First software only tone - Does it actually sound good?

I am trying to build a good, heavy distortion for A standard tuning, entirely in software. I am new to playing a seven, and relatively new to recording guitars generally, so I thought I'd post up where I've got to so far and see what people think.

I'm mostly a singer, and I want to make some instrumental backing tracks for myself so I can practice more meaningfully. I don't demand spectacular professional tone, but I do want something that's credible; good enough that I can feel good sharing demos and cover versions with other people.

The only guitar I have to work with is my SubZero Generation 7 which is cheap, and the pickups are limited (you can read the full story over in this thread) but I've done my best to work around it. The clips I posted up in the other thread were through my analogue set-up, but that isn't really working for me for recording.

I want to be able to tweak the guitar afterwards so I can mix it with vocals and programmed drums, so it's helpful to have literally everything inside my DAW. I don't have a huge amount of experience here, but after a lot of frustration I have something I am reasonably happy with.

DISCLAIMER - I am a mediocre guitarist. I picked something which has a mix of very low notes, chords, palm muting and fast chugs for demo purposes but I know I can't play it perfectly, it's a work in process.

The Industrialist New Distortion Tone

If you are interested, the unprocessed guitar track is here.

What do you think? Am I going in the right direction? What would you want to change?

For the sake of space I'll stick the technical stuff in a spoiler:

Spoiler: Signal Chain

The signal chain is complicated so stick with me:

• Dynamic compressor - Turning down frequencies below 150hz
• Regular compressor - Pulling down the peaks to get more consistent signal level
• Amplitube - TubeScreamer into Triple Rectifier into 1x12 bass cab
• Parametric EQ - Little cut to frequencies around 55hz
• Light reverb - For wetness
• Another impulse response - This time Celestion Vintage 30
• Another dynamic comp - Again, turning down sub-150hz, because they were still booming

So, as you can see... Bass response has been a real problem.

The pickups are not very cooperative, and the response is quite different at the low end (too hot, too flabby) which makes creating a single tone hard. In the end I decided to force the issue, by manually yanking out flab, and then pushing it through a compressor. Without that even pedestrian levels of gain splattered out into white noise. With excessive bass removal you can push it enough to really call it a distortion, but the amp gain is only at 6 and the TS is at 0.

The only other way I could get a sound that worked without all that EQ was at far lower gain levels, and the response was weird as hell. The low notes were barely driven at all, and sounded like I was playing bass, while chords further up were merely crunchy and not proper metal noises at all.

I am open to the idea that there is too much gain on this tone. Through my IEMs it sounds baller, but through speakers there is some fizz that I'd associate with too much gain. Could also be achieved with some EQ on the high end to tame the excesses.

Can't think of anything else really... By all means ask if I have left out any details that might be useful.

 

Amplitube for guitar stuff, as a plugin to Studio One. They came free with my bits of audio hardware, no other particular reason.

It's somewhere between the two. Yes, it's to be recorded but I'll be using it as backing to do vocal practise and demos over. I don't want it to be bad or distracting, and it needs to work in a mix, but people aren't going to be judging me on it. No matter how good it is, it won't make me sing better.

Having sat down this morning I have to agree that I've taken too much out of it, and over complicated it. I will start over today.

I'm not wedded to the IRs by any means, the ones I used were just because I clicked through lots and they seemed to help at the time. I do have a greenback IR but it always seemed to sound worse when I put it in.

However, I don't know almost anything about IRs - Should I be picking an IR first then tweaking everything else to fit?

What should I be looking for from an IR in terms of sound? So many (supposedly) good IRs have quite dramatic changes in EQ that I could potentially match up from the rest of the set-up, but each time that's a lot of work and it doesn't feel practical to click through like 300 GodsOwnCab IRs and re-twiddle the whole setup each time.

 

Can you expand on that a bit?

Amplitubes cab sim section does allow you to move the mics around, so I can just do this if I want to without new software, but I have literally no idea what difference that actually has on the final sound. That's also the problem I've had with using the Gods Own Cab pack - It has loads of IRs in there, like LOADS but they aren't labeled in a way that I can translate.

I know it's a "use your ears" exercise, but in theory what is supposed to happen by moving the mic to the edge or the top corner or whatever? Are there any guides you would recommend for this stuff?

I just loaded up Amplitube to poke at it - The cab section is actually even more in depth than I thought. I can change each speaker within a cab, I can choose types of mic, I can have multiple mics and then mix them, I can put it in different rooms and... I am just out of my depth. I have the tools in front of me but I just don't understand what they are supposed to do.

Edit -

Oh great... I also have mics in the room in addition to the mics on the amp, and I can mix all the signals and also the DI and... I feel like a dog being shown the instructions for Ikea furniture.

 

That is extremely helpful - I will see how I get on with it.

Thanks for a quick and concise write up!

 

I’ve taken another swipe trying to use as few additional gizmos as possible and come up with something that is hopefully better.

Controlled Demolition Tone Demo

Admittedly with dodgier guitar playing on my behalf. You get whatever I was practicing at the time

This is substantially stripped back. It is all inside Amplitube with nothing added in StudioOne and it is a fairly basic TubeScreamer into Triple Rectifier into a 4x12 slant faced IR. I did fiddle with that though, and changed out the speakers from V30s to Greenbacks.

I left the amp dials largely in the middle, except gain (at 8) and bass (at 4). There’s a parametric EQ insert too, because damnit the bass loves to boom with these pickups, but no other trickery.

Mostly I tried to fiddle with the mics to patch things up. Generally just pulling them back and forth and side to side and messing with the mix. In the end I got the fizz out by slowly balancing away from the SM57 mic.

Seems to work. Sounds ok.

What say you, people of the internet? Better or worse?

 

Cheers dude, your help has been appreciated.

 

I'm discovering some of this already - Even just laying guitar over a minimal programmed drum track has forced me to make some tweaks so the cymbals and bass drums are separate within the lows and highs, and not just adding together with the guitar to over saturate it. All this just so the guitar sounds like it did before I started adding other stuff

I'm thinking I'm not going to add a bass track unless it is doing something very different to the guitars. I don't own a bass, so I would only have synth anyway, and since the goal is vocal demos I think it'll be wiser to leave the low end alone than try to become a master producer and balance more elements.

The next challenge is adding vocals of course. I've done a good amount of vocal recording, but always for someone else to mix, so I've restricted my efforts to compressor, low cut, and very rough EQ work, definitely not tweaking instruments to make it fit.

Any advice or resources people have found useful for mixing heavy screamed vocals would definitely be helpful. There's lots of guides out there, but it's not always easy to know what is actually good advice!

 

Here's a link

I'd certainly be interested to hear if you can make something out of it, and especially if you have a different approach to tightening up the sound.