How to DIAL IN your guitar TONE for RECORDING! 

"Don't fix it in the mix. Get the fundamentals right, to begin with." I think it was Dave Pensado, when asked about some of his best mixes, once said "I didn't really have to do much to them. They were recorded so well, they practically mixed themselves." It can't be overstated how much it matters getting everything right before even tracking.

I listened to a lot of isolated guitar tracks from various sources to learn songs, I quickly realized how thin or flat most leads sound without the rest of the mix. That helped me relax and stop trying to achieve the illusional guitar tone that the full mix creates. I stop screwing with the dials, play the lead part with the original backing tracks and it actually sounds fine.

Great info here! My #1 top tip would be DONT BE AFRAID TO SUCK! Especially if you're just starting out. It's going to sound bad, it's part of the journey. Just get in there and do it, and enjoy it.

Awesome vid dudes! Always love hearing from Scott & when you guys collab! Always dropping useful tips & knowledge. 🖤

Yes talk more about the sessions and mixing of Woods with Scott, that would be fun.

Excellent tips thanks guys

Great course for sure and so are all his other courses!! Grab em and dig in. Scott is a great teacher!

I highly anticipated this video! Thank you!

This was very cool. You both made great points about not only the sound of the mix but the sounds for the songs. I was really happy to hear things I've understood for so long come out of you two guys(minus the tech talk) and as coherent and to the point. Thank You.

Great timing! I will be doing that this week!

The biggest difference in my mixes was hard shelving high and low end way more aggressively than I thought necessary. I was originally cutting out the frequencies I found annoying and leaving the rest, and wondering why my mix was muddy. Then I switched it around to instead find the frequency where the sound I'm digging disappears, and then shelving just above, or below that. Makes a huge difference in clearing up a mix.

Awesome video and advice, much appreciated 🤙

really really learned so much from this one, thank you!

Yes, Scott nailed in on the head! PLEASE bring him back on for an episode and talk about Woods 1! I also love that record and would love to hear more about how it was made

So good to see Scott back doing what he loves after everything he's been through. Buy his courses they're great!!!

I got all of Scott's courses. Seriously worth every penny. Teaches you everything from how to establish effective work flow to understanding the mindset you need when approaching a project. Really made me feel hopeful instead of hopeless. Seriously get all of his stuff if you are stuck in a rut or need a boost on ideas. His drum course changed how fast I can bust out a drum beat for a riff. Cheers!

Great video Glenn!

more on topic: I started making aggressive cuts and have noticed improvements. hi pass at 118-120hz and low pass 7k for leads and 7k-6500 for rhythms. It's cuts out most of the fizz which forces me to be super tight and not hide a bad performance behind fizz. I will also boost between 6k-8k if the tone sounds too dark. And cut around 500 to get some boxy/honk out.

This was ridiculously helpful 🤘

Hey Glenn! Im currently working on a thrash metal track and i was ripping my hair apart to get the right tone and your IRs really saved me from giving up on the project. Thanks alot!

I love this channel. I am en electronic musician. But still get useful information from these videos. My songs typically have 3 parts. Drums, Bass, and lead/top line. All provided by synths and drum machines. The drums and bass are typically sequenced. So I can easily have those going while dialing in the lead. I am planning with a new song today. I use a mixing console. When I get back in the studio I am going to use the EQ on the console to dial in the lead tone while the drum and bass are going. So you have to think of this in terms of guitar tone. You can apply these ideas to whatever instrument is playing lead. Great info even for us key pushers. Keep up the good work and fuck you.

Thank you guys for this video it's really helped me get more colors out of my tones but keep them from getting fizzy

Fantastic advice and hopefully more guitarists will listen to it. I once had to deal with a guitar tone totally unsuited for a band but the player would not change their sound at all. The time I spent getting to sit well in the mix was easily 60% of the total mix time (including mastering).

