Tips on achieving DEPTH with distorted guitars?

[chonchball]

I've been spending the last 2 years trying to get the most of out mixing drums and my new task is to learn how to make guitars as BIG as they can be in a mix without becoming muddy or intrusive. I am faced with mostly metal projects, but do a fair share of rock recording as well.

I own and am not afraid to use my Pod XT Pro for distorted guitars but I am no stranger to the 5150, 5150II, 6505, Triple Rec, Marshall cabs, Orange cabs, mesa cabs, etc etc etc, and I come into my Mackie board, or sometimes my Avalon737sp with 57s normally to capture the tone. After a few hours of fidgeting, I'll settle on a tone I can live with...

But when it comes to really bringing the tone to life in the mix, I'm finding that EQing, limiting, and harmonic exciting is bringing too many different variables into play and I just still can't seem to strike the right balance. I'm obviously looking to have that nice round low end without muddying up the mix, a clean biting mid range that doesn't sound like its distoring MORE from compression, and a SMOOTH top end that makes the guitars sound bright, but not hissy or tinny.

If anyone has any real good pointers towards treating my pod tones or miked amp tones to give something a good punchy competitive quality, I'd forever appreciate your help!

 

[colonel kurtz]

nice round low end without muddying up the mix

multiband comp can help here...squish between 6o-240hz or so - this keeps the low end present, but not all boomy/muddy

a clean biting mid range that doesn't sound like its distoring MORE from compression

from what i can tell, many people don't compress distorted guitars for this very reason....surgical EQ dips can be really helpful here as well

a SMOOTH top end that makes the guitars sound bright, but not hissy or tinny

lo-pass filter the guitars at around 10k...this'll cut out all the hiss, fizzy, crap - but leave the track sounding dry and dull. now add a hi-shelf EQ at 12k or so AFTER the lo-pass...this'll add some of shimmer back in, but without all the crap

 

[greyskull]

It's mostly in tweaking the amp and mic placement. Spend more time doing that before fannying around with other stuff.

 

[DanLights]

multiband comp can help here...squish between 6o-240hz or so - this keeps the low end present, but not all boomy/muddy



from what i can tell, many people don't compress distorted guitars for this very reason....surgical EQ dips can be really helpful here as well



lo-pass filter the guitars at around 10k...this'll cut out all the hiss, fizzy, crap - but leave the track sounding dry and dull. now add a hi-shelf EQ at 12k or so AFTER the lo-pass...this'll add some of shimmer back in, but without all the crap

wow some really good tips man, I was interested in the same thing as the OP and this helps a lot. Thanks

 

[Erkan]

Who isn't interested in this?

I'm dying to figure out how the heck to get those smooth highs on the guitars... Doing harmonic excitement and stuff only makes the harshness worse doesn't it? The tip about the lowpass at 10k, and then shelf it up at 12k again seems weird, why would that make the sound smoother? You're just bringing back (some of) everything you cut out or am I missing something here?

 

[derfbonker]

I think 90% is amp, cab and mic placement. You can EQ and multiband the shit out of it, but if you don't have that starting point, you'll never get what you are looking for.

 

[Neil_Mad]

I think that some of the great sounds that I listened here from POD are from "joeymusicguy" I love his productions and sound.
Also I checked your myspace and sound awesome and I was wondering how do you make those hiugh vocals.

 

[Metaltastic]

It's mostly in tweaking the amp and mic placement. Spend more time doing that before fannying around with other stuff.

I think 90% is amp, cab and mic placement. You can EQ and multiband the shit out of it, but if you don't have that starting point, you'll never get what you are looking for.

Yup, +1

 

[mick thompson]

i'd agree with derfbonker - amp, cab & mic placement. if its shit before mixing its gona sound shit after mixing.

 

[derfbonker]

I just had to deal with some poorly recorded guitars the other day (me and my partner's fault). Let me tell you, It was hell getting them to work in the mix. I think they are sounding ok now, but not as good as they could have sounded.

Another thing, bass is a guitars best friend. You get a bad ass bass tone, and it will make the guitars sound that much bigger. I find myself thinning my guitars out more and more lately to let that bass through.

 

[chonchball]

I definitely have been trying to play with the bass being the compliment to the guitars, but the bass players I've been faced with lately are "the friend in the band" bass players and honestly, no amount of patience would yield professional results with their playing so i try to keep it at less of a commanding space in the mix usually... One band I recorded that tuned to drop A (yikes) left me with some pretty unusable bass tracks that I just ended up spending a night learning their songs and retracking the bass FOR them. Ohhhh bass.

that aside, even with bass, I haven't been able to find the blend I want with keeping the low end nice and LOW without basically just cluttering up the definition.
I'm going to try out the first tips with dipping the high frequencies considerably and then bring some of that trailing high freq back in with a little shelving. although i'm not a fan of surgical EQ, i'm willing to give a lot of things a try right now.

