Need help on making a "dirty guitar" sound

[soopey]

Title says all. I'm a bit stuck on what to modify and whatnot to produce this sound. All the guitar sounds in the Mulab sound to clean. If you want to get an idea of what i'm looking for check out this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXTPGrDY ... re=related


And if there is a tutorial or a compilation of tutorials of how to do certain things in Mulab would anyone mind posting the link? That would be great.

[robenestobenz]

You're going to need an amp sim for this. To get most of the traditional kinda sounds you'll need more than just distortion.

Some of the good free ones (IMO) are:

Juicy 77 (my favourite)
Dirthead
Voxengo Boogex
Simulanalog
Aradaz stuff

Except for Boogex, they're probably all Windows only though.

If you want to spend some cash, there're the big guns like Guitar Rig and Amplitube.

[quayquay17]

Yep, you need an amp and cabinet sim.

Also, unless you use a real guitar player, or some premade guitar loops, it's going to be really difficult to get that level of expression from a sampled guitar VST, you're going to need to learn how to play it on keyboard, it's different form a normal VST.

[mutools]

I think there are some nice distortion sounds in MuLab 4, thanks to Andreas' sound design talents.

As an example take

Bass/AMPed Bass 1
Leads/Heavy Guitar M-O-V

There are also SIM effect presets!

[Juan Mendoza]

Bass/AMPed Bass 1

this is one of my favourites, i already used it in 2 songs, very expressive patch

You could start by using this patch, and later you could replace the oscillators by a multisample player with some real guitar multisample and tweak 'till you get close to what you're looking for.

But note that even with the best tools and sound dessigners if you wanna make your guitars sound realistic you'll fail, so in that case get a real E-guitar with a good amplifier, because you can surely synthesize the sound (no doubt about that), but you wont be able to accuratelly reproduce it's expression.

[quayquay17]

you can surely synthesize the sound (no doubt about that), but you wont be able to accuratelly reproduce it's expression.

Yep.

[soopey]

awesome, alot of replies! thanks alot guys. I'll have to try out some of ya'll suggestions and see how they work.

[cron]

Although I can't really help with that particular sound, one tip I have when working with distortion is to do it 'backwards'. Stick your distortion on the track, punch your settings in, never touch them again and then do all your sound design/everything else. I've always found that I can get distortion to sound more musical this way as you you start to see the distortion as an instrument in itself (one thing guitarists know all about) instead of something you just passively apply at the end of your chain once everything else is done.

In short, try setting up a great distortion effect (or cab sim or whatever) first then play your guitar/synth/whatever through it and work around that, rather than trying to nail everything down and then endlessly tweaking your distortion to fit as a last step.