Can't hear guitar over everything else

D

dandufour

Member
I play thru a PA at home and practice. Both are set with bass mid and treble in the middle.I notice when I am at practice, I am constantly turning up. My guitar is getting buried really bad. Keyboards, vocals, and an occasional
other guitar are using the pa also. When I am the only one playing, everything sounds fine. As soon as everyone
starts playing, I am reaching for the output knob to turn up. I don't know anything about eq's, but I notice if I start
turning up the highs so things are not so bassy or muddy, the tone changes to what I no longer like.
Is there something I can do that won't change my tone? Our previous guitar player played thru a Marshall MG100
with an MG412 cabinet and he never disappeared in the mix.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks
Dan
 
What PA are you using? How many watts?

Use low cut to get rid of the sub lows to get the most headroom with your PA.

Tweak your sound in a band context and not separately. Remember you're not the bass player. You're the "middle" player. :)
 
There's like umpteen threads about this problem, you're not the first one to encounter this problem.

The problem is, when you set up your tone, you make it bass and treble heavy, but when you pay with your band, you compete for those frequences with bass and kick in the 40-100-200 Hz range, vocals and the damned cymbals in the upper mid and treble territory. And they inevitably win, it's their home turf, not yours. You need to find your place in the middle.

Oh, and don't use reverb at all unless it's some special ambient effect.

Keep in mind that most presets, factory and shared by others, are built with recording in mind, not all of them translate well to live sound.
 
Mid and turn up. Set your volumes at gig levels,with the band
Playing by yourself at low volumes, playing with a full band is night & day
 
dandufour said:
Both are set with bass mid and treble in the middle.
Click to expand...
just because BMT is set to the middle doesn't mean there is an even amount of BMT.

different rooms have different EQs. your practice room is probably smaller and therefore has more bass frequencies piling up.

you probably need to cut the bass frequencies of your guitar sound and boost the mid range a bit so it doesn't get lost in the mix.
 
This is why most people have their own monitor. You'll never hear yourself adequately relying on the band mix. It's not that your guitar is "buried", it's that you want to be hear yourself above what would be a proper mix.
 
The pa is a PreSonis with JBL Eon 15's. I do notice a lot of reverb in my patches.
Non are mine. They either came with the Axe or off the Axe-exchange. Looks
like almost everyone agrees the mids need to come up. I am not using the eq block
but notice there are several to choose from. Any 1 better than the other?
 
FractalAudio said:
This is why most people have their own monitor. You'll never hear yourself adequately relying on the band mix. It's not that your guitar is "buried", it's that you want to be hear yourself above what would be a proper mix.
Click to expand...
... and hence began the Loudness Wars of the Five Band Kings.

But yea, mids, mids, and more mids.
 
You either don't have an adequate P.A. or you need in ear monitors or a FRFR. If I go out front when we are doing a gig my guitar is blended and mixed in and there is no way I would want that mix for myself.
 
dandufour said:
The pa is a PreSonis with JBL Eon 15's. I do notice a lot of reverb in my patches.
Non are mine. They either came with the Axe or off the Axe-exchange. Looks
like almost everyone agrees the mids need to come up. I am not using the eq block
but notice there are several to choose from. Any 1 better than the other?
Click to expand...

Yes I would start by bypassing the Reverb block in the patches you use. That alone may help you to hear yourself better in the mix.
 
All very good answers. I will try raising the mids and backing off the reverb right away.
When I used a Boss GT100 in another band, I could never hear myself so I sent the left
channel to the pa and the right channel to a small Behringer 150 watt powered speaker
pointing right in my face. The guy that would run the pa always said I was too loud, but
when I would watch recordings of us at a gig, my solos were almost non existent. :-(
 
dandufour said:
All very good answers. I will try raising the mids and backing off the reverb right away.
When I used a Boss GT100 in another band, I could never hear myself so I sent the left
channel to the pa and the right channel to a small Behringer 150 watt powered speaker
pointing right in my face. The guy that would run the pa always said I was too loud, but
when I would watch recordings of us at a gig, my solos were almost non existent. :-(
Click to expand...
if your sound guy was just watching the meters saying you're too loud, you might have too much bass in your tone, which will make the meters bump up, but you might not hear the bass with your ears. it's just how it all works. be sure to reduce bass in your tone when you can to allow room for the other low-end instruments, as well as putting you in the mid-range, where guitar usually lives.
 
dandufour said:
I will try raising the mids and backing off the reverb right away.
Click to expand...

Try bypassing it completely, you don't need it in 99% of cases, if we're talking about live gigs. There's lots of natural reverberation in most rooms (actually, too much is often the case), and the FOH engineer will use reverb as well. He can always add more of it, but it's not possible to remove. One function of reverb is to put an instrument in the background, make it sound less present and "in your face". So if you want to hear yourself just get rid of it.
 
A dedicated monitor for your guitar will always win because you have complete control of the volume and it's not trying to reproduce anything else but your guitar.

That having been said, use the GEQ in 5 band passive mode post amp block; the mid slider up will cut a dense mix. Watch your levels though, I routinely boost by 5-7 db in the mids and lower my amp block level accordingly to avoid internal clipping.
 
Another trick is to decrease gain. Higher gain means also less dynamics and less dynamics means it's harder to find the right balance for the mix. When you are always too loud or too low but never just right it's often just missing dynamics.
 
Take a listen to some isolated guitar tracks and model your tone after that. Theres some recent Toto Isolated tracks floating around. You'd be surprised what the guitar actually sounds like isolated in the mix. Go for that kind of tone. Midrangey, kind of brash, etc. The more you crank your volume, you're really only poking out in that part of the frequency spectrum and not fighting the other frequencies (which will bury the guitar anyway)

 
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