3 guitars all playing together seperation tips

most of our songs were specifically written for 2 guitar players so the 3rd guitar parts are usually limited to overdubs in certain parts. Generally speaking, I amp the two main guitars a little differently, hard pan both, and EQ one of them a little brighter than the other. One guitar only uses the amp and cabinet, no other pedal effects. The 3rd guitar parts are usually slightly panned right or left and I use a slap-back delay via a bus to the opposite site. It seems to work well enough to get good separation, but the arrangement and parts are key.

A big mistake I made early on was having too much distortion which made everything sound like mud. The other huge mistake I made was spending too much time on the individual guitar sounds instead of doing it in the whole mix (duh!). So I'd get great sounding guitars on their own, but they sounded like total shit in the mix. Now I start with reference channel strips and also roll up all rythm guitars to a track stack for final processing.

Our style is more or less straight up rock influenced by 60s, 70s vibe with a 90s type of sound if that makes any sense so the guitars sound weak and thin on their own, but great in the context of the song.

As far as getting clarity and separation overall, I found a really good video about how Andrew Schepp does this with vocals. I haven't tried applying this to other instruments other than drums. I create 3 aux tracks for punch, clarity, and 'smash' then I can individually dial in each drum component to cut through mixes. Probably easy enough to adapt the same technique to other instruments.

Here's the vid: YouTube
 
I’m going to go a little the other way and say that sometimes it’s okay to have three guitars that sound enough the same that they kind of blend into one big guitar. I sometimes do that on purpose just to fake playing things I actually can’t. :)

But in any event and even in your case here, that kind of makes them one element. That can be okay if there are going to be other elements. But otherwise it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough going on in general. Also I guess that’s not really what you want here. Cause otherwise you’d be done and not asking us.

You want each element to be its own thing. Ideally you’d have treated them individually to fit the role they needed to play in tracking. Most of my repertoire is for three different guitars through three different amps each playing a specific role. But now pretty much your only weapons are going to be EQ and distortion.

And yes distortion. You can’t very well clean any of them up, but you sure can distort them more, and it will definitely help create some contrasting character. Better yet, EQ>distort>EQ and frankly the easiest way to do that is “reamp” whether that means actually running out to an amp or a vst amp sim. In fact, unless you’ve really got a room full of amps and cabinets and mics...

You hear a lot of people talk about like dipping some little frequency range on one track and some other range on the other... That ain’t gonna get you very far. Get in there and get drastic and make each of the guitars speak where they’re meant to speak.

From a first listen, if it was me, I think I’d try to focus the right hand guitar toward the jangley glassy highs end, shoot for more of the midrange bite and honk on the left, neither of them really need much low end, then crunch up that middle one a touch more, darken it up a bit overall and maybe scoop some of the mids.

But then it still needs vocals and/or something else.
 
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