Quad-Tracking Four Guitars?

[Psychotic Break]

I've been running into this problem way too often lately. I've been writing a lot of riffs with a rhythm guitar playing behind two harmonized leads. How the hell do I mix that in four tracks? My problem is that I can't find enough room for all four tracks--the mixes don't clip but it gets hard to tell what's going on...and it isn't my songwriting lol. I have played these riffs with two other guitarists and they sounded pretty good if I do say so myself

I don't see how I can avoid double-tracking the rhythm guitar. I usually just pan the rhythm tracks 100/100 L/R. I think that's a good place for them.

It's just the leads that are giving me trouble. I've tried 80/80 L/R and they didn't stand out. 50/50 L/R seems to work alright, but then the leads start to become indistinguishable from one another while the rhythm tracks fall too far back. I could center-pan and reduce volume but at that point I have to keep the leads reaaal simple or sacrifice more distortion than I should have to.

I'm gonna try just treating the leads as one guitar like the rhythm. Rhythm would be 100/80 L and leads would be 100/80 R... or something like that. I don't think that's the solution though. It's prolly gonna sound unbalanced.

It may be a tone issue though I'm not sure why. Compared to my rhythm tone, my lead tone tends to have just a little more mids/highs/presence and almost no bass. I try to be conservative with the gain all around. They should mix easily, right? Maybe I'm just having trouble because I am using Podfarm... I'm this close to scrapping my current tone and starting fresh with Andy's pod tone. That doesn't even sound so great but it has to be more usable than what I have going on :Smug:

I don't know. This is giving me a headache.

 

[Torniojaws]

Carve some room for the lead guitars from the rhythm guitars. 2 rhythms either L/R 50-75 or something and leads on hard L/R, or the other way around. That's probably how I'd do it.

 

[Psychotic Break]

Carve some room for the lead guitars from the rhythm guitars. 2 rhythms either L/R 50-75 or something and leads on hard L/R, or the other way around. That's probably how I'd do it.

Hah, I can't believe I never thought to hard-pan the leads and 75% the rhythm. That actually works too! Holy shit.

 

[P-E]

True, usually I mix rythm "outside", lead "inside" but I'll see how it fits for a song I'm mixing.

 

[Moonlight_Seeker]

Well I am currently working on a project that has around 15 keyboard tracks per songs, minimum 3 clean vocal tracks, sometimes up to 10, etc, etc. And what I do for the guitars is the rhythms are hard panned L and R and the leads, depending on the parts, are around L30 and R30, sometimes L27 and R32, etc, etc. Maybe it is schizophrenia but it seems that when you pan L28 and R32 things come out a bit more then L30 and R30. The guitars were recorded in DI and I used different cab sims for each of them but they pretty much all have the same amp sim. And if you have two different real lead guitarists then they surely have different amps and cabs. And for the EQ I would for example remove around 400 to 900 in the rhythm and boost the 1000 on one lead and maybe the 2000 for the other lead or the 500. Since there is many keyboards in the project I'm on I rarely boost the 500 but blabla. Sometimes adding a tiny bit of very high in the lead could be nice but I wont swear my life on it. And if they are still being a bitch open as many aux bus as you desire.

 

[abyssofdreams]

Automation, different EQ and aforementioned panning plus depth via delay/verb