How to achieve a big rhythm guitar sound By: DAWsopenat7 No comments

If you’re a guitarist like me then you take a lot of time and care to achieve the guitar tone you want. You’ll find that it sounds great in the room through your speaker cabinet and through your studio monitors, but when you’ve recorded a take and you play it back with yours drums and bass, it suddenly falls flat, it’s not a big as it sounded in your environment and it’s now fighting with other instruments.

The great news is that there is a simple solution to this problem and you can achieve it without using a single plugin. It is important to note that the solution starts at the recording process. Take the part that you have just recorded, mute it, create a new audio track and record the same part again. Once this is done, un-mute the other track, pan one hard left and the other hard right and listen to the results. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the results! I remember the first time I implemented this technique and I was blown away so much so that i now make this my standard process for recording all rhythm guitars.

It’s important to keep your playing super tight when tracking and be sure to record with a click track. Don’t worry too much about slight differences between the two rhythm guitars as it will simply add to what is already a wider stereo image.

Please remember that copying and pasting takes and panning them left and right will not work and will only cause phase issues. To hear this for yourself, try copying a take and pan each of them to the left and right and you’ll hear them both in the middle and a bit louder (not stereo as they would be with multiple recorded takes). I won’t go into the properties of phase but the only way to achieve this effect is by tracking your rhythm guitars twice. The results are totally worth it!.

So if you’re looking for a simple way to get your rhythm guitars to sound bigger, try tracking them twice and pan them out wide. I promise this will do a lot more for your mix than a plugin ever will. It doesn’t have to stop with double tracking either, you can quadruple track your guitars and in my experience this is best done with the final pair of guitars being recorded with a slightly different tone. For example, I like to track two guitars with humbuckers and the other two with single coil pickups as I find these to add a little extra bite, particularly with distorted guitars. If you aren’t already double or quad tracking your guitars, try it out, you’ll never look back!