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Best way to get this Guitar Sound....

José Herring

Lost in Cyberspace
Hello,

So I'm working on something as an exercise then it turned out fairly decent so I've decided to turn it into a real track, but I need to replace the midi guitar with a real one. The part is simple enough that I could figure out how to play it on my guitar but need help on how to get this sound from my Gibson studio Les Paul if its possible.

Going to attempt it tomorrow and tips would be greatly appreciated.
 

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  • Killer Spice.mp3
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what do you have ?......gear wise ?

e
I have my dashing good looks.

Nah, but close.

I have a Gibson Studio Les Paul, Electro Harmonix Big Muff and DS-1 Distortion Pedal. I usually use a Preamp and run things into GTR3, or Guitar Rig, I use to have Positive Grid but since lost it on my system.

In essence I'm not much of a guitar player but hoping that I can use some combination of what I have plus software to get the sound because I'm pretty sure I can figure out the 3 note riff on the guitar to add an element of non midi to this thing.

Thx.
 
Running your guitar through a high-gain amp or amp sim should do the trick, plus maybe put a tube screamer type pedal in front of it. Use the amp's EQ to take some bass and mids out of the guitar.

Also play with different pickup combinations.

I just did a quick test running my PRS guitar into THU and some of the metal presets came very close.
 
Running your guitar through a high-gain amp or amp sim should do the trick, plus maybe put a tube screamer type pedal in front of it. Use the amp's EQ to take some bass and mids out of the guitar.

Also play with different pickup combinations.

I just did a quick test running my PRS guitar into THU and some of the metal presets came very close.
Thank you,

What amp combo did you use in TH-U?
 
The M.Plexi and the Rock'75(UK) - both are based on Marshall amps, I believe. Plus a Tube Nine distortion pedal.

I didn't spend any time tweaking the sound, just wanted to see if there were any presets that got in the ballpark. The ones that did it were the first two in one of the free preset packs that Overloud gives away every month - in this case it was the R. Blackmore pack.
 
You'll need a drop tuning for that sound. I'm saying just as havent found it mentioned in your post. All the mentioned virtual amps/cabs have tons of presets that will sound just great.

For this I would not use real pedals/amps (definitely not a Big Muff with a Les Paul) unless you're a skilled player, as the style implies a full control of your picking ability and you'd probably need a decimator/gate pedal at the end of the chain, as many do, to tighten up notes. But, mostly, you'll have less flexibility in fixing eventual technical difficulties in your daw.

So my suggestion is get a drop tuning (even halftone down for all the strings and 1.5 tone for the lowest string), just apply cable from LP direct to your interface and just find the right preset, making sure it includes a good gate. Les Paul has a traditionally doped low end (thats why it works great with distortion without getting too harsh or acid) so I think it will work fine.

I recently got the Electrum Core from United Plugins (the guys who make FrontDaw and Unichannel) and have to say I pretty much like it and it's very light on CPU. It has quite a few high gain settings.
And, mostly, at 9 euros is a steal.
 
you can do all this in Guitar Rig. It's one of the high gain modern amps. It's sorta slipknot level distortion. Definitely NOT classy . no marshals or normal plain overdrive . Just go through all the presets for the nasty amps until you hear something close. Distortion is almost pure saturation to my ears. And yes it's drop tuning.

best

ed
 
To my ears it sounds layered with a synth, and the guitar is not as thick with distortion as you may think. I would try Guitar Rig, maybe if you have the Rammstein pack, dial the distortion a little bit down, and put on some organ type effect. If you had a guitar synth pedal, that might do the trick also.

But in Guitar Rig, experiment a little with ring.mod, chorus, vibe fx. They can sound like that when dialed in. Or do one layer with distorted guitar only and one more with cleaner sound with a lot of fx, and blend to taste.
 
To play the riff, you'd have to tune down either a whole step to D, or use a drop D tuning where you only drop the low E string to a D. That's actually the easier way to play this stuff for not-really-guitar players.

Other than that, I assume it's supposed to be a typical very heavy, distorted tone. So that would be played on the bridge pickup through a high gain amp. There's free amp sims which do this kind of thing pretty well and definitely better than Guitar Rig. The Ignite Emissiary for example. That's one of those that everyone uses who can't or doesn't want to afford a commercial amp sim from ML Soundlab, Neural DSP etc.

It probably includes presets that are in the ballpark, possibly something with "Thrash", "Djent", "Chug" or similar in the title. :grin: EQ wise low cut either at 80 or 100 Hz, depending on the feel, and a high cut at 8k or so. Mids can be pulled out a bit (300-600 Hz, wide Q, depending on the voicing of the amp) to make it more "brutal", but don't go too far, otherwise the sound is gonna disappear in the distance.

Potentially problematic resonances to listen to: 800-900 Hz, 1k - 1.25k, 2.2k, 3.5k, 4.7k. Those are roughly the ones that can sound "whistly", "quacky" or "telephone-y" and can make a highly distorted tone a bit fatiguing. It's just gentle corrections most of the time though. Guitar tone shouldn't be carved up too much.

Nembrini Audio has free Overdrive/Distortion pedals - Tubescreamer, ProcoRAT and Klone Centaur sims to be exact. Use these before the amp to push the "tubes" to a real cutting, thick distortion and also tighten up the flubbiness.

