Tracking Electric Guitar-Unpleasant Distortion in Distortion in hot Mix

[asagaai]

The work I have been doing over the last few years has mostly been acoustic guitars/double bass, drums/violins etc, with DI double bass etc. I love the complexities and rewards with drums.

When I have tracked electric guitars- I always have issues with noise (cabinets/RF guitars etc etc) , thin tones, crappy noisy cabinets etc etc. I always become apprehensive- and truthfully try to avoid tracking electric guitars. Give me acoustic anyday-I can get a beut tone.

I am working on a project for a client -and the tracks require huge electric guitars. He recorded the song at another studio and it sounds huge- only reason he wants to re-track is cause the original recording had plastic drums/bass. Last week we set up the shells- and layed down dummy guitar tracks and vocals.

On guitar-he pulled into the tracking room a berenger cabinet (gulp). For the real session he assures me the session virtuoso who will be doing guitar has a variety of tube cabinets we can play with. Anyway I threw up a Beyer M160 and Beyer M201, jigged with mike placement, both running through Pacifica via very light dab of compression into Hedd. For once the tone was warm/smooth and very rich, and I though wheew- not letting client see me wipe the sweat away.

Vocals finally were settled on Pearlman TM1(high cut on) -ADL600-nitrous-essence-Hedd.

Once I tracked 3 songs, ran through all my outboard to print mixes. Vocals were simply stunning- ( the result I got on vocals was definately in another league compared to earlier recording).

But the guitars- on especially 2 tracks there was this unpleasant distortion -like a crinkling of hard plastic wrappers that poked through with a boring regularity everywhere. Using a UAD LA3A plug in limit mode seemed to reduce it somewhat.

I should say here that my gain staging and levels were all conservative and not causing any clipping at any of the stages.

One of the songs had far less of the crinkling- and on questioning him he noted it was a song where he took off the Berenger cabinet "effects".

Anyway- this is not the first time I have had this crinkling effect on electric guitars on a hot mix to print (I recall another session this happened where I again had problems with cabinets- and refused to record the cabinet for noise, and a bass cabinet was used by the guitarist instead ).

Anyway- before getting the virtuoso session electric guitarist in- I would much appreciate any insight as to what may be the problem when electric guitar tracks printed to a hot mix via outboard compression results in crinkiling, and I apologise if this has been raised before- i did a search and found no answers.

Cheers

GJ
Newcastle/OZ

[michaels]

I used to stress out on distorted guitars not knowing what kind of offensive POS amp they were going to bring into the studio. These days I just run a direct line for guitars and bass and reamp later thru any of the amps/pedals I have laying around here. Saves me a ton of headaches and my xanax doesn't disappear quite so quickly.

[BlackBeauty]

didn't you notice such a noise while recording? i do not understand why you only notice when mixing...or i didn't pick you up!

[RedWallStudio]

Ironic that you posted this.

I've got a bunch of old guitar amps.. everything from Vox's to Marshalls to Fenders to Gibsons to Supros. They all seem to have their little gremlins... little flutters or rattles or buzzes. Most of the time I don't notice them, or they simply add to the human aspect of the songs. Last week however I was tracking distorted electric guitar in a song intro (I was both player and engineer) where the only other guitar was a strummed acoustic... so the electric was "naked" and you could hear every detail. Needless to say, the little "extra" noises that my amps made was driving me nuts.. I literally went through every single amp I had and spent nearly 4 hours swapping out amps and guitars... for a 15 second part. At the end, I finally got the part using my JCM800 into a home-made Fender 2x12 closed back cabinet. By the time I was done, I was tired, aggrevated and sore from lugging around all the amps.

Thats when I started looking around for a nice solidly built boutique amp. I've heard and played through a Bogner in the past but now I figure its time to either get a Bogner (or Victoria) 1 x 12 combo and have an amp that is totally dependable and extremely quiet.

I love all my old amps, but they are just that.. old. They are like Harley Davidsons.. they require you to got through them, take them apart and tighten everything up on a routine basis.

And I don't care what anyone says, but old paper cone speakers are crap... every amp that I have had either reconed or just put in a good Jensen replacement, has immediately sounded tighter, quieter and cleaner.

Anyhow, I don't know if this helps you much.. but at a minimum, i felt your pain and that is my solution.