Wond'ring Aloud: Heavy metal guitar...

[esactun]

(Granted, Tull was not this heavy... )

What are y'all's favorite/preferred/usual way of panning guitar tracks for aggressive music? Do you hard-pan left and right? Or pan maybe 75% each way? A combination of both, to make each guitar "wider"? For metal, hard rock, whatever.

On "Sewn Mouth Secrets," Soilent Green's producer seems to have tracks hard-panned and then doubled closer to the center (75%, as a guess), or so it seems from the intro riffs. But Terrorizer sounded fine with very hard panning-- there seems to be no left-channel axe bleeding or reverbing or whatever into the right channel at all (and vice versa).

I tend to prefer hearing not-so-hard panning, it seems to help thicken things, but can step on the vox and drums. Hard-panning seems artificial, too wide of a stereo field, but can help keep things clear (especially with super-fast bands). The combo idea seems like a good way to get the best of both. But it is harder to mix, and spreading the guitars around can thin them out somewhat (hence those 12-guitar mixes! )... <end babble>

Whaddaya think?? Actually, whaddaya do?

 

[Gidge]

if the two guitars are playing the same part, i like them hard left and right....if they are playing two different parts, i try to bring them in some if i can without encountering the problems you mentioned.....

 

[WEBCYAN]

1. have one guitar track with a thick warm tone panned hard right with volume full, and about 50% left with volume about half.
then...
2. have one guitar track with a harsh hot tone panned hard left with volume full, and about 50% right with volume about half.

thats a total of 4 seperate guitar tracks, each recorded on its own.

thats what i do and it sounds perfect. even on crappy amps it makes it sound enourmous.

 

[atomictoyz]

i i like them hard left and right....if they are playing two different parts, i try to bring them in some if i can without encountering the problems you mentioned.....

I heard Gidge likes it this way

Peace,
Dennis

 

[Cyrokk]

I first consider what kind of distortion is needed in the text of the music.. For example, the last song I did I wanted the guitar sound to be dark and natural.. in my own psychotic point of view, I was trying to capture a "witch" sound. That prompted me to record with my Epiphone, one track was mic'd, the other was DI with an amp modeler on a Rectifier setting.. I panned each at 50% because the richness of both complemented each other..

My next song I am looking to a much wider distortion, sort of a Megadeth sound, so I am probably going to go with my old Strat and work towards a less midrangey sound.. I was even thinking of doing something similar to WEBCYAN in that I may pan two guitars hard left and right, and add two additional guitars at 50/50.. I want a gigantic distortion for this next one. This may involve bouncing though because I only have eight tracks to play with, and I'm very anti-bounce.

Cy

 

[esactun]

It's cool to get these new ideas!!

1. have one guitar track with a thick warm tone panned hard right with volume full, and about 50% left with volume about half.
then...
2. have one guitar track with a harsh hot tone panned hard left with volume full, and about 50% right with volume about half.

thats a total of 4 seperate guitar tracks, each recorded on its own.

thats what i do and it sounds perfect. even on crappy amps it makes it sound enourmous.

WebC, it's like you anticipated my next question-- which was "how do y'all like to pan the axes when they have markedly different tones?" Cool idea, I will try it!

When I was four-tracking I often had two very different guitar tones going on, and panning them hard made it hard to balance the overall sound. It didn't help that the unit's EQ was global .
Lately I've had different tracks but with similar tones, so I tried that 75%-90% trick. It seemed to work pretty well (though it was hard to tell, that project was tracked badly ), though I had to yank lots of mids out of the 75%-panned tracks.

Cyrokk, your idea sounds cool too...