Baritone guitars to fatten bass tones in mix?

Tahoebrian5

Fractal Fanatic
Just wondering if any of you recording gurus have experimented with using baritone guitars as a halfway house between guitar and bass for recording rhythms? I’m talking about just mixing in just enough to support the bass.

ive tried finding some examples but mostly I get djenty stuff when googling anything to do with baritone or 7/8 string guitars and mixing.

I’m mainly looking for a way to get the tone in my head to come out of a mix and no amount of distorted or split path bass setups are getting me there. I can’t really think of a reference sound, but if I had to describe what I’m thinking of its medium gain but heavy with Iron Maiden style compositions if they were down tuned a bit.

My thought at this point is to double track my normal modded Marshall style guitar left and right, then have a third baritone guitar track down the middle with a somewhat modified arrangement somewhere between the bass line and guitar rhythms.

Anyway let me know if anyone has any examples or have experimented with this. I don’t currently have a baritone guitar so trying to do a bit of research before I go all in.
 
Well, no one got mad when Dug from King’s X used his 8-string bass which would effectively be doing the same thing. Each additional string was an octave higher than the regular EADG strings.

Which unit are you using? I got a pretty sick bass tone, specifically going for a King’s X tone, that I can send you the preset for. The IR’s have a lot to do with getting everything coming out punchy and clear, but not all nasty sounding as a result of the distortion/grit involved.

I’m using it here-

 
Ya your bass tone sounding pretty good!
Im using an axe3 mk1, and musicman Sterling 5 string bass.

@RevDrucifer lemme put hands on that preset/IR bro... (please)

The IR is a York IR, it’s an Ampeg 8x10, so you might be able to find one similar. There’s also a Recto cab on the guitar amp, if I remember right, but I’m pretty sure that was a factory cab. It’s going to sound distorted as hell, but in a mix it doesn’t sound nearly as distorted. In the King’s X tune I also captured a separate DI and mixed it in with the preset. Taking all the low end out of the distorted tone and letting the clean(er) tone do the heavy lifting is how ya get the balls to remain intact.

I’m on my iPad and can’t figure out where I saved the preset to on here, but it’s at the bottom of the first post here-

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/some-kings-x-on-bass.171612/
 
I know Devin Townsend used cleaner (but still distorted) guitars on some songs on Empath, while blending synths to provide more distortion. So, you get the punch and clarity of the less distorted guitars, but a more uniform waveform to work with from the synths. I really want to try this myself. I can imagine it would work well on bass.
 
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