CraigBert — Dec 31, 2009
So Jon, when do we start hearing some of your "proper" handi-work? :D
soon :) In fact, more like see it in action too in HD with green screen etc :)
Here is some good info that says a lot!
Not happy with your electric guitar recordings? This blog should give you some insight as to how you can drastically improve your electric guitar tones during the mixing process.
Okay, tracking is all finished. You are ready to begin the mixing process. If you find that you are not happy with the way your guitars sound during tracking there is hope. Go ahead and add the following plugins to your guitar track:
EQ
Compression
Delay
Reverb
Chorus
Flange
Phasing
Now, play around for 10 minutes until you find the massive electric guitar sound you are looking for.
Did you find it? If you did, GREAT! This blog is over for you. If you didn't find it, you are not alone. I tried to use my plugin collections to make my electric guitar tones for years. I tried everything in the book. You name it, I've tried it! My guitar sounds never really came into my own until I discovered the ultimate plugin for mixing electric guitars...
NO PLUGINS!!
That's right. This plugin is as transparent as you can imagine. No audible distortion. No crazy phase problems, just pure signal. You can't even hear it working. The best part is the price. It's free!
Alright, enough being a smart ass. The day I learned that plugins were not the right tool for the job was the day my guitars DRASTICALLY improved. A big part of this whole audio engineering process (like many other crafts) is understanding which tool is the right tool for the job. A chainsaw is probably not idea for cutting the wedding cake. A flame thrower is not the best tool to test if you have a gas link. Most of all, plugins are not the right tools for make killer guitar tone.
So, if you are in the mixing process and totally hate the guitars you've gotten, there is only one solution. First, make sure that you really hate them and that you are not just being stupid (a problem I suffer from frequently). Second, if you are sure you hate them, click on the guitar track and press delete. Done!
The Right Tool For Killer Guitar Tone
The right tool for killer guitar tone is an amp head. I'm not sure why I spent hundreds of billions of hours tweaking plugins on electric guitar when I could have done a much better job by playing with the knobs on the amp.
Why reach for a parametric EQ to take mud out of an electric guitar recording when all you really need to do is pull the low end out of the amp? Why add fizz to recorded tracks when you can bump up the presence on the amp? If parametric EQ was that good at creating tone, people would plug their Les Paul directly into a parametric equalizer and be done with it. EQ's have their place. They sort of nudge the tone this way or that way. They don't create tone. If you want a great recorded track, you must focus on the source.
What If I Don't Know What A Great Guitar Track Is?
This is a common problem. In fact, it's the entire challenge of audio engineering...learning how to listen. There are no real rules for getting great guitars except that a great guitar sound isn't too anything. If a guitar is too bright, too boomy, or has too much gain you have a problem. Only you can define what too means. However, you can start my making your guitars not so bright, not so boomy, and not use too much gain and you'll be amazed at how quickly your guitars will improve.
Where Is The Magic Mic Placement?
Grab a Shure SM 57 or maybe even a condenser microphone. Slap on some headphones and start talking. Move around quite a bit. There will be a spot where if you stand in the PERFECT spot, you will hear angels singing. Seriously, you will actually hear this glorious tone of half-naked chicks with wings singing into your headphones while you go through the motions of check 1 2, check 1 2. Then, it'll occur to you that you must be crazy to hear angels in your headphones and you have to be burned out to assume that there is any magic at all in your little Shure SM 57 or any other acoustic energy to electric energy converter.
If you are into miracles and all that jive, GREAT! However, if you expect to find a miracle with your microphone, well.... let's just say that I don't have a whole lot of faith in anything supernatural occurring with my microphone placement.
Back to what I was saying. You can clearly hear different tones as you dance around the mic. It gets bright in some places and boomier in other places. But like I said, you never really hear angels. You never sound like Morgan Freedman in that Penguin movie. Well, the effects of mic placement are exactly the same on your guitar amp. I'm not convinced there is any magic spot when micing a guitar.
The Amp In The Room
You've probably already read in various recording magazines that you should spend your time getting the amp to sound great in the room. What does this mean exactly? It means a few things.
#1 You should get the guitar to sound awesome in the room. If you can achieve that you are in. There should be an exciting quality to the guitars. They shouldn't hurt. It should be pleasing to listen to them even at fairly high volumes. (Obviously, anything hurts if it gets too loud). When you listen to the guitars you need to remember that there is an entire band that these guitars must work with. A ton of low end sounds stupid on a guitar recording. Have you really ever heard an electric guitar fighting with the kick drum in the subwoofers (NOT recommended!).
#2 It means that mics don't lie. (Microphones aren't even female! HA HA..) If you think the amp sounds great in the room but the recording sucks, it's more than likely your tone really sucks and you just get too excited about volume or whatever. There are a couple of exceptions to this. If you mic the guitar in the dead center with a dynamic or condenser mic you will get an extremely bitey tone. If you mic the guitar too far to the edge, you'll get a very dark tone. If you mic the guitar too close with a cardiod mic, the proximity effect will kick in and the tone will be bass heavy. If you mic the guitar from too far away, the sound will be distant. So as long as you are fairly close to the center of the guitar speaker (but not directly on the guitar speaker) and not too close or too far away (1-3 isn't a bad place to start) you should be fairly close. After you tweak the amp to do what you want, you may decide to move the mic an inch or two this way or that way. This will sort of act like an EQ. Remember when you talked into the 57. We may need to knock some low end on the amp out or we may need to boost the low end back in. Moving the mic around lets us tweak just a little bit after the character of the tone is really rocking.
Electric Guitar Mixing Conclusion
If all of this works out and tracking goes the way I hope it does for you, electric guitar mixing is fairly straight forward. Just grab the volume faders and move them around until you get something that does make you mad. Done! Of course, you can always add effects to them, but this is purely to enhance the tone...NOT TO FIX IT!!
You still may find that you need a little bit of EQ to make the guitars fit into the mix. This is okay, but be lazy about it. There are times that it gets tough cramming big guitars, big drums, big bass, big vocals, and big egos into the little grooves on a cd. In a subtle way, slowly nudge the tone in the direction it needs to go to cut through without stepping on the toes of the other tracks