What is your “guitar channel “ when recording?

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mrdavek

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I am beginning my recording journey and looking for advice.

I am primarily going to be recording instrumental guitar.

I have an AxeFX 3 going into Logic Pro.

i also have an Apollo interface.

my question is.... what should I set up as my guitar channel for plug ins?

any all help would be greatly appreciated
 
mrdavek said:
my question is.... what should I set up as my guitar channel for plug ins?
Click to expand...
The simple answer is; Any track you create in your DAW providing it is the correct 'type' of track. In Pro Tools that would be an audio track, as opposed to an instrument or midi track. Other DAW's may have different terms but the principal applies across the board.

The trick is in assigning the correct input to that track, so that it identifies with the output of the AxeIII.
 
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mrdavek said:
I am beginning my recording journey and looking for advice.

I am primarily going to be recording instrumental guitar.

I have an AxeFX 3 going into Logic Pro.

i also have an Apollo interface.

my question is.... what should I set up as my guitar channel for plug ins?

any all help would be greatly appreciated
Click to expand...
I use a some plug-ins of my own, but in addition to those, there are a few commercially available plug-ins that I use often. For example, Valhalla Shimmer, StutterEdit, Molot, Soothe2, Ozone.
 
I don't use much on guitars coming from Fractal - mostly some channel eq and compressors ... the stock stuff in Logic is pretty good.
 
A guitar channel can be pretty simple.
For me the most important plugin on the guitar channel is an IR player such as Ignite NadIR, so that you can easily swap or blend IRs in post.
Parametric EQ to taste.
A compressor can be useful, but I wouldn't worry about that until everything is recorded - IMO it's better to get the dynamics right at the source, and polish with a compressor later.
Delay if desired, parallel via a bus.
There are heaps of good reverbs out there. This too I find more convenient to use in parallel.
Everything else is FX and I'd rather use a seperate channel for that.
 
You have an AxeFx - the sound coming out of it should be pretty darn close to perfect for what you want with your recording. Only plug-in I use (with ProTools) is a delay that acts like a stereo enhancer.

Vocals and master track should have stuff like compression, reverb, delay, eq. Guitar and bass should be dialed in at the source, meaning the AxeFx.
 
I don't use Logic but I do use Studio One and each channel has a set of presets broken down by instrument and only uses stock plugins. If Logic has this function it may help as a starting point.

Do yourself a huge favour though. When starting out recording, forget about buying plugins from 3rd parties, avoid that rabbit hole and Instead learn the ones in the DAW. This will save you a lot of money, remove you from the plug in rabbit hole, and more so, allow you to learn which plugging work for you and which dont, then replace the ones that dont.

As mentioned above, the Axe sound should be close to perfect. If you are compressing and eqing heavily in the DAW, I would rethink your patches in the Axe. Not only will this make sure that the signal you record is good, it will also offload a heap of CPU processing (remember shit in, shit out). A great way to do this is to either use the Looper in the Axe to record a loop of your playing then start to create the sound in your head, so you are not also hearing the dry guitar, or learn how to reamp: the latter being the better option so you can hear the changes in context of the song.

A good general rule of thumb, expecially if you are doing anything effects laden is record everything that is non modulation into the DAW (amp, cab, overdrive, compression, eq etc) and use the modulation plugins (delay, tremolo, flanger etc) in the DAW for more control.

Just a few things to consider.
 
Great comments above.
I just create 1 center guitar track and 1 panned hard left and 1 panned hard right then load my preset from AXE, gain stage it and done until mix down, love logic and my apollo
 
In the Apollo, you might want to explore their console preamp emulations - before I switched to RME I quite liked the Helios preamp/EQ IIRC.
 
For guitar tracks I only use EQ after to get the tracks to fit in with the rest of the instruments. While you certainly have more control by adding effects in after the fact, that and going for full takes start to finish are two things I still do that remain from my early recording days.

I found I was dealing with optionitis when I first started teaching myself to record/mix in a DAW and learned to treat the songs like a snapshot in time rather than something I had to labor over until I reached some intangible idea of “perfect”. That said, I figure out a lot of what I’m going to do as I‘m writing the song. I generally write in Logic, by the time I’ve finished writing a full song I’ve played it about 100x over and generally have the sounds all dialed in by then.
 
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