I completely agree that you can't turn a shit-sound into gold, that's why i really do start with a tone that sounds real nice in the studio... it's just always that what you hear where you record/mix sounds so much different in a car or on a laptop or on a TV or through a club FOH system... I'm looking to find a process to guitars that represents all the right frequencies for as many listening scenarios as possible.

I will post a clip of a band I recorded in January called The Informant. I have yet to mix it. The guitarist wants his guitar to be very dillinger-esque. Very overdriven, yet not overly distorted BUT still sound real heavy. We did a lot of reAmping with it, so there's a crisp tone, a very gainy tone and more of a midrange tone to blend together across the album. It's definitely going to be a test of my skills.

Thank you so far for the advice.

 

[Tesseract]

One thing im messing about with at the mo is having one mic for the low & mid frequnecies and another for the highs and maybe some of the mids. Just filtering them each hard so they have there own job. Doesn't always work but when it does its sweet...takes some tweaking.

For example... At the moment im using a Royer r122...quite a dull mic in some ways...but the highs it has are smooth and not harsh. Then a neumann tlm193 which has a more solid low end and more lo-mid heavy. Mush the two together with some filters and you can get some cool results.

 

[Ermz]

If anyone has any real good pointers towards treating my pod tones or miked amp tones to give something a good punchy competitive quality, I'd forever appreciate your help!

The trick is dealing with the mids. That's where the depth lies. Most people will have an over-abundance of lower mids in the 300 to 700Hz regions in their guitar tones and that will cloud all the space and background/ambiance information in their mixes.

That's only depth though. Guitars have a lot going on in the higher mid areas which a lot of the time needs some pretty surgical notch EQ treatment to create that smooth sound that most of us are after. Then there are the lows, which for all intents and purposes should be filtered out drastically. You have to let the bass guitar do its job in adding the actual punch, and just let the guitars hold down a tight and dense midrange.

Using more than one mic on the cab is a better starting point. 2 mics essentially give you physically sweepable EQs. I normally phase reverse one of them and then position it so I only hear the very worst of the fizz playing back in the cans. Then I flip the phase back and voila... you get a reinforcement of core frequencies, with all the shitty buzz cancelled out.

 

[Fox Mulder]

Who isn't interested in this?

I'm dying to figure out how the heck to get those smooth highs on the guitars... Doing harmonic excitement and stuff only makes the harshness worse doesn't it? The tip about the lowpass at 10k, and then shelf it up at 12k again seems weird, why would that make the sound smoother? You're just bringing back (some of) everything you cut out or am I missing something here?

What you're missing is a de-esser.

De-ess the track till the point of which it sounds all muffled and shit. Next in the chain, use a good EQ plug to bring up some of the highs. That + saturation.

 

[dani]

hmm, you guys raise some interesting points here. i've only just really got into putting eq's after [insert guitar amp modeller here], so there are a lot of things i need to try - this has expanded my list!

thanks,

 

[ahjteam]

If you want some real sense of depth, take the mics further away. You can't get a depthlike sound from 1cm away from the cloth even if you would turn the mic down in the mix. It would just be close miced guitar turned quiet.

 

[Aaron Smith]

Guitars have a lot going on in the higher mid areas which a lot of the time needs some pretty surgical notch EQ treatment to create that smooth sound that most of us are after.

I know exactly what you're talking about. I've nailed some really good sounding tones with just a 57 in the right place that don't seem to need much EQ or anything, but come mix time, I always tend to go surgical on it. Andy still really, truly baffles me when it comes to tone skills. I always have weird little stuff to notch out before I'm satisfied in the end...

 

[kaomao]

well you can even make a great sound out of a single mic, positioning it till you remove the fizz (going off center).
Then if you think is dull, turn on the amp the highs till you get the crispy top end.
That's something I did for a few recordings. I was getting mad removing the fizz even if I lowered the highs on the amp, it didn't help that much.
Getting off center and boosting the highs helped a lot.
Maybe I wasn't blasting the amp that much.
Another thing is to get the speakers moving, this adds natural compression, and last but not least you gotta have you speakers already break-in.

cheers

 

[JonWormwood]

Another thing is to get the speakers moving, this adds natural compression, and last but not least you gotta have you speakers already break-in.

cheers

Many often forget about this...