recording distorted guitars (informative?)

[pikingrin]

**Disclaimer: This post is solely the OPINION of the author, not 100% fact. Read/apply at your own risk. (This post may not apply to those doing metal recordings...)**

Some of you may have read a post in the guitar/bass forum a few weeks ago as to my procurement of a vintage Magnatone amp. Well, on a current effort to record some distorted guitar I only used this amp. I played through it with an '80s squier strat and a relatively new Gibson ES-135. I used a bigg muff PI and a DOD FX50 for my two seperate overdrive settings. Now, for my findings...

I asked about recording distorted guitars probably about a month ago, and I have been toying with a lot of different amp settings and mic placements since then. Tonight I had a major breakthrough in my meager quest to get a good recorded sound from a distorted guitar signal. It was not so much mic placement as it was the blend of a lot of minute details. I recorded 10 takes alone for my main guitar parts, each one dual mono. 20 guitar tracks, not including the fills. I took the approach that less is more, but only on the volume control on the guitar - not the amount of overdrive applied to the amp. I recorded 2 takes with my bigg muff, 4 with the FX50 and the remaining 6 I tracked completely clean. I must say, after tinkering around with the rough mix (no effects/dynamics/reverb applied yet), this has got to be one of the best sounding overdriven sound I have got from my setup. I listened to the rough mono mix after recording each track, and I noticed a HUGE difference when I got the clean guitar signal mixed in with it. That high end squealing distortion turned into a nice round pile of overdriven goodness. When the bass track was recorded, it also made a significant difference.

I will post a link to some sound clips of the progression within the next few days for those of you who might find this helpful.

Please feel free to leave any comments, I look forward to hearing your different takes on this.

 

[zed32]

I'll usually record the bass track prior to recording the guitars. I find that sometimes a guitar tone might not sound that great on its own, but once it's blended with the bass track, it might end up sounding great! I think it's good advice to not dwell too much on the individual tone of the guitar, but to hear it in context. That sounds like a massive amount of layering that you are doing here, but sometimes that can be the key to capturing a full sound that has the bite of the distortion with the clarity of the clean. Just make sure that it's not going to overpower the entire mix and you should have a winner. Good post.

 

[NYMorningstar]

The -less is more- approach is good and I think you'll also find that when you record distortion you need alot less than you would think.

If you have a mix that only has a little space for guitar, your multitracking may not fit in too well. Try using just one or two thin distortion tracks recorded with alot less distortion than you'd think is necessary for that.

If you have a solid guitar track and it's hard to fit it into a mix, a different approach that may work is building the mix around that guitar track and make space in it as opposed to for it.

Great job on reaching a goal. Keep experimenting and you'll keep having those breakthroughs.