Compressing lead guitar

Humbucker

Humbucker

New member
I'm working on an instrumental song in which my lead guitar plays the melody/impovises throughout. The first part is quite a clean sounding lead but the second has more gain/overdrive. As you'd expect, after I laid down the lead tracks they sounded very 'live' in terms of the dynamics. In some parts I hit the notes a little too hard, some a little too soft etc. Normally I just go through my parts with a wav editor and turn phrases up/down accordingly. I've recently downloaded the classic compressor from the Kjaerhus Audio website so I thought I'd see how it sounded ran through that. I put the ratio to 2:1, threshold to -20DB and it sounded really nice, pretty much levelling out everything. When I hear people talk about compression it's mostly in regard to vocals and bass guitar - do any of you guys compress your lead guitar parts and do you have any tips you could pass on? Many thanks. :)
 
Yea, be sure to mess a lot with the attack time. You don't want anything so fast that it kills the dynamics. Don't want anything so slow as to defeat the purpose either.

Release times are a little easier to figure out. If it's a slow or ambient kinda' solo that rings out a lot, then use a very slow release time for more sustain. If it's a faster solo, then use a much faster release time (so it recovers in time to catch the next transient) ... this will give the faster solos more attack and bring them upfront.
 
Crunchy guitar is already compressed by its very nature. I usually don't compress there. Clean guitar I may step on for effect though.
 
sure, if going clean i tend to add a bit of compression or limiting (depending on the material) to bring it out in the mix (where some of the dynamics will be "lost in the sauce" anyways...). using the Classic compressor is often a nice touch. if I doing something heavier - I might add a compressor before the amp plugin just to push the input level a bit - but mostly on a rhythm part rather than lead... as mentioned - play with the attack/release times to get the right balance between dynamics and compressed signal.
 
Yeah, clean guitar can do with some compression, but heavier guitars are compressed naturally by the distortion. Still a bit of copression might be needed to tame the odd part with distorted guitars.
 
well..i use compressor for my guitar a few times...only if im not using the distortion...i just increase the attack to get a lil more crunch...never tried it with the distortion though...
 
RousseauBABA said:
well..i use compressor for my guitar a few times...only if im not using the distortion...i just increase the attack to get a lil more crunch...never tried it with the distortion though...
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I've tried it on distortion with some favorable results, if you use a soft limiter and are scrupulous with the eq. It's really not necessary though. Using some eq and the fader on your mixer can give you what you need to punch a lead through. The compressor will keep your sound level.
 
I had never heard of Kjaerhus, but I am downloading some of their free "classic" series effects plugins. Never know what you will discover on here.


Thanks
Amra
 
amra said:
I had never heard of Kjaerhus, but I am downloading some of their free "classic" series effects plugins. Never know what you will discover on here.


Thanks
Amra
Click to expand...

They're an awesome set of plugins IMO - I use Cubase SL and they are undoubtedly better than the ones that come included with that. Enjoy :)
 
If it is crunchy or dirty guitar, this is the one thing I like to get nailed down as close as possible at the recording phase and leave alone at the mix as much as possible. I might use a little bit of light limiting to catch the odd stray peaks, but 99% of the time I like to use as little compression and EQ as I can on the dirty rock and blues guitar stuff. I have just never been satisfied with guitar tracks that I have used a lot of processing on.
 
I Compress almost every single track (and the sum in the end). I am a copmpression addict. I know that this is not considered the way to go for many guys here, but I like the sound (doing pop/punk rock).

Once you know how to tweak the attack, it will still sound nice. You may also try multiband compresion - may help a lot with distorted guitar that sounds nice but has some problems with fast palm muted parts...

aXel
 
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