How do i record metal guitar EX. The Boy Will Drown, Within the Ruins?
Home > Home Recording Forum > Recording Techniques > How do i record metal guitar EX. The Boy Will Drown, Within the Ruins?
Posted on Feb 08, 2010 12:16 pm
jomoney
Member Since: Feb 08, 2010
I am a begging enginer and I want to know hoe to record a perfect metal tone
the equipment i am using
ESP LTD V-100
B-52 AT100
Crate 4x12 Cab
Mics
Shure SM57
Cadd Pencil Condensersx2
Cadd Vocal Condenser
Recording
Presonus Firestudio Project
Cubase 5
I think i have the nesscesary equipment but can anyone lead me in the right direction?
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Feb 08, 2010 01:00 pm Just a thought, I find that with really distorted sound, I get good results from running direct out of the amp. Not sure if you have tried that, but I would recommend starting by getting exactly the sound you want out of the amp, and then going direct with it. Miking the amp is standard practice obviously, but direct seems to work better for me. If your amp still gives off sound when you have your direct input active, you could try a combination, use two different tracks and then sort of blend them together to get the sound you want. I just find that direct gives a clean precise tone for heavier stuff.
Feb 08, 2010 05:08 pm thanks i will try that
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 08, 2010 06:54 pm There are several somewhat long threads in the forums here covering this topic. They may not be for metal guitar in particular, but a lot of the same principles apply regardless of which genre you're recording. Try doing some searches and see if you can turn up a few of those old threads.
There is also an article or two in the tips section of this website as well, they cover micing a guitar cabinet.
I tend to get long-winded when getting into recording guitars, mainly since its pretty much the only part of the home recording process that I feel somewhat experienced in.
Everybody has different tastes in what "good tone" is, especially people in different genres (for example, I would never prefer to run direct out of my amp instead of micing it up...my mic'd tone is superior to my amp's speaker-emulated direct output in pretty much every way). Also, I don't record metal at all. I tend to stay in the rock and indie genre, with forays into indie-inspired alternative rock, hard rock, alt-country, folk, stuff like that. I mainly record crunchy guitars and not all-out buzz-saw death metal guitar tones. But I've done a ton of research and I've heard tips, tricks, and techniques for just about every popular genre of guitar-based music, especially high-gain heavy guitar.
First off, your equipment is more than adequate for the job and you should have no real limitations with what you can achieve with what you have as far as your rig.
One thing that a lot of people overlook, however, is a treated acoustical space in which to record. there are also articles and forum threads around here that will help you get started creating a "live room" that will help your recordings sound their best. The same goes for a monitoring space. Good monitors and a properly calibrated/treated listening room is a must for the best results. But since we're all home recordists and amateurs, we can all afford to bend the rules of "you should do it this way" and instead "do it however I can afford to" :-)
Since you have a 100 watt tube amp, it's going to take an insane amount of volume to push the power tubes of that amp into saturation and achieve the best tones that your B-52 amp has to offer. You're going to need to be able to play very, very loud to get the best out of that amp. Since that amp head has 3 rectifier choices, you're going to want to use the solid-state rectifier. It'll basically eliminate the "sag" that tube rectifiers produce and yield a tighter, quicker response that'll benefit you in high-gain, high-speed acrobatics.
I'm not sure about the Crate 4x12, how well the speakers in it will be able to deal with 100 tube watts abusing them. Hopefully it's a closed-back cabinet since that is the preferred setup for a metal guitar tone. Closed-back cabinets have a much tighter bass, with a quick response. Open-back cabinets are much looser, a little more preferable more for my type of music instead. And the speakers inside the cabinet will have a huge effect on your overall tone. How they're voiced, their power handling, and other design factors will affect how tight they are, how much bass, mids, and treble they will produce (or reproduce, actually).
