If you want to get a chunky, full-sounding guitar mix, there are a few tricks to get you there fast - and Skunk Anansie guitarist and ACM tutor Ace is here to show ’em to you.
In this video masterclass, filmed at London’s Metropolis studios, Ace covers techniques including chord approaches, choice of pickups and panning, all of which should get your guitars sounding massive.
In this video masterclass, filmed at London’s Metropolis studios, Ace covers techniques including chord approaches, choice of pickups and panning, all of which should get your guitars sounding massive.
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TechTranscript
00:00Hi, hello, welcome. It is Ace here. Again, we are in Metropolis Studios in London and
00:12doing some kind of tricky tricks and techniques for guitars that you might want to pick up
00:17on. Today, I'm going to talk about tracking, simple tracking really. Basically, about what
00:23I'm using is I'm just going to use one guitar and one amp, okay, but to make a kind of a
00:27bit of a kind of concise full sound. So first of all, I am going to track the guitar with
00:33single coils. So you can either do like a Les Paul and a Telecaster or you can just
00:38use one guitar that you can change to pick up chords. And I'm going to use one amp and
00:41not change the sound of the amp. So if I switch my guitar into single coils now, so they're
00:46not the humbuckers anymore, I'll get a bit of a more toppy, sparkly, thinner kind of
00:55sound, similar to what I would get from a Telecaster, okay? And what I'm going to do
01:03is I'm going to track the chords with that. So I'm talking like the open chords, so the
01:07more jangly kind of stuff. So I've got a nice, bright, jangly sound on top. Then afterwards,
01:13what I'm going to do is I'm going to track the same thing, but I'm going to go and use
01:17some like root and fifths. So, you know, these kind of chords. So they're like reinforcement
01:25chords, and I'm going to play them on the humbucker sound. So I've got a kind of a cross
01:28between a Telecaster mixed with a humbucker, and what I'll get there is I'll get all the
01:33mids, I'll get the highs, I'll get the lows, and it will sound like one big, huge guitar
01:38rather than two different ones, okay? So it's a tracking technique that I use a lot in the
01:43studio. So let's put a track up. I'll play along first of all with the single coil, and
01:49that will be the chord sequences. Then I'm going to play along with the humbucker afterwards
01:54and track against it with the root and fifths.
02:01Okay, I'm going to now track on top of that, and I'm going to use root and fifths now.
02:10So just simple notes so that we can basically blend in. Not that I've tuned with it, but
02:17make it really solid. I'm using humbuckers now, okay? So I've switched into humbuckers.
02:21Same amp, same setting.
02:22Okay, so we've got rhythm tracks down now. One is single coil on the right hand side
02:42maybe. One is going to be a humbucker played in root and fifths on the left hand side.
02:47So we should have a really massive sounding one guitar type of sound. We're going to separate
02:52them a little bit just so it gives a bit of a stereo effect, and we're going to put a
02:55guitar down the middle now. So we're going to play a bit of a solo to see how it sounds
02:59against our really full rhythms now, okay? So on the solo, I'm going to stick on a few
03:04effects to make it a bit more exciting. So let's have a bit of delay, I think. Maybe
03:10a bit of envelope, and a bit of drive. Okay, so let's see how this works on the track.
03:30So we can see now that, yeah, it kind of works, doesn't it? It sounds like a really fat rhythm.
03:35It's got the tone of the top and the bottom in there. It's weighty. Nothing can flick.
03:39It's got reinforcement in the sound, and then when we put a solo on the top of it,
03:43it really complements and it works with a few effects on top of it. So that is my secret
03:48of quick tracking for rock songs to make it sound good.