This is a great point! Type of microphone or mic pairings and placement makes a huge difference in the sound. At the risk of being more off-topic is keeping in mind how the guitar is going to sit in the mix. Sometimes a distorted rhythm tone that sounds great on its own will muddy up a mix because it’s eating into the drum and bass frequencies. There’s some Zeppelin, Beatles, and Who tracks where the guitars on their own sound brittle but in the mix they’re so heavy.
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From Line6’s promotional material, it sounds like that’s what they attempted to do with the Helix: fine-grained modeling of the circuit design and components of target amplifiers.
Kind of what I was getting at, albeit vaguely, in mentioning sound people compensating at the board. Mics, preamps, channel strips, compressors, and the presence of other instruments factor in to define our sound.
Guitarists and engineers are evolving to hear and expect differently. Peace, Daniel
NOTHING in guitar gear is an accepted fact. 
I’m personally an amp distortion guy - there’s something about the way a Mesa lead channel sounds and responds that works very well for me. You see plenty of other guys using a clean amp with a distortion pedal out front for their main tone, however, and lately you see plenty of guys doing BOTH, for example using a Tube Screamer as a clean boost in front of a Recto, a la Andy Sneap.
If I had to make a broad generalization it’s that this is something that’s changed with amp design and up through even the 80s you generally saw most rock players relying on pedals for their gain because amps alone just didn’t put out that much saturation, but with the advent of the modern high gain amplifier circuit(s) - Soldano SLO, Mesa Recto, Peavey 5150, etc, you suddenly have preamps capable of putting out almost unusable amounts of saturation, and you don’t NEED a solid state gain circuit outside of the amp to get sustaining saturation. In the case of the TS/Recto thing, for example, that’s less to juice the front end into additional saturation, so much as change WHERE it’s saturation by hitting the midrange higher and rolling off a little bit of low and high end.
Even that though is a huge generalization.
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Great point. Someone in a home studio forum pointed this out to me by sharing some guitar-only tracks off of a recent RHCP album. I was shocked by how brittle it sounded. It’s a tone I would have immediately rejected outright. Yet, in the context of the full mix, the guitars sounded outstanding.
I’m always shocked how bright and thin raw guitar tracks sound in hard rock and metal. It’s even worse if you get to here solo’d individual mono tracks rather than stereo pairs - you’re taking what are NOT big sounds, and between the stereo spread and the context of the bass and drums in the mix, turning them into something that sounds huge.
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There is only so much sonic real estate to occupy. So I think of it like crossovers in a home theater setup. The total frequency response you are looking for is X. You can choose to cut that off high, where most of it is the bass, and only the tippy top is being provided by the guitars - pick attack and high-end harmonics, mostly. Or you can choose a lower crossover frequency, where the guitars get to occupy more mids, and the bass gets less space.
I like option 2. An ice pick guitar track is an unappealing sound, and just another element contributing to the super treblification of rock mixing, where guitars are slammed with 8k or 4k or something to make them stick out in the mix.
How are you handling the bass here, then, a lot of sub-lows and, from the sound of it, leaving some space for the “growl” and “clang” of the string to come through in, say, 1.5-2.5khz or so…?
Even this, though, kind of muddies the waters a little, since this is double-tracked, which makes everything sound bigger and fuller. You can kind of hone in on individual tracks by just listening to one side - I’m at work with one earbud in - but I guess what I’m getting at is the difference between a single, solo’d, mono guitar track, and what you hear when everything is double-tracked and in the context of a mix, is HUGE. I think a lot of people, when they’re first getting into recording (and god knows I was one of them!) wonder why their raw tracks sound so thin and lifeless, EQ them to hell and back, and then when they’re in the full mix, wonder why everything sounds muddy and indistinct.
I actually suspect our approaches aren’t all that different, at the end of the day - I think I may be a little more aggressive about carving out low end, but then again a Mesa Rectifier is going to be a lot more bass-heavy than the modded Marshall vibe you have going on here anyway, so I kind of HAVE to be. I’ll have to toss up a raw rhythm track for comparison, though I have a work event tonight so it may be a while.
Sorry for the confusion, there’s no bass here this is just a guitar track as an example of what a non-ice-pick guitar sound is to me. But generally, I just record the amp. I don’t apply eq anywhere, only because it’s not really necessary since I control the amp tone controls, speaker, and mic. But I’m not slamming the upper mids like a lot of stuff that gets on the radio, which is just too bright and overcompressed for me.
For rhythm tracks I use the Cornford cab with the V30 or the Marshall 1960A if I want more scoop. For leads over those tracks I switch to our pine cab with an H30. Same mic position.
That’s it. These are all impulses at this point but they are impulses of our own gear and sound identical to the real things.