OK I can really type a novel on this subject, so I'm going to try to keep this from growing into a huge post, but somehow I feel that I'm going to fail that goal :-)
There are several pieces of advice that I cannot resist offering in each and every thread about recording high-gain guitar. I was given this advice early on in my recording "career" (for lack of a better term, I'm a total amateur that just happens to have an unnatural geeky infatuation with guitars and their associated equipment...I'm not a pro, so take my advice as seriously as you would any amateur's). This is the advice, and I highly suggest that you follow each piece of it:
- Use your SM57 right up against the grille cloth on one of the speakers of your 4x12. You might back it off up to 4 inches or so, but I wouldn't go any farther back than that.
- The way that your guitar rig sounds in a room is very different than the way it sounds to a microphone that's right up against the grille cloth.
- Experiment with mic positions around the cone of one of the speakers in your cabinet. Closer to the center = more treble than bass. Closer to the edge of the speaker = more bass than treble.
- Experiment with off-axis mic positions, "leaning" the mic 45 degrees, for example, or putting the mic perpendicular to the grille cloth.
- Have a friend assist you in finding your preferred mic position. Have him play through your rig while you listen through headphones and move the mic SLOWLY around the speaker. More than likely, one position and orientation of the mic will jump out at you as your favorite.
- Turn DOWN your preamp gain to yield a cleaner distorted tone than you're used to playing with. Too much distortion robs your amp of its dynamic range and makes it sound thin in the mix.
- Don't scoop out the mids in your amp's EQ settings. You need those mids to be heard in a mix. Without them, your guitar becomes buried and indistinct, and muddy.
- When playing through a tube amp, you need to saturate the power tubes. That means turning up your master volume. Maybe not all the way, but you're almost certainly going to need it to be at the 3:00 position or higher (not set at 3 of 10, but at 3:00 as in relative to the hour hand on a clock. So that's more like 7 of 10 or higher).
- Keep your preamp gain low,set your master volume high, then add preamp gain back into your signal until you get enough sensitivity and saturation to satisfy you. Now turn the preamp gain down a notch or two from there :-)
- Record with no reverb on your amp. If possible, record with no time-based effects at all (delay, reverb, etc.). If possible, add these in post-production instead. You can always add more reverb in post production, but you can't take any away.
- And probably the most important piece of advice for recording heavy guitar parts (especially heavy rhythm parts) is to layer, layer, layer! Record your rhythm part once. Now, find another EQ setting on your amp and record the rhythm part again. Don't copy and paste the same take. Perform another take. Pan one take to the left, pan the other take to the right. They don't have to be 100% hard-panned L and R, but you can pan them pretty wide. THIS, combined with lower gain amp settings, is how to generate nice, thick rhythm parts. You can even add another layer to each side of the mix, resulting in 4 takes altogether: 2 panned L, 2 panned R. Try to vary the EQ settings for each take so that each take fills a different part of the frequency spectrum. Don't worry as much about what each take sounds like alone, you're interested in what they all sound like when played together.
Anyways, do some reading around here in the forums and in the tips section for some good advice to get you off the ground. Ask some specific questions and the guitar gurus here will probably be able to give you some specific answers in return. There are a lot of metal guitarists that hang out here, so over the next several days several of them will probably be able to chime in.
Good luck, and 'till later!
Dematrixhttp://www.reverbnation.com/2ndgMember
Since: Nov 27, 2007
Feb 08, 2010 08:13 pm the room is the biggest thing when recording guitar. you have to limit the noise off the walls as much as possible.
find a spot in the room where the least noise is.(after youve treated the room as much as you can) although you'll be close micing, it doesnt seem to matter. the noise, as little as it might be, seems to take the edge off distorted guitars.
straight open chords is ok, but when you start fast picking and muting, you'll notice it. the response time is crap.
Feb 08, 2010 08:13 pm thanks alot is there any tips for recording me and my other guitar player?
