10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

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Chumpy
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10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by Chumpy »

I live in an apartment, so all my electric guitar sounds are recorded direct, and I spend a lot of time messing around with emulated pedals, cabs, amps, and mics. I use mostly guitar amp designer that comes with Logic, but I also experiment with Amplitube3.

There are so many knobs to tweak, I sometimes don't even know where to start. It's also hard because the amps all have non-trademarked names so they don't run into lawsuits. Some of them are easy enough to figure out like 'tweed' and 'blackface' are both Fender amps, but some are harder to figure out. I'm just now starting to learning what some of the amp knobs actually are supposed to do. Like 'presence' is a brightening EQ curve adjustment. There are a ton of different EQ models and emulated springs you can choose for reverb too. Don't get me started on virtual mic placement, or cabinet selection, there are just way too many variables, and I feel like I can spend forever tweaking things and still have pretty crappy tone.

How do you guys do it?
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jb
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by jb »

Tweed is an emulation of a small, low-powered, ancient tube amplifier that you can barely hear 3 feet away, but which when recorded sounds like God touched your guitar.

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Paco Del Stinko
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by Paco Del Stinko »

Amps, man. Small, medium, and large. I also have a ton of pedals but the best tones are usually dialed in right from the amp, combined with whatever pickups are on the guitar. I too lived in an apartment and although I have a POD rack mount, I use it primarily to write on, then...fire up the amps! But while in the apartment, I would still mic the small amps, during the day, and also use an isolation cab for the big watters. Emulation is crazy good, and allows you a warehouse full of amps that you'd never get use otherwise. Convenient, flexible, loud as you want them to sound, but a real amp pushin' air still wins, in my opinion. Of course, it really comes down to what your playing, but ya gotta dig the tone.
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by Lunkhead »

At the BSS space I play either my old Fender Stratocaster with a DiMarzio humbucker in the bridge, or my cheap Gibson Les Paul with Burstbucker Pro humbuckers, through my Fender Deluxe Reissue tube amp. Both go through my pedal board on which I mainly use a tc electronic MojoMojo overdrive pedal, or sometimes a ProCo RAT pedal.

At home I'll just record my cheap Fender Telecaster Thinline with Fender Noiseless pickups direct and use Cubase's guitar pedal/amp/mic/etc. emulation. It doesn't sound that great in my opinion. Sometimes I run my guitar through my Digitech Bad Monkey overdrive, maybe using its amp emulation output. That sort of helps make things sound less fake.

I like to try to start out with a good sounding guitar, and tone wise I generally just leave the tone knobs all the way up and use the pickup selector to change tones, as a way to limit my options. (I don't really care for darker tones from rolling down the tone knobs anyway.) I've never been very big on long effects chains. I mostly just use one overdrive pedal, any other effects are usually just delay and reverb, and maybe occasionally vibrato. I mostly leave any EQ on a distortion pedal at a neutral position and play with the gain/distortion knob. Amp wise, I'm usually pretty neutral with the EQ there too. I like a guitar sound that is fairly balanced across the EQ so I don't want to e.g. cut the bass or boost the mids or whatever. When recording direct and using an emulator plugin I usually am pretty lazy and just pick a preset, often either a Fender tube amp clean sound or a Marshall 100w 4x12 distorted sound.
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by fluffy »

I usually record my Ovation both mic and direct, and then use guitar amp designer on the direct and space designer on the mic. But I've never been all that happy with my guitar tone either.
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Chumpy
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by Chumpy »

I went out and bought the Amplitube Fender Collection, which is a set of VSTs for various Fender amps and pedals. The guitar tone on Fender Island is from the emulated '57 Deluxe Tweed, the emulated Fender Fuzz Wah pedal, the Fender compressor on 'light' and my Mexican Strat on the bridge pickup. The bass tone is from the Fender Bassman 300 VST and 'medium' compression. I'm pretty happy with my $50 purchase, which I think gets pretty close to a 70s Rock sound.
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Paco Del Stinko
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by Paco Del Stinko »

Sounds good! Chumpy Doobie!
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Re: 10/14/16 How do you get your guitar tone?

Post by Pigfarmer Jr »

I'm late to the party, but my recording computer is broke and so am I so I got nothing better to do:

Recording: Generally I use the presets on my Boss BR-900 (which is a bunch of the boss sounds/pedals/emulators.) I have a couple of go to presets and I've tweaked a couple. You can also build a sound from scratch by selecting the amp, speaker cabinet, type of gain and any effects such as chorus or delay. I've always thought a couple were decent, but overall most of them aren't great. But then I bought a cheap LP copy (Greg Bennett Samick) and my goodness those presets came to life. I still use my MIM Strat a bit, but the past year or two... maybe longer, I record predominantly with the Bennett.

I just bought a ZT lunchbox jr amp within the last month with the idea of using pedals or its clean tone to record with. There's just something about recording a live amp (even one smaller than a lunchbox) for clean/rhythm tones that I love. And it's decent. Takes pedals well. But honestly, I've not used it much.

Then I found a Fender 25R for 75 bucks. I've always wanted one so I bought it. Brought it home and plugged into it and... damn, I like this amp. My intention was to replace the speaker, and for the clean side I think it'd benefit greatly. But I really dig that dirty channel. And all the reviews say the clean channel is good the dirt sucks hind tit. But I dig it. Yes, the more you turn it up the shittier it sounds... although I'll probably find a use for it. But on the lower half of the gain knob I've been playing some fun blues and blues-rock. It'll never be my go to sound, but I can hear it doubling some parts or filling out an acoustic track as is. I've not tried pedals, yet. But that was the whole reason I go it.

For my pedals: I use a Bluesbreaker II... well two of them. One for overdrive and one for boost (live.) I typically always have a wah pedal on my board for live playing. But I rarely use one recording. And I have a chorus, delay and compression pedals, but I rarely, if ever, use them. The band broke up a few years ago.. sorry, is on permanent hiatus or something.... and I've not had the motivation to actually get another together. Which I'd like to do, but not enough to deal with other musicians. We can really be an unreliable lot, ya know?
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