Help with my muddy guitar tone.

[superjoint45]

Hello. I am new to this thread and I was wondering if I could get some advice. I tune down all my strings on my 1991 les paul studio two steps. I have a marshall jcm 2000 dsl 401. I am using a Fostex VF160 to record with and mic my amp with a sm57. I was just wondering if you guys had any advice to get my sound to cut through on recordings. My band is influenced by Sabbath, Kyuss, Queens of the stone age, The melvins. Thanks.

 

[treymonfauntre]

well are you doing the usual tricks of using less gain when recording and cutting the bass?

 

[tourettes5139]

I tune down all my strings on my 1991 les paul studio two steps.

This could be your problem, or at least it is not helping. It is tough to get a "cutting" sound when you are tuned down that low. I think the best thing I can say is mic placement, mic placement, mic placement. Also turn your gain way down, much lower than you would use live. Then do multiple takes of the same guitar part to thicken it up and make it "bigger" if you so desire. But yeah:

 

[tourettes5139]

Beat me to it. treymonfauntre!

 

[Codmate]

This could be your problem, or at least it is not helping. It is tough to get a "cutting" sound when you are tuned down that low.

This is almost certainly the problem I should imagine.

 

[Dani Pace]

Low tuning tends to sound muddy to start with, it's hard to clear it up. You might EQ up the highs and mids while cutting the bass a little, let the bass player deal with getting the lows, guitar is more of a midrange instrument. Tuning down puts a lot of slur and sloppyness into guitar just because there is less tension on the strings. If you are tuning low (regularly) use very heavy strings, light guage strings sound awful when tuned down IMO. You might consider playing through a bass amp, many guitar amps get muddy sounding at lower frequencies, especially those with 10" or smaller speakers.

 

[gusfinley]

well..

If you DSL401 is dead stock, then the best thing you can do is to swap the speaker. The stock speaker sounds terrible!! IT is muddy. Check out my webiste about that particular amp --> http://cc.usu.edu/~davbradshaw/amps/dsl401 I have put a lot into trying to get this amp to sound more true to its classic marshall forefathers.

There are a lot of improvements that could help your bass response, but listen to these guys about the tuning down two steps thing.......

 

[-=¤willhaven¤=-]

I posted in another thread about mic placement. I have a Randall ISO cab (basically a speaker in a box with a mic stand inside for recording). To make a long story short, I went from 2-3 inches away from the cone to 1/2 inch from the cone and the difference in tone was huge. I went from boxy and muddy to crisp and defined just with a little mic placement.

I tune to a similar note as well (CGCFAD), it sounds good to me now, or at least its a good enough base to mix off of down the line.

I also made sure to start with my presence/bass/mid/treble at 5 and my gain at about 75% and tweaked from there. My recording settings are quite different from my live settings.

Also, in order to get your mic placed as close as possible, you might have to remove your speaker grille. It also seemed to give me a brigher sound when I had my mic facing the slant of the speaker cone.

If this is a side view of your speaker \__/ I had my mic "//" placed like this \//_/. Toward the center of the cone, facing the cone as straight as possible.

In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to experiment. Start with mic placement and do some double tracking. Set your amp EQ to the middle and play something in which you want to hear the definition, record it, move the mic a bit, try again. Then listen to the takes back to back to see which you like better. Once you nail that, start tweaking your amp EQ and repeat the process until you get the tone you like.

At least, that's what I'm doing.