Recording Metal Guitar Tones for a Newbie

[ChemicalFire]

I'm having some problems wrapping my head around multitrack guitar recording and mixing as I'm pretty new to it.

From all sources I have been told to use a strong mid tone and less gain to keep my guitars punchy and crisp. This is fine the results are pretty good (I'm using amp simulation at this time, Softubes Metal Amp Room) but the tone is more akin to hard rock instead of metal.

The problem I feel is I'm using Mid heavy tones with lower amounts of gain that a standard metal song would use. To get the tone that I want live I tend to have to use more gain and mids than would sound good recording.

Basically I'm not sure how to record a metal tone. I've also been told that you want to get a great tone before you record. But I can't get the tone I want because I want to keep the mids high to keep my recordings crisp.

What am I doing wrong?

[Go Nigel Go]

Most metal players actually cut the mids and boost the bass and treble. When recording you will probably need space in the mids for vocals, so don't be afraid to cut them a bit after the fact either. Much of the detail in metal guitar comes from the boosted treble, the power and punch comes from the low end. Much of what you get from the mids is distorted mud. Do whatever it takes to get the live sound right. Then cut with your parametric EQ after recording if you need to make space for voice and other instruments. You are correct to try and get the sound right before going in. It is much easier (and sounds better) to remove unwanted information from the recorded track with equalization than it is to try and make a bad sound good with processing!

[CJ Mastering]

+1 to what Go Nigel said..

Can I ask what guitar and pick-ups your using and what strings your using
Cj

[dragunov308]

I use a real tube amp in conjunction with a Hughes and Kettner Red Box which is an active DI with a 4X12 simulator. One of the heaviest pedals I ever used was also made by Hughes and Kettner which is called the Warp Pedal.

[jitterybit]

the less is more thing with gain also comes into play when you start compressing. Parallel compression will get you closer to your beefiness. Try a compressor that's going to give you some harmonic content. Look at softube for that.
Maybe try a few distortion pedals in front of your simulation. Nothing over the top, maybe a tubescreamer set below 12 o'clock.
Just remember to keep it in context with "the mix."

[jigsawlogic]

This is a perfect example of the limitations of "popular wisdom".

A blanket statement, such as "set the gain lower than you think you should" only applies to people that set the gain too high in the first place. I tried taking that advice once, and was amazed how much better the guitar sounded...AFTER I deleted the lower-gain tracks and re-tracked everything with the gain set where I initially knew it SHOULD be.

It's impossible to take any advice as a general guideline without knowing WHO it's targeted at, and under what circumstances. In this case, it's targeted at people who have the idea that more gain=better rather than right gain=better. It naturally counteracts wrong tendencies in the first case, but confounds good ones in the second.

So if your ears tell you that your gain is too low, trust them. It might take some time and experience to hear where it sounds best, but this is often a matter of fine-tuning rather than the large-scale problem that you've identified. And I second what the other guys said about EQ.

[BurnStudios]

watch this video! It is long but WELL worth it...
Guitar Tone video

[MightyPwned]

I think a lot of the posts in this thread are completely absurd.

When recording metal tones, most people actually cut the bass, and let the bass guitar handle the bass frequencies, and don't scoop their mids.

Yes- you see guys scoop their mids, but they scoop their mids on metal amps, which in most cases have a lot of mids (5150, for example, which is used in countless metal guitar recordings). So really, they are not scooping their mids.

I will tell you right now. That low end you hear that comes from the guitar is not the guitar. It is the bass. The bass is the key in getting a big sound and really the low end that metal is known for.

My advice is to dial in the guitar tone once you have the bass guitar mixed.

These two videos, are pretty spot on for recording metal bass and guitar:

YouTube - Tutorial: Recording metal guitars at home - The Fearedse way...
YouTube - Tutorial: Recording metal Bass guitar at home - The Fearedse way

[Dreamsilent]

Don't EVER cut mids on a guitar. The guitar is an instrument made up of PRIMARILY MID FREQUENCIES, so you'd be an idiot to cut those out and be left with...well, fizz.

Metal sounds are all about the right kind of distortion, and the right amount. There's no right or wrong way to do it, it took me years of trying and owning countless different types of guitar amplifier to get to know the different sounds and how to achieve them.

Not saying that you need to go shopping for the next 5 years to find a good sound, just saying that all advice, especially on a forum like this, is to be taken with a grain of salt, and you'll get much more out of experimenting and learning yourself. This forum in particular is notorious for misinformation (I actually stopped coming here when I was a beginner...)