I sometimes hear AAA movie soundtracks where they tried to add guitars to the orchestra and it often sounds totally out of place, weak, anemic and it just screams "we have no idea how this stuff works".

One of the "secrets" to these really aggressive tones is double/quad tracking. It's never gonna sound "right" with just one guitar track. You gotta play the same thing twice and pan one mono track hard left and the other hard right. If you're doing quad, the other two can be 70-80 left and right. We don't want any "imperfections" or "human element" or any of that bullshit, you gotta lay down the parts TIGHT. Aim for identical takes - it's gonna sound lively and human either way, but if it's not tight, it will be a mess.

If the tone has too much distortion, multi-tracking will result in a too mushy, flubby sound that has no definition and attack and loses the tightness which makes this stuff heavy. So it's better to keep the distortion to "just enough" and track the riff 2-4 times, it will sound fat AND aggresive at the same time (provided you played all the takes tight enough).

Don't overdo it with the low end on the guitars. The low end violence of that massive metal sound comes from the bass guitar. So why not do it right and add that in as well. A vst will have to do if you don't have a real bass. You can run that in two parts - one clean track and one copy where you distort the midrange. You can achieve that by either using a multiband distortion plugin, or maybe copying the clean track and hard-filtering the low and top end out and run that through a distortion pedal, the amp sim or even something like FabFilter Saturn, iZotope Trash etc.

That sometimes doesn't sound all too pleasing on its own, but this added mid range distortion lets the bass blend in with the guitars better while retaining a clean, big, fat, defined low end.

Finally, there's also a distorted synth in the audio example, so that might be fun to add in to the mix as well.
 
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What’s the BPM?

EDIT:

You could also duplicate the L & R Guitar track and sum it to a bus, then use an M/S EQ to completely remove the low end from the Mid channel along with some of the high end. Then on the side channel roll off some high end and just a tiny bit of the low. Maybe even add some extra dirt to the filtered channel, then blend it under the L & R Guitars.

That way the Bass gets loads of room for the centre channel and the guitar still sound meaty because the low end for the guitar is living on the side channels.
 
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To play the riff, you'd have to tune down either a whole step to D, or use a drop D tuning where you only drop the low E string to a D. That's actually the easier way to play this stuff for not-really-guitar players.

Other than that, I assume it's supposed to be a typical very heavy, distorted tone. So that would be played on the bridge pickup through a high gain amp. There's free amp sims which do this kind of thing pretty well and definitely better than Guitar Rig. The Ignite Emissiary for example. That's one of those that everyone uses who can't or doesn't want to afford a commercial amp sim from ML Soundlab, Neural DSP etc.

It probably includes presets that are in the ballpark, possibly something with "Thrash", "Djent", "Chug" or similar in the title. :grin: EQ wise low cut either at 80 or 100 Hz, depending on the feel, and a high cut at 8k or so. Mids can be pulled out a bit (300-600 Hz, wide Q, depending on the voicing of the amp) to make it more "brutal", but don't go too far, otherwise the sound is gonna disappear in the distance.

Potentially problematic resonances to listen to: 800-900 Hz, 1k - 1.25k, 2.2k, 3.5k, 4.7k. Those are roughly the ones that can sound "whistly", "quacky" or "telephone-y" and can make a highly distorted tone a bit fatiguing. It's just gentle corrections most of the time though. Guitar tone shouldn't be carved up too much.

Nembrini Audio has free Overdrive/Distortion pedals - Tubescreamer, ProcoRAT and Klone Centaur sims to be exact. Use these before the amp to push the "tubes" to a real cutting, thick distortion and also tighten up the flubbiness.

I sometimes hear AAA movie soundtracks where they tried to add guitars to the orchestra and it often sounds totally out of place, weak, anemic and it just screams "we have no idea how this stuff works".

One of the "secrets" to these really aggressive tones is double/quad tracking. It's never gonna sound "right" with just one guitar track. You gotta play the same thing twice and pan one mono track hard left and the other hard right. If you're doing quad, the other two can be 70-80 left and right. We don't want any "imperfections" or "human element" or any of that bullshit, you gotta lay down the parts TIGHT. Aim for identical takes - it's gonna sound lively and human either way, but if it's not tight, it will be a mess.

If the tone has too much distortion, multi-tracking will result in a too mushy, flubby sound that has no definition and attack and loses the tightness which makes this stuff heavy. So it's better to keep the distortion to "just enough" and track the riff 2-4 times, it will sound fat AND aggresive at the same time (provided you played all the takes tight enough).

Don't overdo it with the low end on the guitars. The low end violence of that massive metal sound comes from the bass guitar. So why not do it right and add that in as well. A vst will have to do if you don't have a real bass. You can run that in two parts - one clean track and one copy where you distort the midrange. You can achieve that by either using a multiband distortion plugin, or maybe copying the clean track and hard-filtering the low and top end out and run that through a distortion pedal, the amp sim or even something like FabFilter Saturn, iZotope Trash etc.

That sometimes doesn't sound all too pleasing on its own, but this added mid range distortion lets the bass blend in with the guitars better while retaining a clean, big, fat, defined low end.

Finally, there's also a distorted synth in the audio example, so that might be fun to add in to the mix as well.
This is pretty much all you need here in a single post. The quad tracking and bass guitar parts are especially key in getting a huge sound with less gain.
 
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