Feb 08, 2010 11:09 pm im using a b52 at100 and the way i get a sick sound is to turn up the individual volume all the way and the gain all the way and then control the volume with the master volume. But when i record it is really fuzzy do i turn down the gain? i have tried that and then its hard for the harmonics to squeal
The question is how do i make it sound as tight as possible like the boy will drown? they sound like there gain is down but there harmonics are sweet
Quincysanhttp://www.unitedmusicians.infoContributor
Since: Nov 11, 2007
Feb 09, 2010 04:26 pm Tad: Thank you for posting all that information. You should make a thingy for the tips section.
Jomoney: Tad answered those question in his exceedingly generous post, no offense. Everything he said is spot on as far as I can tell and everything he said is important to what you're trying to achieve. Deon also makes a good point. I'd spend some time studying the things Tadpui brought up and understand a little more about what creates good tone before fiddling with knobs on your amp.
If English is your second language I'll help you out with the answers to your questions using a few highlights from Tad's response:
"But when i record it is really fuzzy do i turn down the gain?"
Quote:
- Turn DOWN your preamp gain to yield a cleaner distorted tone than you're used to playing with. Too much distortion robs your amp of its dynamic range and makes it sound thin in the mix.
"The question is how do i make it sound as tight as possible like the boy will drown?"
Quote:
I'm not sure about the Crate 4x12, how well the speakers in it will be able to deal with 100 tube watts abusing them. Hopefully it's a closed-back cabinet since that is the preferred setup for a metal guitar tone. Closed-back cabinets have a much tighter bass, with a quick response. Open-back cabinets are much looser, a little more preferable more for my type of music instead. And the speakers inside the cabinet will have a huge effect on your overall tone. How they're voiced, their power handling, and other design factors will affect how tight they are, how much bass, mids, and treble they will produce (or reproduce, actually).
Another option is to use something like the Line6 POD. This is an alternative to learning all the techniques necessary to getting good recorded tone out of a mic'd amp. Everything in the POD is modeled and with a little tweaking can be a really awesome tone machine (especially in high gain stuff). Click on Deon's name and listen to the song he has posted in the music section of his profile for an example of how good the POD stuff can sound.
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 09, 2010 04:30 pm Hey thanks Quincy :-)
Quote:
im using a b52 at100 and the way i get a sick sound is to turn up the individual volume all the way and the gain all the way and then control the volume with the master volume
That's pretty much the opposite way of getting a smooth, tight guitar tone. It sounds like you've found this out by the fuzzy distortion that you get by doing it this way.
I'm looking at the owner's manual for the AT100 and it looks like your amp has a very similar gain structure to mine (Traynor YCV80). They even use the same kinds of preamp and power tubes. Your amp just has more preamp tubes (3 per distortion channel, 6 total), a rectifier tube, and a reverb tube. Both of our amps are powered by 4 6L6 power tubes. So we're in the same ballpark as far as architecture of our amps.
So let's single out one of the distortion channels to use as an example. Let's use the medium gain distortion channel since it's probably the most similar to the crunch channel on my amp. You can repeat these steps with your high gain channel later.
First things first, let's get an initial setting from which we'll work. Turn your Overdrive Channel 1 gain down to 0. Turn Volume 1 down to 0. Set your Treble, Middle, Bass, Contour, and Low Res all to 12:00 (middle position, straight up, on 5, whichever way you want to think of it). Turn the master volume up to 7 or 8 or 9. Or dime it, if you want.
You have 3 different gain stages on this Overdrive 1 channel. The first gain stage is your preamp, controlled by the knob labelled Gain 1. This controls how hard you are driving your preamp tubes (3 12AX7 tubes for this channel). The characteristic that turning this knob yields is a harsh, buzzy, fizzy distortion. This preamp distortion is what you'll use in order to add a little saturation and supplimental distortion to your main tone. As you turn this knob, you'll notice that the volume of the amp doesn't really change, and it may not be making any noise at all with the Volume 1 knob at 0. I'd suggest keeping it Gain 1 below 12:00 just because the more you turn it up, the fizzier your distortion. I use a pretty low-gain sound and I keep my preamp distortion down at 10:00 or 11:00. This creates a clean sound when I play lightly and a nice crunchy breakup when I play hard. That's the dynamics of a tube amp at work!
