Oct 11, 07:15 PM
Top 10 Tips for Recording Metal Guitars
Here are some great tips to get better metal guitar recordings.
1) Reduce the lows (bass) of your guitar signal before the distortion, then boost the lows after distortion. This is how you get a very tight rhythm. Use a Tube Screamer type pedal or the Hardwire CM-2, to cut the lows before the amp. Then you can use a bit more gain to sound more brutal without losing your dynamics. With a pedal that lets you adjust the low end, you can make even a crappy farty amp sound tight. Just turn the gain all the way down on the pedal, turn the level up to middle or higher, and then adjust the low and high knobs to taste. If you turn the treble down on the amp, but turn the treble up on the pedal, you’ll get both a warm and rounded distortion tone (like in power chords as they ring out) with simultaneously accentuated pick attack. If you’re using an amp sim, use an EQ prior and reduce the bass, boost mids slightly for same effect.
2) Don’t turn your gain all the way up on your amp or preamp. Heaviness comes from a balance between dynamics and distortion, not from the highest distortion possible. You don’t need high gain to sound heavy. Too much gain reduces the difference between palm muted and open notes, reduces dynamics, and takes away all the impact and punch. Palm mute and pick string repeatedly and turn the gain up just enough to get some sharpness that damps out quick, but not so much you have a continuous sharp buzz throughout.
3) If you’re using a real mic and cabinet, you will need a 4×12 and standard mics like the SM57, e906, Heil PR40, and MD421 to even get close to what you hear in professional recordings. Even so, if the room you’re recording in has bad acoustics, all that will be for nothing. If it works out for you, cool, but if not, look into tube preamp like the ENGL e530 or Peavey Rockmaster run into cabinet impulses by Catharsis, Guitar Hacks, or Redwirez. You’ll get 90-95% the sound of an ideal mic/cab/room combo, repeatedly day after day with that.
4) If you use impulses, pay attention to the treble, presence, or edge settings on your preamp. Impulses are recorded with a particular level of highs in mind, so if your preamp isn’t as sharp sounding as the one used to create the impulse, you’ll be doing a lot of post-EQ fixes to bring it up to level, with the associated undesirable phase distortion artifacts. This applies mainly to distortion pedals, which are designed to run into the clean channel of an amp which itself applies compression and high boosts. Thus a pedal by itself straight into the computer will lack the highs,edge,presence of a recording guitar preamp. So turn up the presence/edge as needed until it sounds good through the impulse, then tweak EQ further to your desire.
5) Parametric EQ is your friend when it comes to shaping guitar sounds. You can almost make one preamp sound like any other using just post-EQ. Ear piercing fizz is usually found in 4.8-5.2kHz region, digital shrillness around 7k and 9k. You don’t want to reduce all highs through a low pass at 6k like some people recommend; rather you want to reduce the bad high frequencies and leave the rest. Afterwards, use another EQ for gentle sculpting of your tone. If you find yourself boosting anything by more than 10dB, then there’s a problem with your signal source or choice of impulse – go back to the source (amp, guitar, pedal, etc…) and correct that, as you want as good a signal as possible since the more you process it afterwards the more undesirable and artificial artifacts you introduce.
6) You cannot evaluate the merit of a guitar sound if it’s solo and mono, well unless it’s a lead guitar sound. For rhythm, you MUST have at least one track panned left and another similarly played track panned right. Only through this stereo effect can you know whether your choice of impulse and EQ is good. What may sound fine mono and solo may not sound fine stereo. And even then, that’s still not as ideal as what it will sound like in the final mix with vocals. For instance, by itself, even a solo’ed stereo guitar track may sound rich and full, but that’s because it has frequencies that would otherwise be taken up by other instruments like bass or synths or vocals. So get it sounding as sharp, full, tight, and crisp as possible in solo stereo, then later don’t be afraid to make a shallow broad scoop in the 800 to 2k region to make some room for the vocals.
7) It’s better to use a low shelf than high pass filter on guitars. The reason is that while you want to get rid of the boomy muddy bottom end, you still want a little to be there to provide “information” to the listener that yes, your guitar indeed has balls. A shelf reduces the lows without cutting them off completely. Don’t cut off your balls.
9) For the thickest tone, quad track your guitars. That means play the same thing twice and pan both tracks full left, and that or a complementary thing played twice and panned full right. That’s four tracks total, a pair left and a pair right. In each pair, play one with regular level of distortion gain, and the other with a bit less. Try not to stack the same exact guitar tone together; have one be more full and rounded, the other more mid range and sharp sounding. This way the buzz from the distortion in each won’t interfere, as one buzzes less and is taking care of the lower and mid frequencies to provide greater body and dynamics. You can also get by with just double tracking (one left, one right) IF the EQ of each track is finely tuned. The better your guitar sound, the more you can get away with just double tracking. If you do double track, make each track slightly different in the EQ or guitar or preamp or impulse choice, which will add greater stereo separation for a big sound.
10) From your album collection, pick songs that you think have the perfect rhythm guitar tone. Then find a part of the song where just the rhythm is playing by itself. Excerpt that part into your DAW (recording program) and use it as a reference for when you’re establishing your own guitar tone. You can even use a Match EQ to get an idea of how your tone differs from theirs, but don’t use the Match EQ’s generated match curve to mold yours into their sound; it won’t sound right; rather match it visually and in a general way using a separate parametric EQ, and most of all, use your ears to come up with something that, while different, is still good. Finally, try it out in a full mix and see if it works. This Match EQ trick is mainly to give you an objective idea of what exactly is happening in these professionally mastered recordings. You may realize they differ in a part of the EQ spectrum that previously you hadn’t thought to examine.
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