You’ve started a final mix and frankly, it’s not happening. You pull up the faders and are presented with a wall of guitars that blend well harmonically — but not sonically — and there’s no room for anything else in the mix. Never fear. Sweetwater’s here with some tips and tricks to help make your mix come together with guitars that sound bigger, well-defined, and more dimensional.
Use Different Guitars
Let it be said that carefully curating the guitars you use — acoustic, electric, humbucker, single-coil, extended-range, 12-string, Nashville-tuned, etc. — for particular parts in an arrangement can make a huge difference in terms of things coming together easily when you get to the mixdown stage of a project. Even on the same guitar, that doubled rhythm part might work better voiced differently or simply up an octave. But as we’re going to be exploring “fix-it-in-the-mix” techniques you can deploy to add zest to your guitar tracks after they’ve been recorded, let’s assume that a client has sent you a Pro Tools session to mix and replacing guitar tracks is not an option.
Think in Three Dimensions
It helps to think of your mix in three dimensions: width (stereo spread), height (frequency range), and depth (individual relative track volume, reverb, and delay). As you record, overdub, and make rough mixes, you are developing a mental picture of your final mix — or, at least, you should be. Tracks recorded this way will mix themselves when you’ve been mixing them all along. But, right now, you’re stuck with that wall of guitars somebody else has recorded. So, the first thing you want to do is to create some space in the mix.
Create Space in the Mix
Start by muting all the guitars. Get a good bass and drum mix and bring up the rhythm guitars one by one. Do they lock in with the bass and drums? Remember, you can’t replace them — but, if they’re too on top of (or behind) the beat, you can delay (or advance) them fractionally to better sit in the track. And, assuming you have approval from the client/producer, you can also keep a track muted if it simply doesn’t work.
Dump Tracks
Sometimes less is more. Having multiple guitars all competing for attention dilutes the power of a track. Keep in mind that many of the epic guitar-centric hits of the last half century — the Rolling Stones come to mind here — were driven forward with no more than two (complimentary) rhythm guitar tracks. Doubling a rhythm part with a different guitar is particularly effective. Again, if you’re a for-hire mixing engineer, then you may or may not have the option to banish tracks at will; but, depending on your professional status (and persuasion abilities), you may be able to convince your clients to be reasonable — and try it your way.
Populate the Stereo Spectrum
Use the stereo spectrum to spread out guitars and create a sense of air in the mix. Start with those two complimentary rhythm guitars panned hard left and hard right, still monitoring with drums and bass. And, speaking of the bass, is it in the pocket? For the sake of establishing a baseline (pun intended), let’s assume it’s a 4-string electric bass recorded directly. Sonically, does it take up too much room? If so, it may need some compression to tighten it up. Bring in the lead vocal, and note how everything’s sounding together. You can then try cheating in the two guitars a little (pulling their panning more toward the center) so each one is not completely absent from the opposite channel. If you’re contractually obligated to use four rhythm guitar tracks — or they just happen to sound awesome together — so be it. Pan the four guitars hard left, hard right, half left (9 o’clock), and half right (3 o’clock) so the four guitars are spread out evenly, and give them equal amplitude. If all four guitars are distinctly audible and balance well with bass, drums, and lead vocal, then you’re in good shape. Time to move on.
Equalize Judiciously
Equalization (EQ) is an effective tool for making guitars work together and for opening up sonic real estate for bass, drums, vocals, and solos. Let’s go back to the example of those four rhythm guitar parts. Let’s say they’re all beefy Les Pauls, bridge pickup, through cranked Marshalls. Together, they form a thick, impenetrable wall. It’s a muddy mess, but the producer insists on using them all. Cutting (as opposed to boosting) at select frequencies to suck out duplicated areas of the frequency spectrum can thin out these tracks and make them fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. After that, you can (sparingly) boost certain frequencies to make individual guitars more distinct. Unless you’re compensating for a particularly poor recording, however, it’s wise to be judicious with additive EQ.
