What Effects make a guitar sound more transparent?

[ganymedes81]

HEY! Thanks so far everybody! I'm going to post a clip soon! I really appreciate the help! Here are my responses to certain posts.

tkmattson: the guitar is the primary instrument. It's really a guitar-based song, with some vocals on top.

Funkybot: the amp settings I used were somewhat low on the bass settings. The guitars are supposed to have a rock and roll feel, and I'm worried about cutting out so much bass that the guitars feel even more 1-dimensional.

tcadillac: Yes, I'm using a TON of stereo effects on it. In fact, I copied the guitar to 4 tracks, applied different amplifier settings to each track, and then did different stereo settings (such as 20% left) for each track. Do you think this is the reason? I wanted a really realistic, crunch guitar sound... but the guitars ended up sounding like this paper blanket: it sounds like it lacks depth and it sounds like a brick wall.

donkey tugger: it's not as cool as it sounds. It sounds really fake and 1-dimensional.

Coolredguitar: I know how to scoop to find bad frequencies, but with the guitar, it's not usually clear to me what is the bad frequency.

greendoor: the guitar is the only main thing. i'm adding vocals too. but even pre-vocals, it sounds horrible.

Vervil: i want them to be really distorted, and have a somewhat translucent quality to them. I'll post a link soon.

xoxos: wow. i'm pretty sure you're way more hard-core then I am. I'm honestly not at your level. I only understand a little bit about phases.

I'll post a link soon!

[Vervil]

Yes, I'm using a TON of stereo effects on it. In fact, I copied the guitar to 4 tracks, applied different amplifier settings to each track, and then did different stereo settings (such as 20% left) for each track. Do you think this is the reason? I wanted a really realistic, crunch guitar sound... but the guitars ended up sounding like this paper blanket: it sounds like it lacks depth and it sounds like a brick wall.

nonononono Never do that! If you want to make layers of guitars to make them sound big you have to record every guitar track. You can go as far as you think it has sense. On System Of Down Toxicity album, there are about 10 distorted guitars recorded and layered one on top of another. This is the only way; small differences between your takes are the reason why guitars will sound big played together. Idea is to pan them all left and right, and make them sound like one big stereo distorted rhythm guitar.
Making copies of one take will just make your guitar sound louder and possibly even thinner if you start playing with effects, it can even end in phase problems.
Off course when recording takes, you can play different takes with different guitars. I like to do 4 takes at least, first two with guitar that has humbuckers and with heavily distorted sound, and second two takes with less distortion and guitar that has a lot of definition, strat for an instance...
Than off course first pair is panned hard left right, and second pair too. You can make them panned differently, one pair at 9 and 3 o'clock, and second pair a bit more or less wide than that.

I know how to scoop to find bad frequencies, but with the guitar, it's not usually clear to me what is the bad frequency.

Sound of a guitar speaker box "thump" or hit (don't know how to call it really) is around 200 Mhz, you can add or cut it a little, it depends. Below from that is mostly just mud. Definition, sort of "edge" of distorted sound is between 3500 and 5000 Hz, but it really depends what you want to achieve. Middles are fundament of guitar, so cutting them too much makes guitars sink down in mix, and undefined. Also, boost in middle fr. on lead guitar is a good thing most of the times, it will make them stand out of a mix without being too loud. Be aware that good guitar sound is actually union of bass and guitar playing together. Think of a bass as an lower extension of a dist guitar. They should sound big together, and sometimes if you could hear some "big" sounding guitars without bass, you would be surprised that they are not so big. You have to make room for the bass, but again, it depends on arrangement of a song. It is impossible to make guitars big if their rhythmic pattern clashes with what bass and drums are playing, they should work together.
Also have in mind one thing: Something is big or small compared to something else, so if you want to have big guitars you have to sacrifice reverbs, pads, drums, even vocal a bit sometimes, and vice versa, you can make drums sound enormous by recording thin guitars in a part of a song.

