By Various
I'm doing a demo for
a local act and we've tracked layer upon layer of overdubbed guitars:
there are 10 rhythm parts with various chord voicings, and 10 lead parts
playing variations on the solo and riff hook. A few of the layers are
duplicates, but we had four different guitars, playing bar chords, open chords
and power chords for the rhythm parts.
If
you're mixing many layered guitar parts, consider identifying sub‑sections of
each and giving them their own characters with different amp‑sim treatments and
re‑amping.
My question is: how many should I use? The lead tracks
are mostly duplicates and there isn't much distinction between them, so I'll
comp those later; it's the rhythm that's bugging me. The parts are tight and
played on nice instruments, so the issue isn't so much of musicality, it's of
fitting all the variations into the mix without it sounding like mush. Do
I try and fit them all in? Or comp them down to make one or two awesome
tracks? It's essentially a bog‑standard rock sound, so double‑tracking the
rhythm makes sense, with each part hard panned, but how would you incorporate
the other rhythm tracks? We DI'd the guitars, as we can then use IK Multimedia
Amplitube to change the tones. I assume I would try different Amplitube
settings for each pass?
Via SOS web site
SOS contributor Mike Senior replies:
In my experience, unless someone's put in a fair few hours of punching‑in
and/or editing, most tracked‑up walls of guitar aren't tight enough to sound
punchy. Even if the timing of the individual picking transients is on the
money, the lengths of the notes or the point at which the strings are damped
doesn't match up nearly as well and also affects the rhythm. So my first
suggestion would be to focus on the tightness of any layers of the same basic
guitar part. This is especially relevant if you're stereo panning them, because
human hearing is extremely sensitive to inter‑ear timing differences. If you're
having trouble with mushiness, you may find that there are some tuning problems
too, so be critical and ditch anything sour. The closer the tuning of your
parts, the more the pitched elements of the part will reinforce, and this will
help keep the harmonies of the part clear despite any layering you may do.
For a middle‑of‑the‑road rock
sound, it's typical for the stereo field to be balanced by putting double‑tracked
rhythm parts on opposing sides of the image, and if you're going to have more
than two parts going at the same time it'll probably give you a more
satisfying spread if you don't pan them all to the same two places. You'd also
expect the guitar arrangement to fill out for the choruses, so you're sensible
to think in terms of adding more overdubs for those sections, plus you could
add more extreme‑panned layers here while leaving the verses slightly narrower.
That said, while added overdubs can help increase the illusion of size, they
will tend to make the composite sound more bland and homogenous, as well as
pushing the guitars away from the listener: using more guitar parts means that
each has to be lower in level to avoid making the rest of the mix sound small.
Every producer tends to make their own compromise in this regard, so you can
only make an informed judgement by comparing your mix to a few commercial
tracks in the style.
Beyond that, if you've got that many
parts available to you, I'd use them to bring some light and shade to the
arrangement. Most riffs are made up of smaller musical figurations and fills,
and you can really bring them to life if you give each of the different sub‑sections
of a riff its own character, by altering the balance of the parts from
moment to moment. The easiest way to do this is to line all the tracks up
together with different modelled amps and then edit different bits away from
each track. If you use clearly contrasted settings from Amplitube, this could
make life easier. Because your guitars are DI'd, you could also use them
to drive virtual stomp‑boxes and amps at different moments, by splitting the DI
audio between sequencer tracks with different plug‑in settings.
You have access to the amp settings,
so you shouldn't need much processing during the mix, beyond perhaps
a little low cut to tame any general woofing around that might interfere
with your bass part. However, in my experience, layering up parts that all use
the same amp‑modelling engine seems to make it trickier to get a really
solid sound, so I'd experiment with other modelling options as well (even
comparatively lo‑fi ones) — or, even better, try re‑amping a few of the parts
through a real amp and speaker to catch the sound of some real air moving.
Published September 2009
Published September 2009
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