Guitar Tone

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kingofpain678
  • Start date Start date
Kingofpain678

Kingofpain678

Returned from the dead
hey guys,

ive been searching for a good use-able distortion guitar tone and i have had very bad luck with finding it. ive gone through many amps trying to achieve my goal.

as of now im using a crappy dean vendetta, a crappy line 6 head, a crappy marshall 4x12 cab, and a couple crappy microphones. and while i realize that with crappy gear im gonna get crappy results im wondering what next piece of gear i need to upgrade to in order to get better results.

ive realized that my guitar is very pronounced around 100 - 200hz which generally makes it very "boomy" but ive gotten around that problem. but now my tracks sound... for lack of a better term, "blurry". its like theres no definition or clarity, its just a nasty wall of sound.

i dont know if its my guitar (which gave me problems with "boominess" which made my tracks unusable) or my mic (im using a shure pg57 and two other crappier mics). so if anyone has any tips or suggestions i would be very grateful.

This is a link to an example of what is being recorded.
 
That's really not bad actually. At very least, you've got a good start to my ears. As I had mentioned in another thread, I'm no conniseur of heavy guitar tone so take any of my advice with a grain of salt.

All I'd recommend doing is turning down the distortion, which should help get rid of some muddiness. Also, layer the guitars by recording multiple takes and panning them pretty wide in the stereo field. The layered guitars will create the impression of heaviness, not the distortion on each individual guitar track.

Then, in order to keep this guitar tone from interfering with the bass guitar, you might want to do a roll-off of the frequencies below, say 120 Hz for starters. Maybe roll off at 200 Hz if it still sounds boomy. Or try 100Hz since this is a pretty low-tuned guitar.

Just remember that this guitar is going to be sitting in a mix with a whole spectrum of other frequencies, so getting rid of some low end shouldn't hurt much unless the guitar is playing by itself.

Maybe a touch more midrange wouldn't hurt. I fooled around with the simple graphic EQ in Windows Media Player and it seems that adding +3 dB at 500Hz, +4 dB at 1Khz, and +2 dB at 2Khz did bring out much more presence in the guitar. Those are very rough numbers since it's a very granular graphic EQ on WMP, but its a starting place. And I have no idea if the divisions on the sliders in WMP are actually dB or some arbitrary numbering scale.

One thing to keep in mind, though:
The trouble with upping frequencies in this range is that it tends to interfere with the clarity of the vocals. The intelligible parts of speech are around 1Khz-4Khz for the most part. So if you boost other instruments in that part of the frequency spectrum, you start to drown out the vocals. So maybe you can make the midrange adjustments on the amplifer or with an EQ stomp box and then still be able to take out the "notch" in all backing instruments between 1Khz-4Khz for the vocals to sit in and not neuter the guitar tone.
 
Tadpui said:
That's really not bad actually. At very least, you've got a good start to my ears. As I had mentioned in another thread, I'm no conniseur of heavy guitar tone so take any of my advice with a grain of salt.
Click to expand...

REALLY?!?!
maybe i AM being way to hard on myself??? my friends tell me that alot...

i generally dont have very much distortion in my tracks, sometimes i think i dont have the gain dialed up enough. that was just a random eq and distortion level i dialed up in an attempt to find somewhat of a usable tone, but i guess maybe its not so bad?

ill definitely take all the advice you've given and i really appreciate it.

thank you for taking the time to have a listen and give up your advice. :D

EDIT: for anyone who cares, heres a quick (incredibly crappy) mix i did with some drums and bass with *some* of the recommended adjustments to the guitar. for anyone who takes the time to listen to this, im sorry for what your about to hear. any more input is openly welcome.

Horrible Mix Download Link
 
Last edited:
Step one - BUY A REAL AMP. Line 6 doesn't count. They may be nice if you are playing in a cover band and have some delusion that you need to recreate the sounds off the albums, but they sound like shit. A real amp, with real tubes, and very little else, will make your life a lot easier.

Step two - Play LOUD. If you want distortion to sound good, you need to move some air. Preferably a lot of it. After that, most of the rest is fairly easy to sort out. Do that, and put a good mic in the right place (you're just going to have to experiment on this one) and you are 90% of the way there.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Hmm. It's not bad, but you're right, you should be able to make this better.

Listening on a pair of Skullcandy 'buds in the office, so the fidelity here leaves a little to be desired, but...

It DOES sound like, to me, you're running the gain a little higher than you need to, and that rolling it back a bit would both help with that low end clarity and also clear up some of that thrashiness in the high end.

I'm not really hearing much stereo spread between the two tracks, either - varying up the sound between takes would probably help a bit, too, to add some girth.

Biggie, though - to me, this sounds overly scooped. The guitar seems pretty focused in the upper-mids and high end in the "mix" file - you can hear a lot of really deep low end in the solo file, but all of that gets washed out by the kick, so it leaves the guitars in the clip sounding pretty thin. Where's your midrange knob?

