I searched this topic and didn't find a full answer to my question, so I'll go ahead and ask. I know there are no "magic" settings that you guys can tell me that will work just right for me. I realize I'm going to have to tweak it and just listen, but I'm just looking for a general starting point. Here's our band setup...
Lead Guitar: dual humbucker into Sunn 100W head w/ Marshall 4x10 cab
Rhythm Guitar: dual humbucker into 50W Vox Valvetronix ad50
Bass: Fender P-Bass into GK 300W head w/ 2x10 cab (4x10 at our practice space).
We all have our "tone" dialed in from playing in the living room, but when we get together, it makes a wall of sound. It is better now that we are in a bigger practice space, but I listened to the recording of last week's practice and our lead guitar was way down in my bass frequencies. He said he boosted his bass because the rhythm guitar was too treblely. Lead doesn't cut through well on solos either. I'm loaning him my EQ pedal which has a gain slider on it, to hit when he goes to solo, so hopefully that will help some. Tonight, our goal is to tweak our EQs to sound good together.
My thoughts for a starting point are to boost low and lo-mids and flatten hi-mid and hi on my bass. Cut bass, boost mid and flatten hi for lead and flatten bass, slightly boost mids and boost hi on rhythm. Does that make sense? Any advice from someone who has gone through this? Somehow, I've become the "sound guy" of the band :shock:
Are you making those assumptions based on your recording or what you are actually hearing with your ears. The reason I say that is we are pretty much in the same boat as you guys and have a similar band/gear and we have struggled with the same thing, but when we recorded the lead guitar could hardly be heard yet in reality it was quite loud so in that case it was a bad recording.
But there are so many dynamics to room acoustics it will probably be difficult to get any real numbers other than tweaking them on the fly as you guys rehearse, but that becomes difficult if you are the sound guy and the bass player.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
In addition to the EQ issues, it sounds like you may not be leaving enough "space" for each other. If everyone plays the same rhythms and the same tones, it'll all sound the same. This can happen during the "verse" when the lead starts doubling the rhythm part.
Some other things to consider: When the rhythm guitar is using distortion, then maybe the bass should be rounder. If the lead line is really fast, then the rhythm should consider longer sustained chords, and vice versa. Rhythm should consider neck pickup while leads uses bridge. That kind of stuff. That's also why lots of bands use one Strat, and one LP - they naturally sound different, even with similar EQ.
It's based on recording and hearing it live. I can hear the rhythm fine because he's right next to me. I could hear lead last week, because I had him in my monitor pretty high, but in the overall mix, he's not very audible. Last week was the first time we've been able to record practice and it has helped. The lead guitarist has been working with the recordings all week writing different parts for himself, so they aren't playing like Laz mentioned. That has been one problem. We originally only planned on having 1 guitarist, so the songs the singer and I had wrote before we all got together were written for 1 guitar.
I mentioned having lead turned up in my monitor, so I'm sure someone will think "then just turn him up in the overall mix", but where we practice has a nicer sound system than most of the clubs we'll be playing. At least one place that I know of, we'll probably play with just amps and only vocals on the PA, so we need to get the core sound right.
We'll be working on it tonight, so I'll post an update tonight or tomorrow on what we come up with.
Well, last night went really well. Our singer was about 30 minutes late (we knew ahead of time, so no thoughtless singer jokes), so that gave us time to work on our sound. Our lead guitar only has a Boss Metal Zone pedal, which sounds horrible for the music we do (horror punk like Misfits/Ramones). I brought him my Boss Super Overdrive, Boss EQ pedal and Little Big Muff. He boosted his mids and highs and cut his bass. Rhythm guitar boosted mids and a little high and left low flat. I boosted lows (I think I am going to turn lows down just a bit, a few notes sounded, uh, flatulent) and lo-mids, left hi-mids flat and boosted highs just a pinch. It made a world of difference.
Here is a recording of last Tuesday. The "bass" you are hearing that is distorting the sound is the lead guitar, not me. You could barely hear my bass in there.
Before
Here is a recording from last night. We do have a bass player in the band!
After
Disclaimer: I bought a bigger SD card for my digital recorder so I was recording in CD quality WAV format this week and last week it was 320kbps MP3. I also used a camera tripod to get a better placement of the recorder, so some differences are based on that. But you can hear each individual guitar much better because of the changes we made. The difference was obvious while we were playing. After we played our first song that has a guitar solo, I told our guitarist that it was nice to finally hear how the solo went for that song. All I knew up to that point was that he was moving his fingers around on the fretboard. He had a more pessimistic take, that now everyone can hear when one of us screws up. :oops:
You guys make mistakes?
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
A few :D Last night I blamed all mine on the new strings I had put on yesterday. Of course the new ones are much easier to play, but it was because they were too easy, so it threw me off.
We have a few songs we play pretty tight all the way through. We've only been playing together a month and a half and half our songs are still being written. We have the basic riffs and progressions on them, now we are filling in the bits and pieces, so they are ripe for train wrecks.
Jim,
That's cool that you are writing your own stuff at some point I'd like to try that but we always have so much drama going on we never seem to get to it.
I keep forgetting to listen to your recordings. I tried recording our seessions with an old MK424 Tascam 4 tack but didn't really like the souns. Of course I had no idea what i was doing..never read the manual or anything so I'm interested in how your recordings sound.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
I am very impressed with my Zoom H2. For the money, the recordings sound amazing. The band loves it because they have something to practice with the rest of the week.
On writing, I like keeping practice time for practice. I think writing should be done outside of practice. We have written one song in practice (actually the one that is in the sound clips above). Everything else, 1 or 2 of us have done and brought to the group. The singer will give me lyrics and describe a feel or reference another song and I take it and come up with a riff or progression and general structure. I record a demo (using Addictive Drums) and email to singer, we'll tweak it back and forth so he can sing it and he'll come to my house and record vocals over it. Then we send to everyone. Our lead guitarist had music to a song when we got together and the singer wrote lyrics for it. Same for rhythm and drummer, they had music written for a song. We're doing one song that I wrote lyrics and music, but our singer writes most of the lyrics.
