Metal guitars in live mix...

[Roel]

I'm doing some live-mixing occasionally, mostly hardcore and metal bands. (Not my personal favorite however...)

These dudes all think there guitars sound so good, which is true if they play on their own, but you cannot get them in the mix, cause they leave all mid out.

How can you mix guitars that don't have any mid in it? Their amp settings are: all gain they can get rolleyes:dead wrong...), lotsa bass, lotsa highs, and very little mid (again wrong as hell... )

So what do you do about it? Readjust the amp settings? Just leave them out of the mix??

 

[guhlenn]

How can you mix guitars that don't have any mid in it? Their amp settings are: all gain they can get rolleyes:dead wrong...), lotsa bass, lotsa highs, and very little mid (again wrong as hell... )

uhmmm... what's wrong with high gain settings? NOTHING to be exact... your right about the mids though. just explain it to them, any serious lpayer will accept when you tell them why you need the mids. i did. now i know that when playing alone more mids sound better too. educate 'm , somebody has to. i use a high gain amp (JCM2000) gain on 9 bass 5 1/2 mids 6 1/2 high 7 1/2 presence 8 1/2. Recording my tone is really easy as the frequencies are not too mutilated. took me some time to understand though... just tell 'm. or record the shitty tone and make 'm pay anyway... but better educate 'm.

greetz guhlenn just wanted to try this symbol LOL

 

[Roel]

Yeah, high gain can be ok... Depends on what you play actually.

But too high gain makes you lose definition. This is especially true if your playing chords with thirds in. High gain will make this sound just as random noise. I learned it the hard way. The mixer told me AFTER recording. You don't need as much gain as you think! (therefor, all the gain you can get is mostly dead wrong. alot can be ok. all you can get is too much.)

Also, in a studio you can walk up to them and tell 'em, on a stage you ussually have a time limit, and you hardly have time to get the eq right...

 

[guhlenn]

well your right about that. depends on the type of amp and alot of things i guess. a live mixer guy once told me what he did: cut ALL lows alot of highs and bring up the volume ie creating some mids in the sound. of course this sounds like shit so i drastically changed my settings after that experience...

greetz

 

[Major Tom]

The higher the gain setting the more compressed the signal is. Over compressed signals won't cut through...

 

[vox]

I'm a live sound engineer and a guitarist (I hate myself ), what you guys are describing is one of the biggest problems I have these days, especially with young bands, what I usually do is try to convince the guitarist to use a little more mids and less gain (if it's a problem). If he gives me that 'Oh you don't know what you're talking about' look I leave him alone, walk back to the board and just crank the mids there till they sound halfway decent. The first few times I did this I was expecting the band and all the Roadies to rush the board and accuse me of 'Fucking up' their sound, but guess what, 95% of the time they dont seem to even notice that I added more mids and half the time I'll get comments on how 'killer' the guitars sound. A lot of these guys set their tones either with their eyes - everything on 11, mids on 0 - or in a room by themselves, so they try to make their guitar sound as big and full as a whole band, without realising what they are doing.