mattplaysguitar
Sure, Danny. I'll try post up a sample this weekend.
And I have one, two and maybe even three songs on my album which may actually go fairly heavy in sections, so it probably wouldn't be a waste of time! But the fact that those would be more temporary means I can get away with less wall sound and just the change into distortion in the first place is going to do a lot for the dynamics considering the rest of the album will be cleaner.
Just a quick one, how many guitars have you used in a single massive layering before? I could imagine aside from bass, two left, two right and maybe one centre would be more than anyone would ever need. Have you gone bigger before?
But I did intend this thread to be just a general Wall of Sound thread, so I'm all for any style of music here :) I'd love to hear other styles especially for future reference when I may be working with other artists (which I expect to do a lot of once I finish my album - I'm sick of writing my own stuff!!!)
That would be great bro...this way I can hear what you're really trying to do. When you mentioned "modern" in the other thread, I had assumed modern rock or today's rock with layered guitars etc. So my apologies if I got that wrong or partially wrong. :)
I had a feeling you wouldn't mind me posting how I've gotten some of my layered sounds...but I don't want to corrupt the thread with stuff that may not be correct in fear someone else may be reading and get the wrong idea.
As for layers, the most I've done where I felt it was enough was 6. On my stuff, I usually use 4 if I need that extra kick in the chorus section. Recently, I've actually been taking the Van Halen approach and am just using one rhythm guitar with a haas effect with some mid side stereo processing so that the other side of the haas doesn't appear to hit so late. That's one problem with the haas effect that has always bothered me....you think one side is louder than the other when in reality, it's not...the early side hits your ears faster so the later side gives you the impression that it should come up in volume. A littlemid side stereo processing can control this a bit....or....you double the track and flip the haas delay to the other side so that they hit evenly.
Meaning, say we are using a haas with a delay that is 100% wet. We have say one side at 1ms the other at like 30 ms. The side with 1ms is going to hit earlier. So if we record another guitar track and reverse the haas delay on that track, it will even things up and still build a nice sound wall because now you have 2 guitars that will sound like 4. The haas effect simulates 2 guitars in one pass depending on how you use the delay times. So if we add another and flip the delay, we have two independently played guitars with this effect and because we flipped the other delay, it offsets that part about hearing one side first and you're double tracking as well.
What's really cool is to play 4 independent guitar tracks of rhythm and use a few different variations of the haas delay. You can come up with some sweet sounds that way while eqing them differently. But again, this usually works better with driven guitars due to the drive in the sound making things smaller. We'll just about always get a bigger tone out of a clean guitar than we will a driven one due to the distortion taking away some of the sound size. So for you to do something like this with a clean tone, it may be over-kill. It's something you'll just need to experiment with.
But yeah, hook me up with some samples of what you're going for and I'll do my best to try and point you in the right direction if I can. :) And let me know if anything I've posted is along the lines and I can explain that too.
-Danny