Layering Rock Rhythm Guitar Parts

[Johnny Robbo]

Another vid, chaps


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO9YUQTGSNM

[Mike_S]

Brilliant vid John... very useful. Very well explained too.

Mike

[T.C. Elliott]

You explained the concept very well, I thought.  I might add that the use of two different guitars gives you slightly different tonal characteristics on each channel which furthers your point of having slight differences helping make a bigger sound.

"What if you're too lazy to tune two guitars?", you may ask. I often will use one guitar (yes, I'm lazy) and use the bridge pickup on one take and the neck pickup on the other. In addition, when mixing, I like to accentuate the sound of each side by slightly boosting and mainly cutting with EQ. For instance, my neck pickup sounds warmer, so I'll low shelf the extreme highs on that part. On the bridge pickup which is brighter, I'll cut more low mids and maybe mids. Which gives us two benefits. In addition to making the hard panned guitars stand out more and sound bigger, it will also clean up some sonic space for other instruments. For instance cutting low mids can help the bass guitar stand out without having to increase the volume. Cutting high mids and some highs can let the vocal sound cleaner.

"What if you are too lazy to record two parts, then?" I'm glad you asked. In that case you can use the Haas effect to fake the big sound that Robbo is showing us. His method is better, imo, but if you have one electric rhythm guitar track you can duplicate that track so you have two tracks of exactly the same part. Hard pan one left and one right. Then nudge one between 10 and 28 ms one way or the other so they aren't sitting exactly in the same spot. You'll have to play with the volume of the two tracks to get them to balance out. But there you have a wider, bigger sound without having to actually play your guitar two times. And if you do record your guitar two times, you can do the same thing to both tracks, essentially using the Haas effect twice, to get even bigger sounds (although sometimes this can backfire as using the effect too often can actually cause the mix to sound weaker.

But I've found that Robbo is exactly correct. The acoustic/electric double tracked and hard panned method results in consistently big sounding tracks that sound really good (as long as you play in time.)  I'm enjoying your videos, Johnny.

[Groundy]

Thanks John, Very helpful,
Good of you to take the time...

Alex