Compression and Parallel Compression
Compressing guitars (and bass) effectively squeezes them into their own “envelopes,” which can be useful to make multiple guitars in an arrangement more distinct from each other. But there’s a catch: Make sure the attack setting is slow enough so that the compressor doesn’t clamp down on the front of the notes, which will exacerbate your muddiness problem instead of solving it. Solid-state opto-compressors like the classic LA-3A work well on electric guitars and bass. With compression, it’s not all or nothing. You can use parallel compression, a technique commonly used on drums, to retain some of the natural dynamics of the performance. It involves sending a mult of your dry, uncompressed track through a compressor and mixing the compressed signal back in with the uncompressed signal. Most modern hardware and software compressors are equipped with a dry/wet blend control that accomplishes this without patching.
Create Depth with Relative Track Volumes
You can use relative track volumes to create depth in the mix. When too many tracks are competing for attention at the front of the mix, dropping a guitar back just enough so that it can still be heard gives the mix ear-catching dimension. Ideally, you want to create a “frame” for the lead vocal, so you have to leave space for it in the center of the soundscape you’re constructing. Bass, kick, and snare drum are pretty much all that should be sharing center stage with the lead vocal.
Ambience: Reverb and Delay
In addition to an instrument’s volume, creative applications of reverb and delay help to create the illusion of depth in a mix — although they can also muddy up a mix that’s too full already. Today’s DAWs offer an endless supply of high-quality reverbs from sophisticated convolution engines to old-school plate and spring emulations — and everything in between. Rooms, halls, and cathedrals; pristine modern and glitchy vintage digital delays; analog delays complete with tape wow and flutter — they are all there for your choosing with a few mouse clicks. Once you overcome the option anxiety and find the right ambience treatments for the tracks you’re mixing, you then have to place them so that they enhance the mix without sacrificing clarity. Automating your reverb triggers and tails can be useful to define the temporal shape of your ambiences with concise actuations and durations that don’t step on other tracks.
Re-amping for Powerful Tone Shaping
We’ve saved the best for (next to) last. By all means, the above measures are all valuable tools for recording engineers whether they’re working with guitars or kazoos. But sometimes you have to break out the big guns. If you’ve heard about re-amping and haven’t tried it yet, you’re in for a treat — it’s a powerful way to reshape guitar tone. If you plug your guitar directly into the DI input of your audio interface, record a guitar track in your DAW, and assign an amp model to that track, then you’re already practicing a form of re-amping. You can change amps at will and even string a couple of them in series to generate seriously gnarly tone. More traditionally, you would use a hardware re-amp box (Radial makes several excellent ones) to send a previously recorded guitar signal to a physical amp and record it again. Then you can mix the re-amped guitar with the original or discard the original. The re-amp interface handles all the impedance and level matching for you. However you go about it, you can get exotic with stereo, layered, and even multiband re-amping involving multiple guitar amps (either hardware or virtual).
The Acoustic Guitar Resonating Chamber Trick
Technically, this is a form of re-amping; but, instead of an amp, you’re using an acoustic guitar. Send your previously recorded guitar signal out to a speaker situated near and directed at a miked acoustic guitar on a stand. The acoustic will resonate sympathetically, producing a unique ambience that you can apply to the original guitar for pleasant, zither-like textural flavoring that will make it stand out. Experiment with different acoustic guitars — 12-strings or Nashville-tuned, for instance. Remove strings; try different tunings. You can employ variations of this technique by deploying cymbals, which will produce a shimmering halo effect; an acoustic grand or upright piano — or, for that matter, anything that resonates. Whatever you use, the effect is subtle (and typically only works in sparse arrangements), so we recommend a quiet room, a sensitive condenser mic, and plenty of preamp gain.
In Closing
So, there it is. We all want to nail the perfect take — with the perfect sound — right from the get-go; but sometimes you have to work with what you have. To that end, these essential studio tools and techniques can be used to bring your guitar tracks to life. As always, should you need expert professional advice, your Sweetwater Sales Engineer is just a phone call away at (800) 222-4700. So go forth, be creative, and have fun. Exercising good taste is optional, but highly recommended!