Guitar Sound Shootout - Which Sounds Best?

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dewhitt

Dave DeWhitt
Hi All,

I appreciate the great feedback I have received from everyone on my track Signs of Life, and I'm working over this mix again. Step one, I borrowed a 1997 Les Paul Classic from a friend, and I'm starting to retrack the guitars. The only problem is, I think my ears are broken :o I've been sitting here for a couple of hours now with Pod Farm (I know I should be micing a real amp/cab, but this is all that I have to work with right now!), going through presets, tweaking things, less treble, more mids, less gain, more gain, etc, etc, etc, until everything is starting to sound the same and I'm about to lose it. So, I decided to make a few quick mixes of the LP through a range of some of the basic amps in Pod Farm to see if any of them sound good to me later with a fresh set of ears on. And then I thought, hey, this might be fun for the good people at homerecording.com to give a listen and weigh in.

So....if you have the time, and you are so inclined, give a listen to these short snippets from Signs of Life that I tracked with a few different modeled amps. The original track is in there too with the strat in all its bumblebee sounding glory There are no tricks here, I promise, and I have a favorite right now, but I am doubting myself so much at this point that I'm wondering seriously if they all just don't suck horribly.

So, let me know what you think...I'll post the names of the models in a few days for those that are interested.







Thanks in advance!

Dave

P.S. Step two will be to mix in Jason Jones's live drums once I get the individual drum tracks from him, and then we'll see about step three :)

Here is the original track in it's entirety if you care to listen to the whole thing: http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8843633
 
I don't know which one sounds the best, but I know which one sucks the worst - Test 3. That tone is no good. The rest can be usuable. You also don't have to use one tone for both sides of the rhythm. Mix and match. I kind of like 1 and 4. Maybe they'd work well together, one on each side.
 
2 sounds good to Me - 4 is in second place... Good Luck... :)
 
1 was my favorite.

2 and 5 were tied for second place. 2 sounded pretty good and might be my favorite in a different mix.

I didn't care for 3 or 4. 3 was missing a lot of upper mids and 4 was too fizzy.
 
Hey Dave,

Number 1 is by far the best imo. It has clarity and "tube bark" to it. The rest just sound muffled and fizzy to me (I am using headphones atm, but they're AKG mkIIs).

PS - Don't forget about that cool little invention I just discovered called the "tone knob" - I likey da tone knob :D


Brad
 
FWiW - I too much prefer the 1st one. It has more body in the mids and sounds less scooped to me. Several of the others sound really similar to one another to me. I don't mind them so much, but in comparison to #1 - less pleasing to the ear. #3 stands out as being the fizziest and therefore my least favorite.
 
Thanks All, I very much appreciate the feedback, and you've actually saved me from putting my ear drums out of their misery with an ice pick or something :D because I liked #1 the best also, so maybe there is hope for these ears yet. For those that care, here is the rundown of what was what:

Test 1 - Line6 Solo 100 (I believe it's modeled on a Soldano SLO 100)
Test 2 - Line6 Brit J-900 Dist (1992 Marshall JCM 900)
Test 3 - Line6 Brit J-800 (1990 Marshall JCM 800)
Test 4 - Original Tone - Line6 Brit J-900 Dist (1992 Marshall JCM 900) + Strat
Test 5 - Line6 2001 Treadplate Dual and LP

All of these were recorded with just the basic amp, no compressors, no reverbs, or anything else in the signal chain. Test 4 was the original tone, tracked with my Fender Strat, and all the rest were tracked with the 1997 Les Paul Classic.

Greg, I like your idea of mixing a couple of the better tones, one left and one right, and I've also been playing around in Pod Farm with the dual tone feature, which lets me choose two completely separate signal chains at once, so combining say the Soldano SLO 100 with the JCM 900. The challenge I'm finding with that is that with two high gain amps, the distortion gets out of control quickly, so it's a matter of really backing off the distortion on one channel, which changes the tone somewhat. The other option is to just track them separately, as you suggested, which is what I will probably end up doing. I'm also going to spend some time on the Line6 site going through their recording tips and tricks to see if there aren't any good suggestions in there for getting a better tone.

As always, you guys are great. Thanks for taking the time to help me out!

Best Regards,

Dave DeWhitt
 
Number one is my (very late) pick as well. I'm not surprised it's the Soldano model--on my current pod and my previous one--I always come back to patches based on the Soldano as being the best sounding. Go figure...
 
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