Looking to achieve a good metal tone for rhythm and lead/recording

B

Bencikss

New Member
Hello!

I'm an Axe Fx 2 XL owner for the past 2 years now, and I'm your typical "tone chaser" guitarist. Recently I've started to record and been thinking a lot about songwriting. I've realized that most of my presets were just "turn up the gain and get that tight palm mutes" style and they're also very bright which I've been starting to realize that it's probably not the best idea when it comes to recording good solo or rhythm guitar?
I would like to know how you approach into creating a really good metal tone for Rythm and Lead. My biggest idol is probably Jason Richardson for sure and I would really like to try out something close to him. But I also like the tone from a band Shokran, maybe in particularly, this video at 0:55
Any help would be appreciated :)
 
A bright tone isn’t a bad thing, even in the metal context. Really, when you isolate most recorded metal guitar tones, it’s practically a wall of white noise with some note definition. It IS a bit of a hassle to find the right level of bright, though. I get annoyed by frequencies around 4K and all my chugga chugga presets battle that in one way or the other.

Check out Leon Todd’s videos on how he dials in his Mesa presets, he goes on about multiband compression and using the PEQ to get rid of unwanted frequencies. That’s a really great starting point to figure out how to pinpoint frequencies you don’t dig.

Once you start recording, you’ll spend a few months figuring out what frequencies work in a mix and what doesn’t, then you’ll probably revisit that 6 months after that and have new conclusions. It’s a common mistake for guitarist to try to get the thickest, meatiest tone they can, only to find that all that meat gets cut out in the studio when making room for the bass/drums/keys. After a while of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, you can pretty much rely on a LPF/HPF to get them to sit in the track properly.

Check out some “Guitar Only” tracks on YouTube of famous recordings. Metallica’s Black Album isolated tracks are a good eye opener because as huge as that album sounds, the guitars are anything but huge sounding. All the balls on that album come from the drums and bass, much like a lot of modern metal. Hell, Nolly’s bass tones in Periphery make up a HUGE part of the overall sound.
 
Bencikss said:
Hello!

I'm an Axe Fx 2 XL owner for the past 2 years now, and I'm your typical "tone chaser" guitarist. Recently I've started to record and been thinking a lot about songwriting. I've realized that most of my presets were just "turn up the gain and get that tight palm mutes" style and they're also very bright which I've been starting to realize that it's probably not the best idea when it comes to recording good solo or rhythm guitar?
I would like to know how you approach into creating a really good metal tone for Rythm and Lead. My biggest idol is probably Jason Richardson for sure and I would really like to try out something close to him. But I also like the tone from a band Shokran, maybe in particularly, this video at 0:55
Any help would be appreciated :)
Click to expand...

buy jason's axe 3 patches in his site
 
I'll disagree with most guys here but anyway...my suggestion would be to try to get the best possible tone according to your taste and a tone that feels easier to your hands and inspires you, without worrying to much about the mix. After all, every mix is different and the mixing engineer can always shape the sound to sit well, depending on the arrangement of other instruments. Just be careful not to scoop too much of the mids/high mids, because it's better to have more than you need than less.

I personally prefer my rhythm tones with less mids and the leads more mid-focused, but that's only me. There is no rules, if you compare ten metal bands every guitar tone is different. Just try to find your own voice.
 
I'm new to the Axe FX world, but have been playing metal and recording my own stuff for a long time. In reading the replies here, I'm sort of in the middle. I got "my tone" quickly when I used to play live, employing a Marshall JCM900 hard-driven by an SD1 sitting atop 2 Carvin B 412s with JBL speakers in the bottom one and V30s in the top one. It was massive, like a pissed off T-Rex, but had to be turned up past 8 to really come to life.

Trying to duplicate that with a modeler, particularly when recording and you can't trust your ears to hear something at mixing volume you remember from jet engine volume, is challenging for sure.

To that end, I finally got where I wanted to be, solo guitar tone wise. And, then I started mixing my own songs at home (I went to school for sound engineering a long time ago, so I understand the basics) and quickly remembered a solo guitar tone doesn't sound the same in a mix.

Add as much beef as I love in solo'ed guitars and it just muddies the mix. All that glorious, unfettered cab thump just overloads the low end when you have bass and kick drums going on down there.

So, I spent some time really dissecting what I like in other bands (particularly Bolt Thrower's prime, early Death, modern Living Sacrifce and Soul Embraced) and could hear how the solo'ed guitar parts were different than the guitar parts in the mix, tonally. The guitar needs to serve it's place in the EQ band, allowing the bass and kick drum to handle the low end. And, if you like dirty bass as much as I do, that creates a whole other challenge in the 2-5k range.

So, I now have presets for jamming solo guitars and presets for mixing. But, in the end, as said above, the HPL/LPL is very helpful. I don't let any guitar frequencies below 100 get through in the mix, sometimes I even chop it at 125... My kick drums thrive as low as 70, the bass at 120 and the guitars true low end should start above that with just some sub-harmonics for character going on at the lowest range the guitar has available per the filters & EQ.

All that to be said, I still tone chase like mad. :lol: And, it took me about 20 hours to finally get happy I'd bought the Axe FX XL+, but now I absolutely love it.
 
And if you guys are curious, when Iron1 writes a song it literally sounds like he’s using bridge cables for strings, big, rusty bridge cables with shards of metal sticking off them, slicing and impaling bodies, allowing them to fall to the depths of the murky waters below. Rarely do I hear music that brings imagery to my mind that quickly, but every one of Iron1’s songs have done that.....and I’ve heard a bunch over the last year!
 
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