I tend to like a pretty dark distorted tone, to be far, but I'd like to hear this with the treble and presence a little lower, mids up a couple notches, gain back maybe, oh, 1/3 (which will sound to clean on its' own, but doubled up ought to be quite a bit better), and the bass rolled back somewhat as well. Midrange is where all the "girth" lies in a guitar, cutting it out just leaves you with something thin and weak sounding.
 
yeah i had the guitars panned 85% left and right

i was thinking about really cutting back on the gain and putting two tracks panned hard left and two tracks panned hard right. or maybe two 100% right and left and two at 50% right and left?

and ill cut back on the highs and lows a bit more too. and more mids :D

i always knew you were supposed to raise mids and cut back on the gain but i guess i never really realized exactly how much you were supposed to cut back.
thanks for the suggestions drew :D
 
Light said:
Step one - BUY A REAL AMP. Line 6 doesn't count. They may be nice if you are playing in a cover band and have some delusion that you need to recreate the sounds off the albums, but they sound like shit. A real amp, with real tubes, and very little else, will make your life a lot easier.

Step two - Play LOUD. If you want distortion to sound good, you need to move some air. Preferably a lot of it. After that, most of the rest is fairly easy to sort out. Do that, and put a good mic in the right place (you're just going to have to experiment on this one) and you are 90% of the way there.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
Click to expand...

yeah i know :( im just trying to make the best out of what i have now. soon enough ill be old enough to get a good paying job so hopefully ill be able to get some better gear. ive done alot of experimenting with different mic positions and different amps(all solid state) so i think that if i can just get this crappy setup to sound good i could be able to make a good setup sound great.
practice makes perfect :D
 
For perspective, I rarely run the gain on my Recto more than maybe one o'clock, and often find myself multitracking in the 10 o'clock range, if I'm not going for extreme saturation. Clarity comes with NOT saturating the fuck out of your guitar signal. :yesway:

The math is obviously a little different if you're trying to get a mid-y distorted lead guitar in the mix somewhere, but if I was recording purely rhythm, then I'd be boosting the mids rather than cutting them. Even then, I'll usually do the "one track with the mids boosted a fair amount and the treble and bass rolled a bit back, and one more scooped panned to the other side" thing just to give a better stereo spread between the two tracks, usually the brighter one a little cleaner than the middier one.

Light's comments notwithstanding, you should be able to get something useable out of a Line6, if you're not running direct. Poweramp compression from a tube amp helps, certainly, but for the sounds you're after you don't really want full-on poweramp distortion; it'll rob you of a fair amount of low-end clarity, which is sort of problematic when you're talking about lower tunings and a fair amount of preamp gain.

That said, he's right on how the things are voiced - over-saturated, with artificially boosted highs and lows. Keep that in mind while dialing them in, and you should get something that you won't be embarrassed by, while you save for another amp.
 
This may or may not be of any use, but...

If you don't mind controlling your volume at the amp, you might try turning your tone control(s) all the way down, and your volume control(s) all the way up on the guitar.

Matt
 
i liked them both, the sound on the 2nd a little better than the first :D it sounds like on the second one he had the tone controls down & the volume up.. probably just imagination

sorry to not be of more help, just wanted to say it sounded really good:)
 
cantthinkofname said:
i liked them both, the sound on the 2nd a little better than the first :D it sounds like on the second one he had the tone controls down & the volume up.. probably just imagination

sorry to not be of more help, just wanted to say it sounded really good:)
Click to expand...

good ear :D

i keep my tone half way down because my guitar is considerally shitty and has an annoying high end "twangy" quality to it so i try to get the highs rolled off a bit by rolling back the tone.

as for an update:
i dropped the gain, highs, and lows down and raised the mids. this pretty much puts all my controls at "12 o' clock" with the exception of the mid control which is at about "1 o' clock". ill be back very soon to edit this post to add another link to a quick mix i did with these settings.

EDIT: heres a link to the new (still crappy) mix i did with two tracks with more of a scooped sound and panned them hard right and did two more tracks with the eq settings mentioned above and panned them hard left. i think i could stand to turn the gain down a little more and i think i might have "scooped" a little too much but (to my ears anyways) its definitely getting better.

Here's The Link
 
Last edited:
Altough only in a whole mix it´s possible a real opinion, what "seems" useless:
Lows below 150hz
Highs above 6 khz

Ciro
 
CIRO said:
Altough only in a whole mix it´s possible a real opinion, what "seems" useless:
Lows below 150hz
Highs above 6 khz

Ciro
Click to expand...

so i should use high and low pass filters?



oh and btw: for anyone who has suffered through all my posts in this thread i'd like to say thank you. i also wanna say if anyone is up to it i'd really appreciate it if someone would stick it out and help me with this till i get it right because im obviously a fail at this and i really need to learn.
 
I find the best recordings are when I get the tone right at the first and don't have to use any eq on the completed track. EQ usually is a trade off and I only use it if I have to. EQ screws up the sound and should only be used if you can't get it right at the first.

