How do you make this thick heavey (tight) djent sound in DAW with Axe-Fx 3 in your music?

GuitarLife

GuitarLife

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I am not heavily experienced in this genre, however in some passage of my idea in music, it would be a exiting kick in my music to have some djent sounding passage. It is some kind of experimental rock - heavy-and metal, with lots of wird synth landscape/grooves) .

It seems to me, that also the bass sound do have an important role to play in this, and the bass should maybe also be distorted to a sudden limit?

So far I understand that it's not about just put on gain and distortion on the guitar, but play deep tones. And the choice of amp must be important, I think
Is the only way to tune down and put on much thicker strings on my guitar?
And of course then have practice the staccato -muted right hand technic?

Someone who can clear this up a little for me
 
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Some of my personal choices for a good djenty tone are as follows. Basically, you want clarity and tightness to let your guitar cut through the mix and sound compact. This would normally imply taming the bass while keeping an aggressive tone:

+ Generally speaking, use a High Gain amp (5150, Uberschall, Diezel, etc.). Lower master volume, you want most of your gain from the pre-amp. Rise gain, but not too much. When you find the appropriate amount of gain chances are that you have too much. Always check if you can lower your gain level while maintaining the character you like.

+ Gently cut bass frequencies. That's bassist business, not yours. Put your beef on mids and bass-mids.

+ Get rid of palm-mute tails: noise gate post-amp sidechained with input. I personally use a TS808 to rise the signal a bit and then a gate before the amp, but this is not the most popular solution.

+ Tighten low-end: multiband compression is a popular option (watch excellent Leon Todd's tutorial on this here: ), and/or an envelope controlled high-pass filter to raise the cut-off frequency in harder strums.

Hope that's an starting point!
 
Thank you very much Lohengrin! , I will look at this with interest. You do not mention down tuning? Is this not important for the djent sound, as I believe?
 
GuitarLife said:
Thank you very much Lohengrin! , I will look at this with interest. You do not mention down tuning? Is this not important for the djent sound, as I believe?
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You're right, it is. It is part of the genre style guide indeed. A djent-focused band will most probably downtune and use extended range instruments, but I think you can still get a "djenty-like" tone without going crazy with an 8-string guitar. Go for heavily syncopated, palm mute intense riffs.

You were also right about the importance of the bass. You gain clarity by leaving those frequencies for them. I'm not sure about distortion on bass though, probably someone more into the style than me can give you a better advice on that.
 
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