Requesting tips/help with "designing" a clean guitar sound (stock/free plugins)

[Erkan]

Hmmm... yea, as the title says.. how do you guys go about to achieve a clean guitar sound, preferably with stock or free plugins? I now realize how much time I have spent with distortion guitars (and I'm still not even "there" yet) and I suck so hard at cleans. I haven't seen this being discussed as much as distortion guitars (naturally ) so I really don't know what to look for and how to approach it.

What I need is a clean guitar sound that would work in a metal mix so it needs to pop through and be heard... I don't know, think Tesseract or something. Even though the rhythm guitars are distorted and they're growling away, the cleans are still "there" and contribute nicely with their melody etc. I have tried some different free amp plugins and stuff now but all I end up getting is a buried sound that does indeed fill up and thicken the mix but it's hard to perceive them as guitars.

AcmeBarGig's Knuckle Head gave me an interesting sound, but it still doesn't work as well as I'd like when the distorted rhythm guitars are present. And every other plugin just sounds... I don't know, dull and buried. There probably is something important that I'm missing... "proper" compression and EQ treatment of the signal? Transient designers? Share any info possible to help me out a little here I may even post a little clip tomorrow... I shouldn't, but I guess it would be good.

Cheers!

 

[Morgan C]

Try saturation, chorus, delay and reverb, all subtly.

If you want them to pop out, try compressing them to bring up the attack then a limiter to make it not so piercing?

 

[TheDarkProject]

Generally speaking the problem with undistorted instruments in a distortion-heavy mix is that you get a lot of the fundamental frequency and the lower harmonics and not much else. That's going to compete with pretty much every other instrument in the crowded low mids range. So one way to get clarity is via something that will add in some top end, and reverb and/or chorus are seemingly common choices here.

Once you hear each note coming through clearly, compression will obviously help with the sustain, but be careful not to wreck the distinctive plucked sound in the process.

Often I just push a little gain on clean sounds. In isolation it sounds wrong, but when layered over other guitars that have far more gain, they still sound clean by comparison, but have more harmonics to help them cut through the mix.

 

[egan.]

I don't have any advice regarding the free pluggins angle but a couple of things that have helped me in the past getting cleans to sit with rhythms are 1) compressing the piss out of the sound 2) double tracking and running the double underneath (sometimes with a little grit) 3) dialing in the tone in context (rather than soloed). Too often you can waste time dialing in a clean that sounds great on it's own and completely gets lost in the mix.

As others stated, chorus/delay/verb are generally cool on cleans. You may want to push these up in the context of rhythm guitars if you want them to be fully audible.

 

[The-Zeronaut]

acmebarbig ´s whisper tube or tribe


http://www.acmebargig.com/tribe/

http://www.acmebargig.com/whisper-tube/

whisper tube clip using a PRS se custom with SD 59 in the neck:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/453972/whisper FTB.mp3

(no post processing)

 

[JohnnyMcFly]

simple... Go get any of the following AcmeBarGig plugs...Whisper tube, Tribe, and then get some tonestack Ir's for tribe, or any of the Preampus Metal, or Preampus Classic Hybrids. make sure the gain is low. Any of these is capable of creating a rich clean tone..
KM

 

[Erkan]

Try saturation, chorus, delay and reverb, all subtly.

If you want them to pop out, try compressing them to bring up the attack then a limiter to make it not so piercing?

Aye, I will experiment with compressiong + limiter. Right now, I only run it through ReaComp but I hadn't really considered smashing it back down with a limiter again after... because then I can up the attack time without it being piercing as you said. I don't know how it'll sound but it's something to try right after I grab some breakfast soon

Generally speaking the problem with undistorted instruments in a distortion-heavy mix is that you get a lot of the fundamental frequency and the lower harmonics and not much else. That's going to compete with pretty much every other instrument in the crowded low mids range. So one way to get clarity is via something that will add in some top end, and reverb and/or chorus are seemingly common choices here.

Once you hear each note coming through clearly, compression will obviously help with the sustain, but be careful not to wreck the distinctive plucked sound in the process.

Often I just push a little gain on clean sounds. In isolation it sounds wrong, but when layered over other guitars that have far more gain, they still sound clean by comparison, but have more harmonics to help them cut through the mix.

You sir got it right! That's exactly what happens... you get lots of fundamentals and very little upper harmonics. So based on that observation, it is not so crazy to consider adding a little distortion after all... and I just listened to Tesseract's cleans and they sound like they have quite a mid bump and a very high high-pass to get rid of most competing fundamentals, and a nice sparkle in the top-end.. maybe through excitement or simply EQing. I will definately experiment a little more today!

acmebarbig ´s whisper tube or tribe


http://www.acmebargig.com/tribe/

http://www.acmebargig.com/whisper-tube/

whisper tube clip using a PRS se custom with SD 59 in the neck:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/453972/whisper FTB.mp3

(no post processing)

Very nice tone but I think it would get buried in my mix... although it's hard to say since I'm not even near mixing the project right now as I'm only working on scratch tracks but I have sort of found the main rhythm guitar tone I want for this project, and it's already obvious the cleans are gonna have a hard time poking through so I'm still trying to solve a mix issue before the mixing has even begun... haha.

