounds as bad as you've described.

 

[crosstalk]

No I didn't record them. They did it in a studio in Lansing (Michigan) and they are gone meaning like on a mini tour. A fucking stealthplug running through the headphone jack woulda sounded better than this.

They did this in a studio!? Like paid for it? 12 yr old engineer or something? Post a clip.

 

[AdamWathan]

If it's not too many songs, get the Guitar Pro files saying you need them for MIDI tracks for whatever reason, send them to me and I'll re-record all the guitar parts myself and send you DIs.

 

[GarethSE]

If it's not too many songs, get the Guitar Pro files saying you need them for MIDI tracks for whatever reason, send them to me and I'll re-record all the guitar parts myself and send you DIs.

And that is why this forum is the shit.
People on here are dedicated as fuck.

 

[Joematthews]

If it were me I know I would play every single part again.

If not, multiband to get rid of the boominess, and sweep around to find the "roomy" frequencies with your eq to try and get rid of some of that crap.

For the drums, use any of the clicky kick samples available here... there are FUCK loads of them

Joe