Next of your 3 gain stages is the channel volume, controlled by the knob labelled Volume 1. This controls how much of the preamp signal is being pushed into the power section of your amp. You want this at a middle to high setting. I keep mine at 9 or so. I find that it tends to change the character of my amp's power tube distortion as I turn this up higher. At lower settings, I get a darker, more compressed sound. At higher channel volume settings, I get a more midrangey, open sound. But turning it down too far doesn't push the power tubes enough to saturate them and I get an unsatisfying, lifeless, flat tone.
The last of your 3 gain stages is the amp's overall Master Volume. This is what controls how hard you're pushing your power tubes, and you want this at a middle to high setting. I keep mine at 9. This creates an incredible amount of volume. It is very loud, no two ways about it. But that's what you get for buying a 100 watt tube amp. If it's too loud with the Master volume at least at 6, then you're going to want a smaller, lower-wattage amp. If you keep all other things equal, it takes 10 times more power to double the volume of the amp. So if you want half the volume, you'd have to step down from a 100 watt tube amp to a 10 watt tube amp. Turning the Master volume down too far will not push the power tubes into breakup at all. You'll get a flat tone that lacks dynamics, lacks low-end, and lacks distortion. If you try to make up for power tube distortion with preamp distortion, then you'll end up with what you've already experienced: thin, fizzy, cheap sounding distortion that's not becoming of a metal guitar album.
Now that you've dialed in your gain stages, it's time to adjust your treble, middle, bass, and contour settings. This is all personal taste, as has been this whole exercise; but even though our tastes are probably very different, it should get you in the ballpark of satisfactory tone at least. My only advice here is not to scoop out the mids. Leave them at least at 12:00 or else your guitar will get lost in the mix once it comes time to move from tracking to mixing. On my amp, I find that the treble knob acts kind of like a Presence knob acts on a Peavey amplifier: more treble adds more harsh grit. I keep my treble down at 9:00 to 10:00. Any higher than that and the distortion gets too gritty and fizzy. And with the bass, you just want it high enough to fill out the low end, but not so high that it begins to distort more than mids or highs, and not so much that it makes your speakers go flabby.
Now, see if you can repeat these steps with your Overdrive 2 channel, which is the higher gain channel on your amp. Remember to keep the preamp gain low, the channel volume pretty high, and the master volume high.
If it's too punishingly loud when it's set up like this, then you're either going to need a smaller amp or a power attenuator. The Weber mass and THD HotPlate are the leaders of that technology. I use a THD HotPlate, and I love it. Without it, I would regularly be getting the cops called on my due to the noise. My YCV80 is 80 watts, and I keep the master on 9 all the time. Without some attenuation, it would be too loud to be in the same room with.
Good luck, hope you get what you're after. Sorry for the lengthy posts, but I just wanted to go through the whole process with you just to make sure you understand gain staging an amp with 3 different gain stages.
Feb 09, 2010 04:42 pm Ya, listen to Tad. He knows what he's talking about. If you can afford it you may seriously want to consider getting a Line 6 UX1 with pod farm, they're only about $150. I had the combo amp version of that B52 and actually ended up selling it in favor of the UX2. Try micing with the tips Tad is telling you first though. Maybe you'll have more sucess than i did. my at212 cab just wasn't the sort of thing i needed for the tone that i wanted, and my room is not very complimentary to recording.
Feb 09, 2010 04:47 pm Quote:
im using a b52
I like the B52's...saw them a couple years ago, still sound great.
OK, I'll leave now.
