Your method for making a lead tone stand above the rhythm?!?

[gemini8026]

Just curious as to the best way to "set apart" a lead from a rhythm. The obvious choice is VOLUME, but on your lead tracks, do you add anythign different in the reverb, or perhaps in the amp section itself (more mid?!?)

Just curious if anyone wants ot share any good tips. Im currently working on remixing a few old tunes, and I've always done things my way, but Ive heard lots of clips on here that have great seperation between lead and rhythm.

Any advice/help/suggestions is appreciated!

 

[GarethSE]

Well what I usually do for lead tones is high pass the tone much higher. Around 150-200hz. Don't want no bass in a lead tone IMO. Then I put a shelving boost around the high end, depends on the song and the melody/solo, then low pass around 9-10khz.
Then I cut where I boosted rhythm guitars and vice versa. And sometimes I put a stereo delay on for good measure.

 

[Fredrik-Ablaze]

The key for me in mixing leads is mids,with a nice little boost in the midrange of the sound it tends to cut through the rest of the mix alot better.
I usually try to compress or eq out some of the the low end "boominess" you sometimes get when playing the neck pickup on the wound strings.
A nice modulation delay/reverb combo to that and I'm usually happy.

 

[~BURNY~]

Automate about -2db on the rythm guitars when the lead gtr kicks in.

 

[joeymusicguy]

Automate about -2db on the rythm guitars when the lead gtr kicks in.

+1

 

[ahjteam]

you can actually narrow down the lead tone to quite a narrow band without losing anything nessecary(my empirical research has narrowed it down to 1000-5000hz), then just boost it a bit for the lost volume and put it thru a reverb and delay and it will be a lot louder than the rhythm guitars.

 

[mr.L.]

I mostly dial in the amp for some extra mids and not too much gain to keep note definition (unless it's just complete chaos Kerry King-style solo-ing hehe) than hp at around 200hz and low pass at around 10k, add some compression to even things out a bit and send to a delay and sometimes reverb or some other effect (phaser/chorus or whatever might sound cool on the solo) that i also tweak a bit to fit neatly into the mix. I also automate the rythm guitars back a bit (1 or 2 db). When the mix is very busy I usually don't use reverb (since I still pretty much suck with reverb and it tends to cloudy things up) and sometimes use a reversed curveEQ of the rythm guitars to make it stick out even more.

 

[Zack Uidl]

Different amp, different EQ, delay and automation on rhythm guitars

That is what I like to do

 

[greyskull]

Automate about -2db on the rythm guitars when the lead gtr kicks in.

yes sir!