Taming high gain "hiss" without losing treble.

[Poparad]

I've been trying to dial in some higher gain tones lately, but I keep running into issues on some amps having way too much high pitched hiss going on (the Energyball is a big offender). Now, I love the tone of those amps, but is there a way to tame the hiss without totally killing the treble frequencies in the guitar tone? Or is it a lost cause? I mostly play clean or with a light overdrive, or with a Holdsworth-ian lead tone, so dialing in high gain stuff is not something I do often. In real life, I always played on a Deluxe Reverb, so I don't have much real world experience with things like Shivas, Bogners, EVH amps, etc...

 

[Hellbat]

Enable the input gate. Intelligent mode. -74 dB, 1.8 ratio. That should quiet things down when you aren't playing at least. Try up to -80db until you start getting the background noise back in.

 

[Scottckr]

If you're using the bright switch, try turning it off and bring up the bright knob instead, doesn't do exactly the same thing but it's pretty close.

 

[The Last Romantic]

Use a filter block to isolate the frequencies and find out where the hiss is coming from, then cut just those frequencies.

 

[Bojangles]

Yeah, PEQ is a great tool for this, widen the Q, move through the frequencies until you have accentuated the sound, dial in the Q, then drop it out, you could do this in your daw, then apply it in your chain when you have found it, that's presuming its not too wide band

 

[Poparad]

If you're using the bright switch, try turning it off and bring up the bright knob instead, doesn't do exactly the same thing but it's pretty close.

I stumbled across this last night, and it worked pretty well. I'm assuming it's because they affect the signal pre vs. post gain. The PEQ trick you other guys mentioned sounds like a promising line of inquiry. Thanks!