I hope some of this stuff was helpfull

[ganymedes81]

it can even end in phase problems.

D'oh!

Middles are fundament of guitar, so cutting them too much makes guitars sink down in mix, and undefined.

Be aware that good guitar sound is actually union of bass and guitar playing together. Think of a bass as an lower extension of a dist guitar.

This is great advice. Very true.

...

I FIXED IT! First of all, I had been EQing with really small bands. I switched to big bands and did a sweep and noticed the guitars sounded so much warmer and translucent when I did a really wide band around 450. Whenever I had been using small EQ bands, I didn't really notice a difference (probably because I never moved all of them up at once -- and moving just one up made it sound worse). The Q was 2.6 and the gain was 3.5.

The second thing I did was I messed around with the bass and made the bass much bigger and more powerful, and this in turn made the guitar more powerful.

When the two combined, they had an even louder, more translucent feel!

After I did this, I made minor EQ adjustments to make the guitar louder, to get rid of some annoying sounds.

Here are the different settings:

Gain/Frequency/Q

-1.0/5616/100
-3.5/12977/100
-7.0/10375/71.6
-3.0/1800/? (it was a 10 band EQ with no Q)
0.9/225/?
1.1/450/?

I used an excited [with a level of .8] from around 3kHz and up.

-4.8/110/2.2
1.2/16500/5.9

This was in combination with making the bass a lot stronger, using some analogue vintage effects on it, and trying to make the bass have some presence that you can also feel (like an actual electric bass guitar, and without tons of distortion).


ANYWAY, EVERYTHING WORKED OUT! It sounds relatively good now. I'm sure a hard-core pro could make the guitar/bass mix better with more fine-tuning, and probably some of my EQing was irrelivant, but at least now I can move the song forward, get it finished, and then let other people hear it for suggestions about fine-tuning.

Thanks to everyone who responded!


[Also, regarding the amplifier thing, I really changed the original guitar recording a lot before I added differnt amplifiers. I sort of actually liked this effect. I also wasn't really going for System of a Down type of guitars that are that detailed and full. I just wanted them really crunchy. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I did do 2 recordings of the guitar during one part of the song. I'm not a great guitarist and it's sort of a pain for me to play the song even once the way I want it to be played.]

[SecondSkin]

One way to make a great guitar sound is to make an identical copy your favorite take, then pan one copy all the way left and the other all the way right. Finally, phase reverse one of the copies and you'll have the perfect guitar sound!

[bduffy]

One way to make a great guitar sound is to make an identical copy your favorite take, then pan one copy all the way left and the other all the way right. Finally, phase reverse one of the copies and you'll have the perfect guitar sound!

Truly "transparent"...

This is a great thread, cool to see how everyone deals with guitars.

[IainF]

1.0/5616/100
-3.5/12977/100
-7.0/10375/71.6
-3.0/1800/? (it was a 10 band EQ with no Q)
0.9/225/?
1.1/450/?

They are some strange settings. Of cousre i haven't heard it, but just from the settings here are some thoughts.
A guitar amplifier has a limited frequency reponse, and you should get a significant drop in level above 4000 - 5000 Hz. so those high frequency cuts are interesting.
Also interesting about the first 3 settings is the very narrow 'Q'. At those frequencies the bandwidth for those 'Q' settings is only a few hundred Hertz. It's around a 24th or 48th of one octave, i'd be hard pressed to hear that at all, unless there was a very specific frequency peak that was being cut.

A 10 band EQ usually has bandwidths 1 octave wide. (a 'Q' of 1.4)

I used an excited [with a level of .8] from around 3kHz and up.

-4.8/110/2.2
1.2/16500/5.9

I assume these are your new settings. this makes much more sense to me, but i do wonder about the audibilty of the boost at 16500. Perhaps you exciter is increasing the level there too.

Anyway, just some observations based purely on looking at the setting and not listening.

-Iain