In regards to your original post, don't worry so much about "keeping the mids high and crisp" or whatever. There are plenty of tools to balance the mix, sometimes you may even find that your crisp guitar tone is too crisp and needs to be dialled back a bit. Since you're using plugins you're in a great spot as you can always go back and tweak it, and find the settings that work best for you in a mix.

Just find a sound that YOU like, and work from there. After a few recordings and mixes you'll have a feel for where the sweet spot FOR YOU is on the amp's knobs, and thus be able to dial a good tone in quickly.

Apologies for the ramble...

[Go Nigel Go]

An acoustic guitar has it's fundamental frequencies in the mids. That is it's design, and if you cut very many of those frequencies it sounds bad because that's what there is. The highs and lows are what give the acoustic guitar its character and individuality, but are usually pretty unflattering by themselves. I can not think of a single instance where I improved the basic sound of an acoustic guitar by boosting or cutting any frequencies. It may be possible, but I have several guitars in the house. If I EQ the acoustic guitar it is for some reason other than getting it's tone right. If it doesn't sound right live, I reach for another one.

All this goes right out the window with an electric guitar. Your sound is not just the resonant fundamentals of the acoustic guitar, you can boost everything (gain) and cut fundamentals creating new and radically different sounds. That's Rock and Roll.

If you respect the original acoustic guitar tonal pallet with an electric guitar you get something like a Jazz guitar sound. This can be very pretty is how the electric was designed to be used at first. If you distort that sound with gain induced clipping or fuzz or whatever, you get mud. If you boost the signal with electronic gain (not to the distortion point yet...) and cut some fundamentals however, you can change the type and character of the sound radically as "new fundamentals" emerge from the amp and electronics. Until I realized that I was playing electricity, not just amping the string vibrations and "adding effects" for my tone, my electric guitar always sounded like some muddy, sick, and badly mutated acoustic guitar.

[CJ Mastering]

Don't EVER cut mids on a guitar

Never?? There is always going to be situations when you need to cut mids on a guitar in this genre. Never is not a correct term.

What if it was recorded with too much mids?
What if the sound he wants, callls for the mids to be cut out.
What if by cutting the mids out a bit, it makes the songs feel allot better.
What if there is another guitar in this mix and there clashing and the only way to seperate the 2 guitars is by cutting some mids form one of them.
What if by cutting the mids, you get the sound you want that fits the song

There are so many "what ifs" So saying Never Ever is Untrue
Cj

[Insomniaclown]

Experimentation, and lots of it. I just record myself, but there are a few things that work for me to get a big heavy tone.

Combining 2 different sounds together will get you a big sound. Record one with scooped mids, lots of gain, pan left. Record another thats mid heavy, less gain, pan right. One of these from your amp and another from the softube metal amp room. If the playing is tight, you should get a huge guitar sound. You can take it one step further as well. Throw up 2 mics on your amp, either 2 dynamics or one dynamic and a ribbon. Put one so that its just to one side of the dust cap, and the other so thats its nearer the edge of the speaker. Move these around until you get a good combination of clarity and body, and make sure your 2 mics are in phase. You can balance and blend these 2 mics to get different sounds. Keep the room out of it as well by close micing the speaker. You can add space later if you need it.

There is a lot of info about cutting the low end on the guitars, but I prefer to do this after the fact. I find that if you slash out too much of the bass from your guitars, they will be mega wussy even with the bass guitar. To me, its not about killing the bass frequencies in a guitar, but picking the right bass frequencies to maintain the body of the guitar.

There are a lot of great tips for recording heavy guitars, but you need to find what works for you. Learn it, try it, if you don't like it, forget it and try something else. Good luck!

[Dreamsilent]

Originally Posted by CJ Mastering

Never?? There is always going to be situations when you need to cut mids on a guitar in this genre. Never is not a correct term.

What if it was recorded with too much mids?
What if the sound he wants, callls for the mids to be cut out.
What if by cutting the mids out a bit, it makes the songs feel allot better.
What if there is another guitar in this mix and there clashing and the only way to seperate the 2 guitars is by cutting some mids form one of them.
What if by cutting the mids, you get the sound you want that fits the song

There are so many "what ifs" So saying Never Ever is Untrue
Cj

I was referring more to the great big "Tonal Sculpting" mid cutting for that shnk shnk Pantera/Metallica(AJFA) sound. Of course you can cut mids if the mix requires it, I assumed members here would have enough common sense to deduce that

[Go Nigel Go]

I would be willing to bet that most of those "really good sounding distortion pedals" have some hardwired gain and EQ stages that start cutting mids the minute you plug them in...

