Sorry man, I was out of the country for the last week. Oh man, what you’re asking is a HUGE question. I’m at work, but if I have some time tonight I can start writing up some thoughts for you, but I’ll warn you, it’ll probably turn into a book. 
Just wait until you get into how even small, almost imperceptable changes in mic position can change your sound. 
Re: real amps vs. modeling…
I mean, first and foremost, I’m squarely in the “real amp” camp myself, speaking personally. Couple main reasons, and a big one is I’m a purist and enjoy doing things the hard way. I also own a couple great amps, as well as a good mic collection and a few really choice rack mic preamps and EQs.
I also like to commit to basic mix decisions up front because I’m aware I have a tendency for analysis paralysis - your fundamental guitar tone is going to have a huge impact on how other things are going to come together in the mix, and I find I work better when I make those big “macro” decisions up front, so I can’t go back and fundamentally change my guitar sound halfway through a mix.
Finally, it’s a VERY steep learning curve, but when you’re working with good gear and you have pretty good familiarity with it, I still think a real amp and a real mic is still the gold standard to beat, and you have a ton of flexibility with mic position, etc to really capture a sound the way YOU want to.
That said… I’ve played with some software modelers here and there, and anyone who says you can’t do good work with them and get really great guitar sounds out of them hasn’t been paying attention. Even some of the free stuff - LePou does a rather decent Recto model that I was able to get tones I was really happy with out of, and their Bogner Ecstacy was actually a lot of fun to mess around with. And that’s gotta be a six or seven year old plugin at this point. The major advantages with plugins are that you can record silently, you can make tweaks to the tone after the fact or punch in changes to your performance seamlessly down the road if you, say, decide you want to add a bridge to a song that wasn’t there before, and that they’re a LOT cheaper than, say, a Rectifier or a Royer 121. The major disadvantage is if you’re like me and respond to the “feel” of an amp, plugins feel kinda lifeless because the sound coming out of your computer speakers just doesn’t resonate in the room the same way a 4x12 cab does, and there’s sort of a visceral feedback loop for me between the feel of an amp and how I play.
So, no wrong answers here. If you have a real amp you really like, and a room you can play it in, then a SM57 is pretty cheap and the best starting point for micing up an amp I can think of (I use one in conjunction with a MD421), and you don’t lose much by trying. If you think modelers would work better for you from a workflow standpoint, there’s some pretty good options out there too these days, even if you’re going to focus on free/cheap VSTs.
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Ok, I screwed around with GR5 for the past week and no matter what I do it’s just so… crunchy. Are there certain frequences I have to cut to avoid that sort of flubby, fizzy crunch?
Apologies for the guitar’s intonation… NYC went from hot to bone-dry and freezing and my guitar’s neck is screwed. Totally out of tune but I need to start making recording progress.
The Swedish death metal was the best I managed to do but it sounds tiny compared to the classic records. The Yngwie shred is ok but still “crunchy” and not in a good way. Any quick fixes? I was informed elsewhere to cut in the 5-6k range.
I’m still very much inexperienced but I believe the “small” sound may be an IR issue (Edit: is it a single mic simulation?). Do you mind sharing the DI tracks and I can try so send them through a really cool IR pack that I recently got? (Hesu cabs by seacow, it’s free!)
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Hey Tommo thanks for the help. Let me try and record a DI over the next few days. The annoying thing about Guitar Rig is it has a “pre” tape deck function where you can record a DI, and then a “post” tape-deck function where you’re stuck with the tone. Guess which one I chose? Lol.
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So, mother of all caveats, I’m listening at my desk at work on a single earbud of a pair of $20-30 Skullcandy earbuds, so we’re not talking reference-grade monitoring.
But, these don’t sound at all bad to me. You’re probably used to hearing guitar in a full mix and not isolated, and I think two things are going on:
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Solo’d guitars have a bit more bite to the high end than you normally hear in a full mix. Against a drum kit, a lot of that “sizzle” would get lost under the wash of the hi-hat and cymbal, and the result would sound much more normal to you, I suspect.
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These are single-tracked takes. Virtually every rhythm guitar track you’ve ever heard is double tracked and panned hard left and right. The very slight differences between the two tracks as you play them gives them a much bigger, more expansive sound - I remember once seeing someone theorize it probably creates a psychoacoustic effect similar to being in a room with a guitar amp, where you’re hearing it both from the amp itself but also bouncing back at you off the rear and side walls at ever-so-slightly-randomly-variable delays.
Did you track these to a drum beat or click track? If so, if you can do another take with same or very similar settings as the first Soreption track (IMO that one sounded the best to me of your two rhythm tracks, the other sounded a little over-saturated) try panning them hard left and right and play it back with some sort of drum performance. I suspect you’ll like what you hear MUCH more.
If you don’t have the ability to add drums but you did track it to a clip, if you can somehow share each take and let me know what your BPM was, I can pull them up in my DAW and add a simple drum beat to them and help you see what it sounds like.
Killer playing on the 6s lick, by the way - very strong, aggressive attack on that. Again, while you wouldn’t normally double track leads, hearing that with drums and bass (and some sort of ambient effect, either reverb or delay) would probably go a long way to making it sound like a tone you were familiar with.
IMO, there’s nothing wrong with “small” sounds - a big, expansive mix is usually the combination of a whole bunch of “small” sounds put together that just fit really well. Devin Townsend does this exceptionally well, I think - he creates these huge, expansive sounding albums, but nothing in them is independently all that big. It just works.
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Really, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it tonight, but I should sit down and do a quick drum/bass/rhythm guitar demo, then post it here with all of the underlying parts solo’d. The parts really sound VERY different from the whole.