I still have to finish the songs, then re-record everything (with real drums) and edit everything, and THEN I can start mixing. Well anyway, I do already know at this early stage that I need a different clean sound... so thanks for all the replies so far.



AND HERE IS A CLIP OF WHAT I HAD LAST NIGHT

(Don't bother commenting the mix because it's not mixed and drums will be recorded for real later, and there is no bass in there either )

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/585020/2.mp3

This is what I had last night before making this thread. I think the "spaciness" is pretty cool, could maybe lower the effects a tad (just a delay/reverb at the moment) but it needs to sparkle and pop out more me thinks... well, I'll try with some inspiration I got from this thread now.

 

[ahjteam]

Try the AcmeBarGig Brain 2... It gives you a nice, mildly distorted sound when you turn the treblemaster feature off.

 

[LeSedna]

Don't forget... New strings. When you want a nice clean tone to be recorded, new strings can shine where used string could be quite difficult to mix

 

[20Mg]

acmebarbig ´s whisper tube or tribe


http://www.acmebargig.com/tribe/

http://www.acmebargig.com/whisper-tube/

whisper tube clip using a PRS se custom with SD 59 in the neck:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/453972/whisper FTB.mp3

(no post processing)

hey i like. Isit available for mac AU?

 

[20Mg]

hey erkan did u play all that? i really like it. i REALLY like it. Not bad at all virgin boy i see wat ya mean with the clean not sitting in.

 

[Erkan]

Yeah, I played "all that" and there's plenty more to come as soon as Reaper stops vapouring away like it does sometimes (crashes without throwing an error message or anything, I have no clue how to fix it).

It's just a scratch track though so I will re-record everything later with real drums and shit... and even got vocals for it. It's gonna be fucking epic, I really believe in this stuff for once! I usually don't believe in myself that much when it comes to music but... this time, it's gonna be slammin'!

I changed the clean guitars now... think I'm kind of happy with it, I'll update the clip tonight maybe. I want to go play some drums now, it's been a long time.

 

[GarethSE]

A) Neck Pickup
B) Rent a Laney tube combo or something
C) Mic it up
D) Compression
E) LOLDONE

Failing that, try and get something like Zeronaut's got, and then send it to an FX track that's highpassed really, really high, with a teeny tiny bit of distortion on it, to try and simulate that slightly broken up top end of a nice tube clean, but only a TINY bit of compression, it shouldn't really sound distorted, just a little hyped.
Mix that in to taste. Helps with teh tasty cleans!

Edit: Failing that, it's mega easy to re-amp through a pod, so you could just get someone to do all your clean sounds through that for you. I'm sure Bulb's clean patch is out there somewhere haha, and failing that it's ridiculously easy to get a similar thick, chimey, fairly tubey sounding clean with little effort.

 

[Erkan]

A) Neck Pickup
B) Rent a Laney tube combo or something
C) Mic it up
D) Compression
E) LOLDONE

Failing that, try and get something like Zeronaut's got, and then send it to an FX track that's highpassed really, really high, with a teeny tiny bit of distortion on it, to try and simulate that slightly broken up top end of a nice tube clean, but only a TINY bit of compression, it shouldn't really sound distorted, just a little hyped.
Mix that in to taste. Helps with teh tasty cleans!

Edit: Failing that, it's mega easy to re-amp through a pod, so you could just get someone to do all your clean sounds through that for you. I'm sure Bulb's clean patch is out there somewhere haha, and failing that it's ridiculously easy to get a similar thick, chimey, fairly tubey sounding clean with little effort.

Gareth why didn't I simply think of reamping? I don't have the gear for it myself but I'm sure someone will offer a "clean" reamping since this project is going to be pure awesome and I'm sure you all want your name on it! Haha, jokes aside, I'm so set on doing everything myself that I didn't even consider the possibility of reamping... although, the distortion guitars are probably not going to be reamped anyway, I think they'll do for this project.

But fuck yeah, reamp through a POD or whatever would be nice!

 

[GarethSE]

im re-buying my pod back off my bud soon so i'd be happy to do it when i do, that or i could just borrow his laney combo when you need shit re-amped?

 

[Erkan]

You've got re-amping gear? Sweet! That'd be of great help dude

 

[SirZephyr]

I really liked the athmosphere on this. Guitarsounds works very nicely, not so sure about kick sample. Care to share rhytm guitar chain? I Definately like the tone and tightness of it.