Not sure what the next step is for production skills... tips?

Yeah, compression shouldn't be necessary on high-gain rhythm IMO (except if you have a particular compressor that imparts a pleasing coloration, but even then I doubt people are taking off more than a couple of dB's). And I wouldn't say the amp particularly compresses the tone; there's a bit of that going on, but mostly it's more just brutally clipping the peaks (AKA distortion), rather than attenuating them at all.

My bad, to think I now have a qualification in this shit, I should know better :lol:
 
Nah, it's cool, I mostly mentioned it because I so often see people say that distortion compresses the signal when responding to the "how do compress rhythm guitars" question, but unless I'm wildly mistaken, this is for the most part not the case (but of course there's some compression going on, I assume that's where the "sag" comes from)
 
Nah, it's cool, I mostly mentioned it because I so often see people say that distortion compresses the signal when responding to the "how do compress rhythm guitars" question, but unless I'm wildly mistaken, this is for the most part not the case (but of course there's some compression going on, I assume that's where the "sag" comes from)

Because variations near the 'loud' end of the guitar's signal get mooshed away, with the result being a more uniform volume, distortion does technically compress - in the sense of 'reduce dynamic range', at least.

Jeff
 
Yeah, I guess it's a just a matter of semantics - when I think compression, I think specifically attenuation of the volume of things above a certain threshold (the amount of course determined by the ratio), rather than just lopping 'em clean off (clipping). Whatever, I think he gets the idea :D
 
Clipping attenuates above the clipping threshold at a ratio somewhere between "OW" and "BUGGER OFF"... while 'clean' compression is different, the usual definition (reduction of dynamic range) isn't quite so picky and the imaginary wall between 'clean' and 'not clean' clipping serves only to distract and confuse.

Jeff
 
What is a good setting to use on a basic high gain rhythm?

btw, if you have a separate head and cabinet, you could just take the cabinet into different room or closet, then draw a really long speaker cable from the closet to the control room and tweak the tone there. When you get the tone you like, drop the gain by 1-2 (so if it is at say 6, drop it to 4-5). When you double/quadtrack, it usually sounds a lot tighter that way