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.
Category
🤖
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 get a bit of a more toppy, sparkly, thinner kind of sound,
00:56similar to what I would get from a Telecaster, okay? And what I'm going to do is I'm going
01:03to track the chords with that. So I'm talking like the open chords, so the more jangly kind
01:08of stuff. So I've got a nice, bright, jangly sound on top. Then afterwards, what I'm going
01:13to do is I'm going to track the same thing, but I'm going to go and use some like root
01:17and fifths. So, you know, these kind of chords. So they're like reinforcement chords, and
01:25I'm going to play them on the humbucker sound. So I've got a kind of a cross between a Telecaster
01:30mixed with a humbucker, and what I'll get there is I'll get all the mids, I'll get the
01:34highs, I'll get the lows, and it will sound like one big, huge guitar rather than two
01:39different ones, okay? So it's a tracking technique that I use a lot in the studio. So let's put
01:45a track up. I'll play along first of all with the single coil, and that will be the chord
01:50sequences. Then I'm going to play along with the humbucker afterwards and track against
01:54it with the root and fifths. Okay, I'm going to now track on top of that, and I'm going
02:08to use root and fifths now. So just simple notes so that we can basically blend in, not
02:16out of tune with it, but make it really solid. I'm using humbuckers now, okay? So I've switched
02:20into humbuckers, same amp, same setting. Okay, so we've got rhythm tracks down now.
02:39One is single coil on the right hand side maybe. One is going to be a humbucker played
02:45in root and fifths on the left hand side. So we should have a really massive sounding
02:50one guitar type of sound. We're going to separate them a little bit just so it gives
02:54a bit of a stereo effect, and we're going to put a guitar down the middle now. So we're
02:57going to play a bit of a solo to see how it sounds against our really full rhythms now.
03:01Okay, so on the solo I'm going to stick on a few effects to make it a bit more exciting.
03:07So let's have a bit of delay I think, maybe a bit of envelope, and a bit of drive. Okay,
03:17so let's see how this works on the track. So we can see now that, yeah, it kind of works,
03:32doesn't it? It sounds like a really fat rhythm. It's got the tone of the top and the bottom
03:37in there. It's weighty, nothing conflicts. It's got reinforcement in the sound, and then
03:41when we put a solo on the top of it, it really complements and it works with a few effects
03:45on top of it. So that is my secret of quick tracking for rock songs to make it sound good.