Guitar Parts

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guitarmonkus

guitarmonkus

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I have a little issue:

I have this tune that has 3 seperate (sometimes 4) guitar parts going at one time. They're all single notes, but I want them to all be heard very clearly. I was wondering what I can do with my EQ to make these parts not all run together creating mud. I want the listener to be able to follow one guitar line and be able to distinguish it from others, on all three or four parts.

Is that possible?

Thanks!
Thom
 
Can you record the different parts with different tones from your amp? (This might be acoustic, I don't know) Make each one sound unique somehow. What about panning them differently? What about reverb and treating each guitar a little differently? Seems that there are several other options besides EQ to seperate the parts even though you could rely on EQ as well. It's hard to imagine what you could do without knowing what it really sounds like. Are the parts in much different registers on the guitar? Do they not sit right as they are?
I suppose if you were just EQ'ing you could make 2 guitars kind of thin sounding and pan them a little to either side, make the lowest register parts a little more bassy and full but maybe not so much high end and do some different panning on those. I'm just blabbering now..... :)
 
yeah you could pan one to the left, and one to the right. then you just have one or two left...
 
To the average listener they won't know that it's more than 1 or 2 guitars. I suppose you are doing harmony of some sort and each part makes up a neat sounding passage. I've tried to record several part harmony guitar sections and haven't really been that successful. I tend to overdo it.
 
If one guitar has too much energy in a muddy range, say 100-250Hz or something, then four guitars with this sound will add up to tons of mud. You could start by finding the muddy area of the sound of a single track and cutting it a little.

It also might benefit you to use fairly different sounds for each track. Try different guitars, amps, microphones, or settings.

Panning will definitely help as mentioned above.

Hard to comment without a few more specifics though.

Best of luck
 
First, try and make the guitar tracks sound like as unique instruments as possible before they reach your recording system, Metalhead had a good tip with using different amp tones. That can be taken furter to using different amps, different pickups and even (often best) different guitars. For each of these different-sounding tracks, sweep-EQ to cut the resonant honks out of each one; more likely than not those honks will be at different frequencies. Cutting at those freqs will both sweeten each track's sound and help to seperate eack track sonically.

Second, without knowing how your composition is arranged, I'll assume that the seperate guitar parts are playing arpeggiating lines around the notes within a chord; e.g. git 1 is playing around the fundamental, git 2 around the four and git 5 around the five, just as a simple example. If so, you can try modulating the individual lines to seperate octaves as well as EQing the individual lines to accent the fundamental frequency of the key in which each resolves while cutting the fundamentals of the keys used by the other lines.

Third, you can alternate the equalization of harmonics on guitars working the same key. E.g. Git 1: boost the first four harmonics of the fundamental frequency; git 2 cut those same harmonics; git 3 boost the even harmonics only; git 4 cut the even harmonics only...or any variation thereof that sounds right.

There are other tricks, but the above stuff should get you going well enough.

G.
 
Eagles... Hotel California... three guitar solos going at once. Almost all of the techniques written about above were used. Different amp sounds, different instruments, panning, phaser FX going on in there. great stuff!
 
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