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My dude, you need to scoot over to Chernobyl Studios’ YouTube channel. You will learn so much useful info about metal guitar amp sims that it’ll completely blow your mind. Even if you’re not using the same software as him, you can apply the same principles and get massive tones.
Also, listen to Drew. He’s got good advice on this topic. I don’t want to retread too much of what he’s already said, but please keep in mind that when using DI guitars, double (or quad-tracking) guitars and panning with different EQ settings will open up your stereo field in a big way. ALSO, do NOT neglect the importance of bass guitar in a mix. Bass guitar contributes to 50% of your overall guitar sound in a mix.
For reference, here are some demos I’ve been dicking around with lately. The first track is a double-tracked rhythm performance with more-or-less the same settings on each track, plus a couple leads on top. underneath is a sloppy bass guitar take and programmed drums.
The second track is a live rehearsal of my band with 4 mics on the kit and a mic on the guitars + bass cabs. The guitars tracks were muted and myself and my 2nd player quad-tracked some rhythms using DIs at home as an experiment. Two guitars are panned 100% L/R (eq’d with more midrange), and the other two tracks are 80% L/R with the high-end heavily filtered and the mids scooped out more. I think I used a mixture of greenback IRs and mesa V30s.
All guitar tone is powered by the SS-11X amp sim by Mercuriall which cost me $40. I also ran the bass guitar in the second track through this plugin for extra grind. It’s the best metal rhythm tone I’ve gotten so far. Some of the freeware options out there are also very worthy. I rather like the Ignite Emissary.
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Thanks guys for all the help. I am going to start recording to a click - none of those examples were recorded to one. The Soreption one was all improvised using old patterns and was pushing it way too hard at 190-200 BPM.
I’m starting to realize the faster you go the more you need that “responsiveness” in tone. I feel like a lot of notes that I know I’m hitting don’t cut through enough. In a mix I’m sure they’ll get buried even more, so I see what you both are saying about the mix making the guitar sound completely different.
Are there any good standalone software options? I did see BIAS come up a lot, but I’m really all about having some standalone software that I can record in super quickly, like Guitar Rig, that allows me to practice and then record when I feel like it. It’s just that the GR5 support is dead and Native Instruments doesn’t seem to care very much anymore.
I swear by Reaper, personally. Free to try, cheap to buy, very active software support, and with a great user community.
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Yeah I keep hearing that over and over for the DAW solution. I think that will be my recording software choice. Do you know much about software options for guitar sims? I’ve tried POD Farm and now I am looking into BIAS. Echoing what @element0s said, I do keep seeing that freeware is the way to go.
Not really - all I’ve really experimented with myself are the LePou sims, which with a good cab IR are certainly good enough to work with. For the most part, though, I’m a fan of micing up real amps. That’s a personal choice though, at the end of the day, and both can yield great results.
Reaper’s great - there are other good options out there, but it’s at least worth trying, since it’s a free download.
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Just a quick comment to say that bias isn’t very highly rated in the amp sim community / review websites - and it’s very expensive if you start buying add ons etc! But they have good PR. I bought the first version and wasn’t very happy with the tones.
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Filter out the low-end of your tone to about 100hz (depending on tuning… use your ears) for rhythms and even higher up for leads. Use the “Andy Sneap” multiband compression trick on the low mids to clamp down on excess buildup. Reaper comes stock with a multiband compressor perfect for this trick, message me when you get there and I’ll walk you through it. Use an Overdrive pedal somewhere in the chain to tighten up the low end response. I like my lead guitars to be more mid-focused so the notes pop out.
In my experience, you generally need less low end in your full-mix guitars than you expect
EDIT: I would also recommend against BIAS. I’ve tried it a few times and I think it’s low-quality for the money you pay. If you’ve got a spare hundo to spend I would just go right to one of the Neural DSP suites. Fortin Namless, NTS, Plini, whichever suites your style the most. I also like Mercuriall stuff a lot but I’m not sure if they do standalone software. Fantastic sounds though.
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In my opinion that gave it a really pleasant to the ear old school death metal sort of feel, like back in the day when people weren’t playing to a click and were pushing themselves a touch beyond what they could actually play.
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I just tried the Fortin Nameless demo and it is the most brutal sounding plugin ever. I was actually shocked at how realistic it sounded, felt, and responded.
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Yeah, that one seems very highly rated in the industry (as in: I see a lot of positive comments about it on various FB groups etc etc). Unfortunately I tried the demo when I had near zero experience with ampsims, so I could not really appreciate it. I am patiently waiting for a discount (I already have too many ampsims to justify another full price purchase) - got some small hopes for black Friday!
PS: try the mercuriall SS-11X demo as well. I think it goes for around $30-40 but has top quality high-gain tones.
EDIT 246: it also does Hendrix tones actually!
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Yeah the Neural DSP stuff is out of control and Mercuriall is on a similar level, imo. If their Spark amp sim (a full Marshall modeler) goes on sale I might pick it up because the lead tones you can get out of that thing are deadly. Accept have been using it on their newer albums.
I might start a separate thread for recorded guitar tone show + tell, if anyone thinks that’d be useful
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Yes please! 20 characters
EDIT: the only thing missing in spark is an IR loader.
You can of course load IRs with an additional plugin but then you lose all the nice post-effects included with spark (delays etc.). Unless you want them between amp and IR, but this is typically discouraged.
Or you can load two copies of spark sandwiching the IR loader plugin, but it feels somewhat inelegant
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That’s interesting, I didn’t realize it worked that way. I have some pretty sexy delay plugins on hand so I probably wouldn’t have to worry too much about this but it definitely seems a shame to cut options away at the knees like that.
I think I’ll go ahead and make the topic I mentioned. I’m working on DI tracks for a song so I’ll post a few different variations on the guitar tone and how I got them. Will probably have to wait until tomorrow though!
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