Taming upper harmonic build-up with multiple high gain guitars

[ReInventor]

So how do you guys do it? Individually the guitars all sound pretty great, and mixed together they sound huge, but as those upper harmonics begin to pile on top of each other and occupy the space of cymbals in a very non-musical way.

So do you EQ that out? Multi-band compression? Both? What are your tricks to handling this?

The mix I'm working on has 5 guitars in it:

Two heavy rhythm guitars, somewhat scooped and hard panned - lots of high end content here.

One heavy rhythm guitar that's much more balanced, more mids, nice and solid right up the center.

One guitar playing natural harmonics, highly distorted, very chimey panned about 70% left.

One guitar playing a "glue the verse together" lead 70 % right, nice and syrupy.

The last two also have delays panned opposite, but with a low pass at around 4k, so not much contribution here.

What would you do?

 

[noisewreck]

Ease off on distortion. They might sound a bit "wimpy" alone, but when combined you'll notice that they sound more musical and less irritating.

 

[miroslav]

Without hearing your mix and just by seeing how you have the 5 giutars panned...start by working the panning.

The guitars are spread across the entire mix left to right, so it's no surprise they seem to mask other things.
I would lose the rhythm guitar that is in the center...and just go with the harder L/R pans...that way, you have a lot of space in-between the guitars for other things.

AFA doing something with EQ...like I said, without hearing the mix, it's hard to give advice on that.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I'd love to hear the mix, before committing to anything, but my gut instinct would be to ease up on the gain and maybe lop off a few db in the 8k+ hz range.

Though, it also depends what you mean by "upper-harmonic buildup." Is that just a fancy way of saying "my guitars sound a bit fizzy when I play them all back together?" If so, the fix may be as simple as moving the mic a couple mm towards the edge of the speaker, or rolling the presence or treble down a hair on your amp.

 

[ReInventor]

Definitely in the future I'll be adjusting the original sound, but I'm not recording this again. I'll post the mix tonight. Also, there aren't drums yet, so it's not stepping on anything elses toes, it's just got a ring to it that I'm not enjoying. I notice it most pronounced in the car.

What is a good place to store mp3s on the web? I know there are lots.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Definitely in the future I'll be adjusting the original sound, but I'm not recording this again. I'll post the mix tonight. Also, there aren't drums yet, so it's not stepping on anything elses toes, it's just got a ring to it that I'm not enjoying. I notice it most pronounced in the car.

What is a good place to store mp3s on the web? I know there are lots.

Oh, fuck, stop worrying about it, then. I've noticed that on my mixes and even on professional recordings in the rare instances you ever get to hear distorted rhythm guitars solo'd, there's often a bit of buzziness in the high end that's just not that pleasing on it's own (especially on stuff that's not palm-muted). However, unless its incredibly pronounced and dominates the sound, that slight buzziness absolutely vanishes under cymbals. They just dominate those frequencies. You could try to find the exact frequency and notch it out, but my experience so far is it's better just to leave it - in a full mix it fades away anyway, and you'll most likely end up doing more damage than good.

If it still sounds problematic after you get some bass and drums in there, then that's a different story, but don't worry about how it sounds solo'd because that's not how it'll eventually make it to the listener.

As for storing mp3's on the 'net, I ended up just sucking it up and grabbing a domain plus server space. I go through 1and1.com, pay $5 a month, and have a place where I can quickly toss rough mixes up to share with others. I haven't even bothered finishing a proper website yet, the FTP space is valuable enough.

 

[Ronan]

What would you do?

start cutting the offending frequencies with EQ. You might be surprised how much high end you can cut out of guitar once there are cymbals in a mix.