All great stuff, much of which I have heard &/or used before but this is a nice refresher to remind us of the endless options! Chad (my other guitarist) & I are almost always playing different parts and when we do chug on chords together we do tend to write the parts so we are playing them differently i.e. Open chords Vs power chords, next octave up or down etc. Danny I knew you'd be jumping in her eventually bro! Thank you all for your insights!

Middleman


All was covered above but just another approach, when you have multiple guitars you can also approach them as layers of transient combinations. Example. guitar right compressed heavily, guitar left medium compression, another guitar right light compression and another guitar left no compression. Through volume control of these stacks you can get some interesting results. The parts can be the same or inversions. You don't have to compress them all with the same settings is the point.

Reminds me of a parallel compression technique I tried once. Rather than just having one heavily compressed and one not compressed, I was using three or four stages from SUPER compressed, medium, light and clean. I tried it on mastering a track for added beef and ultra loudness. FYI, it didn't really work, lol. Standard parallel seemed to be just as good. But I might try it again one day! It was fun. Might just take more tweaking to pull off.

The Haas trick can work really nicely with double tracked guitars.

It works on everything from banjos to bagpipes, too.

Though, of course, a gentleman is someone who CAN play the bagpipes, but doesn't.

Danni wrote:  There are loads of combinations you can do. Most of the big studio's I've worked with in situations like this like to record 3 sets of guitars. The main guitars, guitars with a little more cut and presence, and then some thick, meaty guitars. Remember, these all create "the layered effect" because of the following:     Different guitars  Different tones  Different rigs  Different eq curves  Different pans  Different compression settings  Different rooms  Different pre-delay settings in verbs if need be  Different timing inconsistencies IF 2 guys play all the tracks.     If we just record four of the same sound (even if they are just slightly different) we lose a lot of the things from that list above that literally create what is known as true layering. You lose:     Different tones  Different guitars  Different rigs  Different compression settings due to the compressor being forced to be altered due to a totally new sound/approach  Different rooms (unless you use verb or impulses etc)  Different human timing inconsistencies IF one guy plays on all 4 tracks 


Thanks...now where in bejeebus in I going to place all this extra stuff in here?? 


There is a lot of things I find go bye bye when mucking around..but then again....

bitflipper


It works on everything from banjos to bagpipes, too.

Agreed.  I just thought it was worth a mention in this context.
 
Just one question, bitflipper:  what on earth kind of project are you working on?
 
Blugrass/Pipe band fusion..

When you are talking about layering a very similar thing applies to layering synth parts as well. For example even within one instrument such as a Roland JD 800 there are 4 tones per key. You press a key and you can hear up to 4 layers at once. What do we put on those layers now?

Suppose we want to make a big fat expansive pad type of sound. You would start with maybe a warm fat pad type sound but you would not use the same sound on all 4 layers necessarily. (or even 4 slightly different pad sounds) You could, and you could pan and detune them and filter and effect them differently and yes you would end up with a more expansive sound compared to say one pad sound on its own. But not a lot bigger though and you have wasted the other three layers to a certain degree.

But the real fun starts when you layer 4 quite different things (eg a pad sound plus a slow white noise effect or a reverse cymbal down 4 octaves plus bell like tone down one octave but with slow vibrato being added plus some tinkling wind chimes etc..) in order to make a very total expansive sound. And after that you apply very different filter and effects setting to each layer and balance them as well. Now the sound will 4 times as interesting as it was before! If you were using compressors on each layer then they too would need to be best set for the sound on that particular layer.  

If I wanted to make a string sound with 4 layers then I would use all string sounds yes but all very different sounding string patches. (from 4 different samplers or VST' is best) That yields the best result overall. It is a bit like the reason why getting one synth to play 16 parts does not sound nearly as strong as 16 different synths playing those same parts.   

TIP* Why checking/mixing on a singe small mono speaker at lowish volume is so cool:

If you have got say 4 or 5 guitars similarly layered (even played differently in each case) When you mix and line up all these sounds behind each other so to speak in a small mono speaker at low volume the net effect is a small guitar sound and you cannot hear the individual layers very well. The small speaker cannot be fooled see. 

But record and treat all those layers differently and in the small speaker in mono this composite sounds now gets very big very quickly even in mono! eg during tracking: Different guitars, pickup settings, effects and amps, cabs and mics and pres on the way in to your DAW and different processing on each layer after as well.

You don't have to change up too many variables either to get an effective result. Even of you only had one guitar with care you could make it sound quite different in each of 4 layers. I recently mastered an album where every instrument and track was recorded with only one microphone and that was a Rode NT1A. But he changed the guitar each time and the mic positioning and room and the resultant guitar tracks are completely different from each other despite using the same mic every time.