[Stevil]

Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars From Hell

[Go Nigel Go]

Insomniaclown, your approach is a good way to record everything and mix it later for very precise control over the entire frequency range of the instrument. It is similar to to the approach used by pro guitarists (with budgets the size of some small governments) use when they use multiple amps in their live rigs and blend a clean one with a scooped high gain etc. etc.

They can push high harmonics out out of one amp, clean out of another, and low end out of a third, then have other amps with their own individual specialized processing. You are limited then only by your imagination and budget. In the end it all sums up into a single signature sound profile as the waves compete, cancel, complement, and blend.

In the end, you are probably using a complex audio chain to reduce the string vibration "fundementals" and accentuate other weaker frequencies to achieve the sound you are looking for. It's a good way to go for recording because it allows you to change the sound at will after the tracks are laid down and dial in precisely what you want.

Doing it in an organized way and being conscious of what you did to the sound will allow you to set up a simpler and more specialized signal chain to get the same (or nearly so) sound, perhaps from a single amp in your live rig. Keep experimenting! It's fun, and will only help your sound (recorded or live) if you let your ears and knowledge be your guides.


Stevil: an excellent read, I like the guy's writing style! It's in my bookmarks now, Thanks.

[CJ Mastering]

I was referring more to the great big "Tonal Sculpting" mid cutting for that shnk shnk Pantera/Metallica(AJFA) sound. Of course you can cut mids if the mix requires it, I assumed members here would have enough common sense to deduce that

Your reference to that is not in your post. So how is anyone to know what you where referring to?
All anyone will see is this below. You cant assume anytihng here. No one can read minds..Its like trying to guess what im thinking. All they have is your words and your words say NEVER EVER

Don't EVER cut mids on a guitar. The guitar is an instrument made up of PRIMARILY MID FREQUENCIES, so you'd be an idiot to cut those out and be left with...well, fizz.

Metal sounds are all about the right kind of distortion, and the right amount. There's no right or wrong way to do it, it took me years of trying and owning countless different types of guitar amplifier to get to know the different sounds and how to achieve them.

Not saying that you need to go shopping for the next 5 years to find a good sound, just saying that all advice, especially on a forum like this, is to be taken with a grain of salt, and you'll get much more out of experimenting and learning yourself. This forum in particular is notorious for misinformation (I actually stopped coming here when I was a beginner...)

In regards to your original post, don't worry so much about "keeping the mids high and crisp" or whatever. There are plenty of tools to balance the mix, sometimes you may even find that your crisp guitar tone is too crisp and needs to be dialled back a bit. Since you're using plugins you're in a great spot as you can always go back and tweak it, and find the settings that work best for you in a mix.

Just find a sound that YOU like, and work from there. After a few recordings and mixes you'll have a feel for where the sweet spot FOR YOU is on the amp's knobs, and thus be able to dial a good tone in quickly.

Apologies for the ramble...

[MightyPwned]

I still do not agree with everything that has been said here, but some more tips are too:

-High pass at around 60-120 hz, use your ears. This is to make room for the bass and kick.

-Low pass at 8000-14000 khz, use your ears. This is to cut junk frequencies. I have heard many people low pass at 7k, with great results.

-Also, bypass the cabinet in metal amp room, and load some cabinet impulses. Guaranteed better sound. Or even look into some of the best freeware amp sims, such as LePou and TSE. I prefer free plugins when dealing with high gain tones then commercial to be honest.

-I also like using a saturator when using amp sims. They make the guitars IMO sound thicker. There are some great free ones, but this one is known to be great.

-I tend to not use a compressor on my guitars, but I know many do and achieve great results.

-IMO, always use a tube screamer simulation with amp sims or the real thing when recording real amps (if they are tube, never on a solid state amp). Look into BTE Audio's free screamer plugin, or Mokafix's commercial Creamtube plugin.

[ChemicalFire]

Thanks for all the feed back guys. I'm looking at buying a Peavey 6505+ 112 Combo and a few SM57's to get started with proper guitar recordings but until then I have Softube and I have the Line 6 Podfarm (not great but it's okay).

[ThunderShepherd]

Originally Posted by MightyPwned

These two videos, are pretty spot on for recording metal bass and guitar:

YouTube - Tutorial: Recording metal guitars at home - The Fearedse way...
YouTube - Tutorial: Recording metal Bass guitar at home - The Fearedse way

i laughed pretty hard at these videos.