My next issue: Mixing Guitars

There are a lot of good tips and discussions in the techniques forum.

If you haven't read it alread this article from Craig Anderton has some great advice for dealing with guitar sims...

http://www.soundonsound.c...es/sonar-tech-0711.htm

Also you will want to pan your guitars left and right. Example: If you have two rhythm guitar tracks pan them hard left and right (but IMO not ALL the way). If you do not have two separate rhythm tracks then clone the track you do have and then pan left/right. This should be done with lead tracks as well. Use busses and sends for this.

Also layering helps. If I'm not digging what I'm hearing I will triple clone the track and set one up to be fuzzy bottom end, one for midrange and one for hi end squealiness. I'll tweak the sims and track EQs then blend until it sounds good and then do more tweaks on the bus from there. However with TH2 I find I don't need to do that so much.

That's just stuff I've picked up and figured out myself so it certainly isn't gospel and there are MANY ways to go about this but thought I'd share.

Also if you CAN amp your guitars sometimes that is just the better option. Also I have an old Line 6 head that has XLR line outs on it. I can use that to get a nice clean input signal which is easier to deal with than the dry input from my interfaces. So if you have something around that can clean up your input signal a bit you might want to play around with that.

Cheers.

And of course...

Volume - 11

Pan one set 80/80, pan the other set 100/100.

That's pretty cool. Never thought of that one. :-)

Awesome. Yes, everyone working with amp sims should read that article. Mr. Anderton is quite the genius.

Happy to help.

Yup. Actually if you have the Anderton X1 vids he shows that technique being performed. It is in the second one. X1 Advanced or whatever it is called. 

You know... I should probably start watching those again. Last time I did I was only getting confused but I think I know enough now to understand what's going on.

I gotta install Quicktime or something to get at the chapters. WMP has seriously gone to arse.

Yup. One day at a time. I've been taking notes as I go along and it's turning into a clusterBLEEP. Gonna have to go back and clean up/consolidate at some point.

Never heard of that one. Cheers.

/sorry for the threadjack... but they're cool vids so you should check them out, TS if you can

I was going to say what Sharke said: If you don't HPF the guitars and bass (at different frequencies), things will get muddy quickly.

I also filter and boost kick and bass at different frequencies.  That may not sound like a guitar mixing trick but it does help clear out a space for each thing.

Starting points (for me): cut guitars under 150 hz.  Cut bass under 50-60 or so (depends on the bass).  Notch out the kick (cut it with a fairly narrow Q) around 300 or so.  Some people also boost the bass at 300 to complement the kick, but the basses I use don't need that and 300 is a very muddy area.  The kick thing varies a lot, but I am pretty rigid on low-passing the bass and guitars.

If you guitar sounds boxy, cut a little at 800.  If it sounds dull, give it a little air between 10K-12K.

I also find that too much effect (like too much drive/distortion or too long a delay) gets kind of messy in a mix even though it sounds awesome solo.

I use in-your-face sounds without layers in general, but for your style of music, layered guitar sounds panned in stereo are common.

Also, and this is weird, I have had better luck with Guitar Rig on Strats than on Les Pauls, even though I love Gibsons.  That is probably a gap in my knowledge or experience and not the fault of the software.

AC/DC use a lot less gain than perhaps you may think. The sound is more clean with a light amp crunch than "distorted".

Every note and chord is very defined and audible, and this, in my opinion is a lot of "the trick" to get this kind of sound on record.

you can make guitars sound huge and punchy when you keep the gain down. 

Also, avoid playing the same parts too many times. It does work in some genre, to create a "wall of sound", but in the style you specified, it is more important to hear / feel the pick attack, which dissapears when too many guitars are recorded playing similar parts.

I would also say: 

don't try too much to compare how your amp sounds in the room compare to plugins.

its not how its meant to be compared.

the amp sims reproduce the sound of guitars recorded from an amp and played back through your speakers. So, if you want to compare with your amp, you need to mic up your amp, record it and then play it back through your speakers and see how that compare with the amp sims you have.

you can then decide which sounds best.

Finally, don't put too much bass on your recorded guitars as they will clash with the rest of the bottom end of your track. They will sound better and warmer on their own, but once in the mix, it will sound muddy.

then only some light EQ / comp should be required to make them seat in the mix.

I hope it helps and you get the sound you want.

I know "chasing tone" is a never ending headache for guitarists. I'm still chasing..

I think a big part of it is backing the distortion down and the gain low-to-moderate for rhythm. You can add on those to get more of a "live" sound for leads.

I noticed this on a recent "real" studio recording of my band.

Some of these things I had already been doing bu luck however the article, http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul11/articles/sonar-tech-0711.htm, was a huge help to get rid of the fizzyness of the amp sims i am using. now my mix is sounding much much better.  Thanks all!

updated the bogus link above.

And I do agree with lowering the gain but some of my tones are still pretty hot when I record my metal stuff. It is still much lower than what I would use live. The blending makes up for the lack of spicy sauce. That's why I find it's better to record two identical takes of things instead of cloning wherever possible. This is obviously easier to do with rhythm tracks and more basic written lead parts. Improvised or blistering solos are much trickier so I just clone those.

I'm pretty much a n00b at most recording stuff but one thing I do know about is guitars. I think wrestling with inferior amps for years on sh*tty stages gave me a good ear for tweaking stuff. Everything else is a struggle.

Glad you found the article helpful, and thanks in general for the props :)

However, that was written awhile ago and I've found two more tips recently I thought I'd better pass along...

• De-Esser before amp sim. The VC-64 works great for this! Killing the highs at higher input levels gives a much smoother sound.
• I've found cutting around 2kHz going in to the sim gives a creamier tone by causing the distortion to work more on the fundamentals of the notes than distorting the harmonics.

BTW if you check out the music videos in my YouTube channel (as listed in my sig). all the guitar sounds on all the songs use amp sims. Also, all the "acoustic guitar" parts are Variax. The "Ambience Rose" one is particularly interesting, although it's not like the other songs (I rarely do ambient instrumentals). It's all Variax through a POD HD500 played live in one pass. I then copied that part 4x in Sonar to add additional processing, like some flanging.