Doubling Guitars

Greg_L said:
I didn't reads those long posts, but I suspect this is a case of someone taking typed words a little too literally.
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I'm guessing you don't do so hot in relationships.

As far as the original post goes, double tracking a seperate performance is the way to go to thicken a sound. Pasting a track with seperate settings or even using multiple mics on one source will only add space and frequencies to the sound. Both techniques sound good to me depending on the song. A solo acoustic guitar piece for example, I think it'd sound great to copy paste the performace and pan a darker one 100% one way, and a brighter one 100% the other. On the other hand, if a monolith of guitar is your aim, track seperate performances.

Sometimes though, I think people confuse "thicker" for "heavier" or more prominent. Listen to the sheer mountainous sound of the drums on any Zep recording. That sound is achieved with a few mics, a good room, and well... huge drums.

As far as the symmetry war going on here, I'm kinda on both sides of the wall. I believe powerful bass frequencies must be in the center. I believe anything prominent in the mix must be evenly balanced L and R unless automating some moving effect. As far as anything else in the mix it can go anywhere without a counterpart on the other side. It does bother me to have more dB action in one speaker than the other. However, I may be mixing with my eyes and not my ears in that case! :spank:
 
Mixerman said:
A 3ms delay is enough of a difference between a player being right on the beat, and laying back (depending on the tempo).
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I have to second this. During an early tracking session for a recent CD I discovered a 46 sample record offset (@48Khz) in the system I was using. It was enough to ruin the groove between the drums and the bass I was tracking to them. An offset of 46 samples is less than 1ms at 48kHz.
 
Mixerman said:
I would advise against a symmetry fetish, or a "fetish" of any kind when it comes to how you use your planes of space in a mix. There are five planes of a mix contained within four dimensions (time being the fourth). They are as follows: Frequency (up to down), panning (left to right), balance (front to back), reflectivity (far to near), and contrast (sparse to dense).
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I agree with what you're saying, but a better word than plane would be dimension. Planes are two dimensional.
 
I'll almost always change something - guitar, eq, pickup... just so they don't sound identical.. but I do this more with acoustics than electrics... I must have a random fetish rather than what everyone else has... :)

Hey Mixerman... I've bought two copies of "The Daily Adventures of..." now for friends as presents, and neither of the bastards have yet read them, and so they won't lend them back to me so I can read it myself.... what should I do? :confused:

Enjoy them royalties! :laughings::laughings: Buy yourself a choc muffin! ;)
 
same settings, same amp. just play it twice.
an other approach would be "layered recording", the you change the settings, amps, mics, etc. of course.
 
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Mixerman said:
It takes a minimum of 22ms to properly throw the signal, and you're still going to have all sorts of phase cancellation issues in mono until you get somewhere above 50ms.
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Again - due respect mate -22ms is about right [maybe try to time it into some kind of musical increment - whatever]... the point where phase becomes a "non issue" is 19ms [stated in the "Haas Effect" - which is primarily an acoustic phenomenon but translates to the electronic as well]. Haas states that delays / reflections captured by the ear / brain in fewer than 19ms will be perceived as part of the original signal... this phenomenon is represented as a "phase anomaly" vs. a distinct delay.

When you get over 19ms your phase problems [for the most part] will go away while the brain will perceive the delayed information as a separate and distinct additional entity... which in this case could still give you some addition / cancellation [phase related] frequency problems... as it would at 400ms, or as any delayed "same signal" has the capacity to create.

At the end of the day, it would have taken far less time to have doubled the guitar part on a song than it would take to read this thread.

Peace.
 
I keep everything the same for 2 tracks, then I change the guitar and/or amp and do two more tracks and I always bring in a clean guitar signal from each take so I can reamp later. This gives you every option to play with during mixing.
I prefer that "wall of guitar sound" and have acheived it using different methods, so find what works for you, and then go with that!
 
laz777 said:
Greg, Why is it dumb to copy a track in order to create stereo effect?

-laz.
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Because copying, pasting, cloning, etc......doesn't create a stereo track or effect. It just gives you a louder mono track. You can make 50 copies, it's still a mono track.
 
RAMI said:
Because copying, pasting, cloning, etc......doesn't create a stereo track or effect. It just gives you a louder mono track. You can make 50 copies, it's still a mono track.
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And then you shift it and flip it, milliseconds here, milliseconds there, desperately trying to get something usable out of it. But no matter what, it sounds like shit. Then you just track another take, which is what you should have done to begin with. And lo and behold, it sounds great.

Double tracking = good.

Copy/paste/shift = shit.
 
If you want a stereo sound out of a mono track, go with 2 mics and pan them. The copy/paste/shift thing sounds way to out of phase. You might be able to use a plugin like PhaseBug (http://www.betabugsaudio.com/plugs.php all the way at the bottom) to get them in phase, but then it kind of takes away from the stereo effect.

Point being made - Double track unless you want it mono.
 
I've tried hours and hours of copying/pasting/shifting. It's bullshit. I've tried everything. Delays, phase flips, pannings, effects, compression, etc. It always sounds like there's a hole in the soundfield somewhere. It never ever sounds natural, or more importantly, good to me.

With the time you spend trying to make a copy/paste/shift sound good, you could have re-tracked the part 700 times.
 
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