Feb 11, 2010 02:17 pm If you are like me man, and you have a terrible room to record in, I still say direct may be worth a shot. I have tried so many times to get a good sound out of my basement, and literally cannot. I have some pretty decent mics, from what I can tell they should be more than adequate for getting good guitar recordings, but something always sounded all scratchy and noisy for me too. Just my two cents. I also have had good success running directly out of a pedal into my interface, but it is going to sound sort of processed obviously. Miking the amp is obviously the best way to do it, but for me with my room and lack of experience, running direct is the best option. These guys obviously know what they are talking about, and actually have inspired me to try miking the amp again :)
Quincysanhttp://www.unitedmusicians.infoContributor
Since: Nov 11, 2007
Feb 11, 2010 05:04 pm @ Abomb Muchbaby: Put your amp in a closet and if you have concrete floors try to find something soft to put on the floor. I had to do that for a while at Momma's place...worked better than a typical unfinished concrete basement. There are some really cool DIY iso cabinet instructions too. You'll have to google around for them but as long as you have the right materials and as long as the cabinet is on casters I think a lot of people have been happy with them. I have a quiet amp so I don't have to worry too much; but when I upgrade I'll be trying one out.
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 11, 2010 07:56 pm Also you might want to consider building some baffles that can help absorb some of those reflections in your basement. dBMasters has a few that he's built, and I think he might have some plans in one of the articles in the Tips section.
I record electric guitar in an unfinished basement and yeah the acoustics are pretty terrible. I've put up just a few feeble attempts at damping the concrete walls and floor and surprisingly it helps. I even made a super-lazy baffle out of a featherbed and a couple of dining chairs (kind of like a blanket fort I made when I was little hehehehe). These little pathetic constructs add up and actually take the edge off of the rampant reflections in my corner of our large unfinished basement. It's certainly not perfect, but I've been pretty happy with the guitar tracks I've recorded down there.
Actually I think that the size of our basement is the one thing that makes it tolerable. I have 3 walls and a floor that are all concrete in my recording area, and the walls have 2x4 framing on them. This allows the carpet I put on one wall to have some dead air behind it. And instead of a 4th wall to complete this would-be room, it opens up into the rest of the basement. I think that's the life-saver in my situation.
Deon, didn't you make some DIY baffles? I can't remember if that was you that built them and if they did you any good.
But baffles and some dead air space can really be the difference between a sickening reverberant mess and at least a tolerable amount of room ambience.
Quincysanhttp://www.unitedmusicians.infoContributor
Since: Nov 11, 2007
Feb 12, 2010 09:01 pm Riddle me this Batman:
You say to not scoop the mids in order to retain the fullness of the guitar in a recorded mix. Pretty much any of these Mark V demos have the graphic EQ in a V pattern. What's the deal?
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 13, 2010 02:04 am Yeah I think that Mesa is single-handedly responsible for a huge portion of the scooped "V" EQ pattern that took over metal and hard rock in the last 20 or 30 years, and especially during the mid to late 1990s "Nu-Metal" movement.
It's kind of ironic that such purveyors of great tone were exploited for one particular sound that their amps could make. The Dual Rectifier happened to be a rare amplifier that could maintain clarity and definition while scooping out so much of its midrange frequencies. And that ability drove a whole genre of music.
I'm sure that it's possible to get a good tone with a scooped midrange sound, but for most of us amateurs its just a recipe for mushy, indistinct guitars. But, the Mesa Mark series does have a rather pronounced midrange "honk", as the Mark V's manual says in the section about the graphic EQ. So when scooping a Mesa Mark, you're starting with more mids than a lot of other amps.
But you know, I think that the trend of down-tuning has actually helped this scooped mids equation by moving more of the frequency range of the guitar parts out of that scooped zone of frequencies. Take the graphic EQ of the Mark V for example (gives me an excuse to read the manual hehehehe). The slider frequencies are:
- 80 Hz
- 240 Hz
- 750 Hz
- 2200 Hz
- 6600 Hz
I'm not sure what the +/- travel of the sliders are, but my MXR EQ goes from -12 dB to +12 dB for each frequency. So with a traditional scooped V, 80 Hz would be at +12 dB, 240 Hz would be at 0 dB, 750 Hz would be at -12 dB, 2200 Hz would be at 0 dB, and 6600 Hz would be at +12 dB. That's a pretty exaggerated example, but I'm just thinking out loud here and I'll use that for an illustration. Given the wide spacing of these sliders, I'll have to assume that the Q is pretty wide for each slider as well, so each one will affect a pretty wide swath of frequencies on either side of the center frequency.
