So I was watching the recent Sweetwater interview with Craig Anderton about SONAR and he started talking about multiband distortion for guitar. He only really mentioned it briefly in passing, but it got me thinking I would like to try that but had no idea where to start. (Great interview by the way. Go watch it if you haven't already!)
 
Soo... I would really like to hear about some other people's techniques with this. What are you doing? How many bands do you use and what are your crossover frequencies? Do you mess with the levels of each band in your mix or do you pretty much just leave them alone? Anything else to add?
 
Here is what I did today to get my feet wet:
I used some of my Google-fu and found an article C.A. wrote a few years ago on Harmony Central...
http://www.harmonycentral.com/articles/the-guitarists-guide-to-multiband-distortion
 
I copied those settings from the picture of the Sonitus multiband compressor settings and tried it out with a simple guitar track using the TH3 simulator on some moderately distorted tracks. I made sure to record a dry track that used a bit of open-E with harmonics and some big open E chords so I could really see if the hype was true or not.
 
I copied the same dry track so I had four identical tracks.
I set up an amp sim in TH3 and saved the preset and inserted it onto all four tracks.
I put the Sonitus multiband compressor on three of the tracks (before TH3 obviously) and set them up as in the article's picture.
I did not adjust the levels or input gain of any of the three "multiband" tracks.
I routed the three "multiband" tracks to a single stereo bus.
I routed the one "full bandwidth" track to another stereo bus.
I matched the output levels of each stereo bus using the input gain control.
I put a mild ambient reverb on each stereo bus, same settings for each one.
I turned on "exclusive solo" mode so I could quickly A/B the busses.
 
WOW was I impressed with the multiband distortion!!! The chords sounded so much more "open" and "alive." The highs were just there all the time, no matter how hard I was banging the low E string at the same time. Harmonics just popped-out at you.
 
Then when I panned the high channel about 30% left, the mids channel about 30% right and left the lows in the center it was really amazing and just completely blew away the full-bandwidth sound. I decided stereo imaging was not fair so I messed with some stereo-field plugins on the full-bandwidth bus and it was still no contest. I also compared without any reverb and my conclusions were still the same (reverb settings were exact for each bus.)
 
It got me thinking that my next tube-amp design/build will be a multiband design. Gears are already turning!
 
Here are the two tracks... 
https://soundcloud.com/makerdp/full-bandwidth-guitar-test
https://soundcloud.com/makerdp/multiband-distortion-guitar-test
 

wanna hear it.
single, and mutli tracked
 
can do?
 

Yeah let me see if I can post something up on my blog this evening.

OK original post edited to add the two samples I made... one "full bandwidth" and one "multibanded" version of the exact same DI recorded track.

Fabfilter Saturn is a multi band distortion on offer with Fabfilter until the 1st June. It has a demo. Just thought it was worth mentioning due to the offer
 

thanks I'll check that out.

The biggest advantage of multi-band distortion is you can avoid generating very high-frequency harmonics that don't enhance a guitar's tone but can cause problems such as aliasing.
 
With analog distortion, especially distortion derived from overdriven triodes and saturated output transformers, there is intrinsic band limiting. What comes out of the speakers might top out around 12-14 KHz, even though the generated harmonics go much higher. Digital distortion does not have that built-in band limiting, which is why people often complain about amp sims sounding "fizzy", and try to mitigate it with a LPF.
 
Using multi-band distortion you can apply harmonic distortion to only the lower midrange, which is where the meat of a distorted guitar's tone is anyway, and reduce the amount of very high frequencies generated.
 
I should note that the designers of FabFilter Saturn took pains to avoid aliasing, so that shouldn't be an issue with that plugin. And, of course, it is multi-band. Saturn also lets you do creative modulation, such as using an envelope generator to boost distortion at the front of the waveform, simulating how analog distortion behaves. My only complaint about Saturn is that it doesn't offer the range of distortion effects that some other products do. It does subtle well, and it does extreme well, but for the in-between moderate distortion it's not as strong.