Thanks so much for your help everyone! I believe I have come close enough for now and should switch over back to the other (guitar) tracks and try to get those closer now. I've learned a lot already from this.
But they've probably just double-tracked the melody and recorded the drone underneath to thicken up the intro. It's not uncommon in metal.
I've listened to tons of metal but I'm not super familiar with what's common for "cheating" on the production side except double/quad tracking. I always think of it in terms of "how could this be played live with the number of musicions the band has", which already falls flat in this example because I hear 3 different guitars during many parts but they only play live with two guitars and one bass.
They've probably also double-tracked the single note using two different positions, one on a high string and one on a low string. Same note, different place = thicker tone.
Interesting idea! I never thought of that. In stereo double tracking i could see it working, but in just layering two mono tracks, wouldn't the phase cancelation make it sound worse?
Bounce me the DI signal and let me know what AMP sims you're using and i'll try to re-create the tone and send you the preset. Don't forget IF you're trying to get the tone using a sample lib, you won't nail it. Most of the tone comes from the player.
Thanks so much for the offer! But I think I'm close enough for my purposes now and a big part of what is missing is most likely in my lack of skill as a guitar player and the guitar / gear itself.
Though... I've seen you have a youtube channel - if the sound of the band intrigues you, it might be worth making a video about how to create the sound of their new album. It has gotton 200k+ views in the first week and since they are very popular in their genre but still fairly unknown in the big picture, there seems to be very little content for fairly many search queries. E.g. if you check out the channel of "Dev Gohil" he got way more views than normal for him on a video that hat the name of the band in the title. Can't guarantuee it works, but it could drive some new people to your channel. You can check out their new Album here:
Not common, but it does happen in this genre.
lol!
Sounds like a regular tuning to me, which would make this totally playable.
But I have been wrong before.
Thanks for persisting, I think you're right. I looked deeper into the issue with the pick noise and it essentially seems to be an almost unsolvable problem, at least with realtime audio effects (there was mention of using audio restoration tools to get rid of it, but I don't want to do that). So that made me wonder how there is almost no pick noise on riff from the reference. I think it is because when picking accross two string (highest string played open, tuned to D and, playing the melody on the second highest string) you essentially mask the transient and harmonic from touching the string with the pick by having the other string still ring. The reason I thought "this can't be it" was my bias as a bad guitar player speaking. I thought this seemed too hard to play and indeed I can't play this. It took me playing the riff many times and painstakingly editing together the least bad parts of the various playthroughs to fake one that comes somewhat close. But that's ok, I just need the amp sound for now, when I write my own riffs I can easily play more to my strengths.
The goal for my template is that I want to compose in midi and then later start replacing the guitars piece by piece and I want to minimize "surprises" in terms of sound changing when I record them. Not sure how far that's realistic because shreddage sounds quite different than my guitar and playing, and as it turns out some of the stuff I need is just not replicable with samples, period. But if I can get at least "somewhat close" that would be pretty cool. I can lose myself for hours in tweaking these sounds, which is why I thought it's better for my sanity to just copy a reference track and then leave it like that. Otherwise I'll keep tweaking till my hair turns grey and never compose anything.
Here are the vsts and settings that I used:
If anyone wants to try to replicate that Mgla guitar tone, the "messiah_3.wav" IR is from an IR pack with 4 impulses that I bought years ago. It was called "Messiah Impulse Pack" and I'm not sure it's available anywhere anymore. Just use something else that has a full enough frequency spectrum and compensate with the match-eq. Except for the IR, EQ and Reverb every other plugin is free. I've used SPAN to compare the frequency spectrum and if you don't have a match EQ you could try to shape the sound with lots of bands on e.g. ReaEQ in Reaper. I'm mainly just mentioning this in case anyone finds this via google because it's possibly now the only place on the web where getting the Mgla guitar sound with (mostly) free vst plugins is discussed. Hope it helps someone get started.
p.s.: In the mp3 the riff plays only once, it's the original at the beginning and fades quickly into my version after the first ~1.5 seconds.