Ugh, doing arithmetic after midnight on a Friday night, I could be waaaaaay off base here, but here goes nothing...
Now 80 Hz is the fundamental tone of a note that's more than 2 octaves lower than the low E on a standard-tuned guitar. 240 Hz is the fundamental of a note somewhere around an octave below the open A string. 750 Hz, the center of the "scooped" frequency range, is somewhere around an F# fretted on the 3rd fret of the D string. And at 2200 Hz, where the frequencies return to a neutral setting, it's somewhere around the 9th fret of the high E string.
So I'd say that anywhere between the open low E string to the 9th fret of the high E string are going to be reduced in amplitude relative to the rest of the frequency spectrum, with about the 4th fret of the D string being the most heavily affected.
Now, tune that guitar down an octave and the "riffing" notes in 1st position on the low E, A and D strings move farther away from that most heavily attenuated frequency of F#5, while the higher notes on the fretboard move into that range. So the "soloing" frequencies start to get attenuated instead of the "riffing" frequencies. Well, no problem there. Most guys use some sort of signal booster for their soloing so it'll make up for the attenuated frequency range.
Eh, so its not all that strong of a case and this is such an exaggerated example that it might not actually translate to a real-world trend in the mid-scooping Nu-Metal movement. But its an idea at least. And its an excuse to drool over the Mk V's manual for a while.
My wife saw the manual pulled up on the laptop and told me "don't get your hopes up!". I had told her what one of them costs earlier today.
Feb 13, 2010 02:50 am Hmm. Interesting theory. How exactly do the note pitch and EQ settings work exactly, scientifically? is it all in the even order harmonics or whatever that term is? I'd be quite interested to read an article on this (or actually the whole even order harmonics to begin with. I really don't get that, is it basically that every note we hear has a tangled mesh of other notes being produced as well, but one is dominent?)
My grasp on everything like this is still pretty elementary. I'm getting there though. Learning a little basic synth programing helped me understand a bit more about the science of the waves behind this music. Plus, i've always been a bit of a science geek. I have a book called "your brain on music" that went into a lot of detail on similar topics. I outta read it again. Its been awhile.
Also i like what you said about this tone driving an entire genre of music on. Its kind of mind boggling, how music shapes and progresses with technology, trends, and a few truly stand out artists that inspire hundreds of copycats each with their own unique twist on things. And when it comes to tone progressing, I'm sure there are scientific reasons some tones are more pleasing than others. But its that imperfection, that quirk that grows on us, something raunchy just sticks in our heads about a certain sound and we want more.
Quincysanhttp://www.unitedmusicians.infoContributor
Since: Nov 11, 2007
Feb 13, 2010 04:22 pm Played through the 10watt mode on a fat strat up at Big Dudes for a while today. Sounds good but I want to hear the 90 watts.
I will say that the EQ sliders are very effective and satisfying. As I suspected, it's going to take a bit of experimentation to get the sound where I want it...but I got in the ballpark of my target tones pretty easily and the controls behaved appropriately. So much EQ control it's just great. Never had an amp like that. Most gain settings I flipped to were usable circumstantially.
"So do you want the black on black or do you want us to customize it?"
I could have black vinyl with a black grill...or I could have one of these...
Bubinga and African Mahogany respectively.
Getting an estimate to see what the damage would be for both scenarios. African Mahogany is pretty cheap, right???!?? (not serious)
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Feb 13, 2010 07:26 pm Of course African Mahogany isn't cheap! What, do you think it grows on trees?
Feb 14, 2010 11:29 pm thanks to all
Feb 17, 2010 12:49 pm Tadpui it worked thanks.
