Wide stereo on electric guitars

[SLy_drums]

How do you achieve a wide stereo image on guitars ?

I'd say using guitar busses helps out, but how would you pan each mic in the mix ? How do you choose them for panning there and there ?

I have an example of what I did a while ago :

The music was heavy metal with big loud guitars.

2 mics on each guitar : 57 and R121 ribbon (tracked through API).

I cut a lot of meds around 600 Hz - 1 Khz on the mics, high passed at 150 Hz, and low passed at 12 Khz on each mics (4 tracks, 2 on each side).
Then I listened in solo the two 57 tracks panned to death, and did the same with the Royers, to hear which of those mics would get me the best low end and the widest pan. It appeared to be the SM57s.
In Logic Audio, I panned the 57s to -60 and +60, and decided to pan the R121s to -17 and +17. It was the best balance, and phase adjustement to my ears.

Then I created two stereo busses, one for the left side guitar and the other for the right side one, and sent the individual tracks into the busses.
Panning each bus to -40 and +40 and doing some EQ boosts brought me a quite wide stereo, even if it was great, the stereo image wasn't perfect at the moment.

Do you have tricks and hints to achieve a big stereo ? Do you listen, as me, to the mics which have the widest stereo when panned hard, and put then into the mix regarding this ? Do you wait for the mastering engineer to widen the stereo ( not afraid of phase issues ?) ? ...

[octatonic]

Hi there,

I don't tend to do that much.
I try to get the sound at the amp rather than relying on outboard later.

I close mic with a 57 and put a room mic out there, mostly a 147.
I high pass all the guitars, unusally in the digital domain, roughly around 80-100 hz, maybe as high as 150.
I'll double track that a few times with different amps or guitars, or both.
I just hard pan them.

I'll often group all the rhythm guitars in a stereo bus and sent them to a stereo compressor and maybe a touch of eq, but there is no hard and fast here.
Effected or melody/lead guitars get sent to a separate bus so they can sit on top of the rhythm guitars.
That is it really.

[allencollins]

Getting wide guitar sound is all about ambience and eq. Find the right ambience either real or digital verb.

The trick I use to get good seperation when doubling guitars is to eq them slightly different. Pick a unique dominant frequency for the different trax.

Also pan them slightly off axis.


If you listen to Kill Em All. Hetfield atleast doubled all the guitars. Youll notice the guitars in one side of the mix
are eq'd slightly different. One has more mids the other has less. It results in huge sound 'seperated' sound
Also the guitars have a really deep room sound but they still sound in your face.

diamond Darrell used this technique too

[djui5]

Originally Posted by allencollins

If you listen to Kill Em All. Hetfield atleast doubled all the guitars. Youll notice the guitars in one side of the mix
are eq'd slightly different. One has more mids the other has less. It results in huge sound 'seperated' sound
Also the guitars have a really deep room sound but they still sound in your face.

Also, dosen't hurt to put a slight delay on one side, like 5-15ms. Mess with the delay time until you get the width you want. Careful with this though, it can muck up your mono compatability.