Edit: Sorry I didn’t answer the question! I do the guitars first since they are the focus. Then I just fiddle around with our Tech 21 bass amp until I get a sound I like. I usually dial in something with a little more attack since I play with a pick. Then I’ll apply a limiter to make sure there are no huge level jumps from slamming the strings with the pick to get a “rock” sound. Honestly I think that mostly is what keeps the bass from overpowering. When you put up both faders, if they blend, you’re good.
I think the question is more what are other people doing to the guitars that makes them thin since it doesn’t really appear to be necessary.
Yeah, this was more what I was asking, and I suspect you are doing what I thought you might be.
I actually usually start with bass for exactly the same reasons - I’m a guitarist, I write instrumental guitar music, and at the same time I’m well aware that a “tight low end” in a mix is largely a product of the bass and the kick REALLY grooving with each other. If I track guitars first (which, to be fair, I generally do when I’m writing and demoing) I’m way more inclined to accept an “eh… good enough” bass performance, whereas if I track bass first I’m hearing it in isolation and I kind of HAVE to really focus on it.
Idunno. Mixing is a great way to drive yourself crazy, but also kind of fun. It’s like Tetris, in three dimensions. 
I think there’s a big difference when you’re doing something with the guitars as a focus as opposed to a vocal lead - you can leave a lot more in the guitars when there’s no vocal to seat, but when there is a vocal it sort of has to take priority over everything else.
The “Epilogue - 1960A - Gtrs” soundcloud track sounds awesome! There’s something slightly “strange” about (edit: some of) the single note palm muted runs though…I assume it was double tracked? Are the two tracks not quite in sync? Or is it a single track but with a “double track app” applied or maybe it’s just me 
Yes it’s double tracked and it’s not spot on. If that’s the “strange” you’re referring to, I accept full responsibility!
I would say this is really isn’t always true. For example, pretty much anything tracked through a Marshall cab with Celestion 75s is going to have a mid scoop by default. You can do almost nothing to those guitars and they will not step on vocals at all. There are lots of ways to have full-bodied guitar and still hear other elements in your mix - it’s not always about surgical EQ’ing of things if the sounds are chosen wisely to begin with.
Yes that explains the “strange” effect I was hearing. Sorry to pick on your playing like that but I was just wondering if it was some artefact of the recording process.
I use MatchEQ all the time. It really works best when comparing two signals and observing the difference curve, otherwise you’re just looking at a hump that looks pretty similar for most guitars. We do a bunch of that in the Zexcoil video and while it’s not the same guitar, it’s mostly the same amp settings. You can see the humps and the difference curve - which is negligible in this case:
The Soundcloud clip is the Les Paul Classic which has a much hotter pickup, the Gibson 500T. It’s got radically more gain so honestly it’s a different beast. I haven’t A/B’d that guitar with anything, so your Match-er-izing is as good as mine.
The original blog post this came from also has some more MatchEQ for speaker cabinets, and those are somewhat more legible. When comparing visually to the frequency plot Celestion (for example) includes with the speaker, you can see how much randomness is added by the box you install it in:
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Thanks Troy, very interesting seeing the EQ curves for everything. I’m still trying to work most of this EQ stuff out when it comes to guitars and getting a tight low end without it sounding thin.
What you’re seeing is technically the frequency response but not EQ. EQ is what you do to something, if you need to! And those are likely to be much more simple and smooth moves, a small dip or boost here or there - if at all.
Honestly, I like the analysis stuff but a lot of it overcomplicates what is really a simple process. When you put a mic on a cabinet, dead center on the cone’s dust cap will be the brightest spot. As you move to the left or right it will be less bright until you get about 2 inches away at which point I think it’s too dark and I don’t go any farther than that.
For high gain sounds with distortion, I usually stick it about 1.5"-1.75" inches left or right, and then just turn the amp knobs until the tone matches with whatever drum track/loop or bass line you’ve recorded. There are only three instruments in a rock mix and only so many ways you can go wrong. For a vanilla guitar / bass / drums mix, if you are miking your own amp, you probably don’t “need” to reach for EQ. “Need” being a subjective term, I realize!
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Yeah, the number of professional albums released with absolutely zero EQ on the guitars would be a very, very, very small number. That said, you should be able to get 90-95% of the way there via mic placement (and selection) and amp/cab choice and settings… But, I’ve never heard a raw guitar track that couldn’t be made to sound a little better in the mix with some careful EQ.
Of course, the flip side of this is, if your guitar sound is kind of meh right off the back, the odds of you being able to somehow “fix it in the mix” with an EQ plugin is ALSO a very, very, very small number.
IMO, a “tight low end without sounding thin” in a mix is much more about the bass guitar than it is about the guitar tone, and I’d even say more than tone about just being really in sync with the kick.
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