Billie Jean Compression

MKeditor

Experienced
David Williams funky clean in Michael Jackson's Billie Jean has a great clean, funky tone. His solo starting at 3:30 is very compressed. How would you approach replicating that extreme squish? Two compressors?
 
I’ve got no suggestions for you but keep in mind when trying to get these great tones from recordings - most of that tone comes from the board, post. Outboard compression, often in series. Outboard EQ, Reverb and delay. Most guitar tracks were virtually record dry in those days. Amp alone. No one wanted effects to mess with the mixing engineers decisions and control over the soundscape. It just give us a bigger challenge.
 
I thought I read that his lead part was taken from a demo cassette he brought in and they liked the lines so much they used that. Probably still lots of post effects. I just use single coils and set the compression ratio to about 6 or so.
 
I’ve got no suggestions for you but keep in mind when trying to get these great tones from recordings - most of that tone comes from the board, post. Outboard compression, often in series. Outboard EQ, Reverb and delay. Most guitar tracks were virtually record dry in those days. Amp alone. No one wanted effects to mess with the mixing engineers decisions and control over the soundscape. It just give us a bigger challenge.

I agree that a lot of clean tracks were direct into the console. Nevertheless, I think the Axe-FX should be able to replicate that. It might take a powerful wizard though.
 
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Sounds amazing!

Have a wedding tomorrow. However -- still not taking out the Axe 3 until I get the new foot controller. Will do the gig with the 2xl+. Won't have time to recreate preset for 2. Next time.
You can convert your presets with Fractool. I just imported a bunch and am working my way through them to see how it went. So far I noticed the bypass on the amp block reset to thru, but otherwise the preset sounded good. So that should save you a lot of time.
 
It's been a few years and I still haven't found any info on what David or whoever engineered the demo at Michael's home studio did to achieve that compressed tone.
 
It's been a few years and I still haven't found any info on what David or whoever engineered the demo at Michael's home studio did to achieve that compressed tone.
Have you tried @Admin M@'s preset above? Nails it, I think.
 
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