Here's my biased opinion, and I don't play guitar:

Forget solid state amps for guitar - they're horrible. Get a tiny tube amp, the smaller the better. I have a Champ and it's a bit too big. Small like a Supro or a Slivertone... or whatever as long as it's tubes.

I have a Fender Champ, a Fender Blues Jr and an Alamo tube amp and I don't use them, I use my Grandma's tube reel to reel tape recorder. It can't be 1 watt and that's perfect. You should be able to find a tube amp for free or close to it from an old tube something.

And forget guitar tuners. Well you can rough it in with them, but don't think that they will find the sweet spot for you - they won't. Really, really watch your tuning while you record and make sure the pitch is in the zone. The sweet spot in the tuning really affects the attitude of the vibe of the track.
 
dintymoore said:
I find the best recordings are when I get the tone right at the first and don't have to use any eq on the completed track. EQ usually is a trade off and I only use it if I have to. EQ screws up the sound and should only be used if you can't get it right at the first.

Here's my biased opinion, and I don't play guitar:

Forget solid state amps for guitar - they're horrible. Get a tiny tube amp, the smaller the better. I have a Champ and it's a bit too big. Small like a Supro or a Slivertone... or whatever as long as it's tubes.

I have a Fender Champ, a Fender Blues Jr and an Alamo tube amp and I don't use them, I use my Grandma's tube reel to reel tape recorder. It can't be 1 watt and that's perfect. You should be able to find a tube amp for free or close to it from an old tube something.

And forget guitar tuners. Well you can rough it in with them, but don't think that they will find the sweet spot for you - they won't. Really, really watch your tuning while you record and make sure the pitch is in the zone. The sweet spot in the tuning really affects the attitude of the vibe of the track.
Click to expand...

i actually had plans to piece together my own tube amp using an old low wattage radio with a tube power amp and connecting a tube preamp to that and housing it all in a wooden enclosure or something but a bunch of people told me thats a bad idea if you dont know what your doing. i personally dont know much about tube amps so i decided against it for my own safety.

as for eq i might as well be a drooling idiot when it comes time to dial it in, as you might have noticed from my first post which showed i THOUGHT i had enough mids and low enough gain but i was WAY off. i thought i had everything covered and it was just a piece of gear that wasnt giving me the good results but as it turns out it was "the carpenter, not the carpenter's tools" ;)

i guess i just need a good lesson pounded into my head so i can finally get the know-how of distortion guitar deeply embedded in my brain. ive read all of slippermans guide and all of tweaks guide and tons of other various facts, lessons, articles and tidbits on recording but there's just no substitute for hands on learning experience. so hopefully with a bit of trial and error and the help from the good folks here on HR ill finally be able to understand the ins and outs and how to get good distorted guitar recordings.
 
Last edited:
to me your tone is lifeless and one dimensional and lacks body

I'd recommend

a quality amp that can deliver the goods. if you're not willing to try amps (buy and sell) to find the one, then go no further.

learn to dial it

a quality cab with speakers that complement the amp

practice micing... over and over

learn to dial the amp

practice micing... over and over

learn to dial the amp

...
 
im willing to sell and buy for the right amps and honestly im fed up with solid state amps. theres a reason generally every good tone comes from a tube amp and that good engineers/guitarists dont use crappy solid state amps.

just like if there REALLY was a "best" mic for rap for under 100$ every fly pimp would have it and spent his money on bitches, hoes and rims instead setting up an expensive studio.

i accept that and im saving for a good tube amp. but for now ive gotta work with what ive got. and right now my problem is learning to "dial it in" and i need help with that, i basically need someone to walk me through it like a baby so i can get a good grip and understanding of how to do it. and maybe my mic placement could use a little work but i think im gettin the hang of that.

i know that no one wants to help another retarded newb through setting up his/her amp but this is my last resort. i could NOT figure it out on my own so i need someone either here or somewhere else to smack it into my head.
 
Layers of guitar

A lot of people are saying "record multiple takes and pan hard left and right" and thats good advice. BUT you should also look at how you're EQing all these guitars. I usually overdub 3 or 4 layers of rhythm guitar with tons of distortion, but if they were all full frequency it would be a muddy mess.

Try doing one track of treble boost, one track of mid boost and one track that has some bass boost. Then when you mix, you can set the over all tonality of the group by adjusting the individuals.
 
Jewishjay said:
A lot of people are saying "record multiple takes and pan hard left and right" and thats good advice. BUT you should also look at how you're EQing all these guitars. I usually overdub 3 or 4 layers of rhythm guitar with tons of distortion, but if they were all full frequency it would be a muddy mess.

Try doing one track of treble boost, one track of mid boost and one track that has some bass boost. Then when you mix, you can set the over all tonality of the group by adjusting the individuals.
Click to expand...

awesome, ill definitely try that.

i think i remember reading something about that, i think it was pan the treble to the right or left, the bass opposite of treble and the mids dead center.

thanks for the suggestion :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top