It’s super awesome to see Scott on this wonderful channel! Scott is an amazing sound engineer I really love watching videos and learning from him on his Chernobyl Studios! And he has really amazing courses! Guitar Mastery is one of them! Just in 1 course Scott opened my eyes how to create good guitar tone with plugins! I’ve been looking for the info like this for so long! Thank you so much Scott for everything you do! 😀👍🔥🔥🔥

So happy to see S.I.T. strings getting some love! I was born and raised in Akron, Ohio and have been playing those strings since the early 90’s. They’re simply fantastic!

18:50 - That would be awesome. I'd like to see that video. I watch a lot of videos about different genres as wall and this is not the first time I've heard the recommendation of not mixing in solo but with the song as a whole. Yes! Glenn! Scott Woods! This video feels incomplete. There HAS to be a part 2.

I bought Guitar Tone Mastery back when it sold on Pro Mix Academy. It's an amazing course Scott does an awesome job at explaining everything. I've went back and rewatched the whole course at least 5 times. I highly recommend this course if someone doesn't own it.

Scotts course does truly deliver.

Scott's courses on mixing guitar and programming drums have greatly changed my worflow for the better. I can't recommend them more.

Great and very informative video! Also, here's another vote for more context about the stuff with Woods of Ypres 🤣

This is super useful, even though I dont record or play metal. Seeing how these extreme cases get figured out goes a long way.

wow learned a lot and will take in consideration the tips mentioned here. i am going to buy that course about programing drums with the german guy

I have learned that sometimes when you find yourself cranking one instrument or a few frequencies of an instrument to make it stand out better, you may need to do the opposite: Turn down the frequency on whatever else is competing with it!

Nice title update!

so glad that this video reinforced what i’ve taught myself

Pantera is the band where everyone forgot about the bass guitar under a thinner Dimebag tone !! He used some thin tones quite often!! Took until Reinventing The Steel where we got to distinctly hear the bass!! Rex was super tight with Dimebag and Vinnie creating one solid tone!!

I only look stuff up if I can’t figure it out on my own!! Love the challenge!! That’s part of what’s fun !!

You heard the man, Glenn. Let's have the video on the Woods of Ypres sound!

Its like Euge Valovirta said in one of his videos, if you have to make big or corrections to your frequency bands, theres something wrong. He explains this a the "some EQing part" on the video HOW TO DIAL IN A GREAT METAL TONE Equalizer is means "taajuuskorjain" here in Finland, literally a frequency fixer or frequency repair. A good way for me is to think about the sounds as words, guitar is snarly, bass is däng, drum is crash, clang, paks and thump, also to know which frequencies they live in and how.

GLEEEEEENNNNNNNN!!!!! Do you think you’ll be doing more bass and drum related content in the future? I know guitar is your primary instrument, but I figure every else matters just as much from a mixing engineer’s viewpoint. Also, how about a video ranking guitar amp speakers in a tier list?

Great suggestion on AmpKnob, I actually use it like a reference track for my guitar tones. I throw it on the L track and whatever guitar tone I'm working on 100% R. If that works and doesn't sound weird, I probably have a pretty usable tone.

I usually cut around 120 and 12khz. Most of our stuff is in drop Bb so all that low end gets very muddy if I don't cut or run a sidechain. I'm already running a sidechain to the kick so it just blends nicely. We use 13-62 cobalt strings. Makes a big difference.

my approach is less bass more mids but not too much, I think it's been working fine but this is so nice, thanks for doing this!

Man, the very first point on the show just absolutely devastated everything i knew about guitar tone and it explains soooo much about what i have found myself thinking less than wonderfully about , when it comes to recording.... And once again, u peel off another scale of ignorance on my artichoke of a brain.....sorry for any comments on the frequency bandwidth of your tone, glenn!

Scott's courses are killer. I recommend them to anyone.

Finally!!! Someone talks about using the bass to shape your tone!!! Bass is way more important than the overall guitar mix.. it makes all the difference

Intresting talk thanks for the video. Be safe and skilful. Pinge

First off, I need to thank you Glenn for the free IR - it is really good. I've started using it exclusively; I use the first one for rhythm and pump it up a little brighter, and the 57 one I use for leads and it makes the leads stand out just right as opposed to rhythm for my sound. Probably didn't mean them to be used like that, but it works great for my rig, which is a Boss GX-100 actually. I have great Marshalls etc tube amps at my disposal and a huge number of modelers, plugins and hardware, AxeFX, Neural, Amplitube 5, you name it, but I find the Boss the best for sculpting my own sound anyhow, it just has so good routing, EQ etc options and IR load possible - and I've used those Bosses since GT6, only previously had to use external IR loaders or cabinet emulators for my sound. And concerning this video - great tips! For me, I've used all these for ages, but then again I've been a tone chaser for about as long as you have so I've just already learned all this the hard way. Especially for modelers understanding how to EQ your sound, and using different IRs is pivotal. To get a really great sound out of my Boss I use up to five EQs in the chain in different places, and those EQ settings can be rather contradictory between them too. My starting point is to hi/lo pass my guitar at 160 and 6500hz, and after that I'll both boost and cut more for sculpting. For instance often it's best to create a different EQ slope by having a hard cut at 6500 BUT boost hard at 12,000 regardless. And then have individual dips here and there, or boosted frequencies. But by far the most important tip, IMO, is to always adjust your sounds along with the mix, or even some similar music. I always adjust my basic sounds while playing over various RU-vid tracks. That gives me a great understanding how will it work in a mix later on. With the band, I make note of what kind of EQ or other changes I make - or the soundman of a venue - makes for my guitar at the DESK - and see if I can add those changes in some extent straight to my own settings. As a result, most of the time when I give an XLR line to the soundman for putting it to PA and FOH, and in a while ask how does that work, they often say "I didn't have to do anything to it, it's great" and then I know I've succeeded. I would also add one tip of my own: stop adjusting your tone constantly, stop chasing the tone on a daily basis and for chrissake stop buying new gear to chase it. Just use or decide what to use, sculpt your tone, and then just fucking use it, and only make small changes when absolutely necessary and when you have felt for weeks that you need to change it somehow. Because guitars sound different in your ears every day. You can dial in the perfect tone and a few days later it sounds like absolute crap to you anyway. DO NOT TRUST YOUR EARS when that happens. Wait for a few days and see - it might sound great again another day without any change. Take your time and don't do changes too quickly but build your sound slowly enough that the daily changes in how your ears hear today won't throw you off the path.

Amazing advice at 19:00

Bring Scott back, I’d absolutely love to hear more about the Woods / Black metal production!

I dont see the link for the IR in the description? Awesome video Glenn!

I watch another home studio RU-vid channel as well as Spectre sound. He always preaches GIRATS... get it right at the source. Strings, performance, etc. You can't mix out crap. The track needs to be solid. Great video today Glenn. Cool stuff to learn and build on.

I'd love to see a similar video aber bass tones. I'd live to see more bass stuff in general.

Like 101 for Lefty fun fun fun! My practice tone is bass at 3 o’clock mid and treble at 9 o’clock, for recording bass is 9 o’clock mid at 1-1:30 and treble just enough above noon to get the sizzle without fissile.

Yes. Glenn. Scott and Woods.

I was struggling with a muddy mix and high/lo pass filters on the guitar saved my mix!

The tip about shaping your gutar tone after you've got your drums and bass tracks down also works for live tones. I mean, I've got a pedal that loads IRs and has amp simulation, Cube Baby, and I've been tweaking it for live use with some tracks loaded on Reaper and I've been getting some really nice results, especially with that free IR Glenn's released. I learned the hard way during a gig. I thought I had a massive tone but after checking the recordings of that gig turns out my guitar sounded like a toy hah

The V30 IR's are actually really good. I'm doing some updated demos for my next project and they work great. I wanted a kinda fat and saturated low to mid gain sound for some single coil neck position riff and chordy type rock stuff, so I pulled up the Marshall head in Ampire (comes with Studio One, not amazing), put an overdrive in front of it, loaded up both IR's and it's just what I wanted. Of course, I'll be using a real amp for the actual songs, but this made a good goal to shoot for. Haven't tried them on a high gain thing yet but I imagine they work just as well.

Definitely talk more about the Woods of Ypres sessions with Scott.

I put the bass to a little behind 12 o’clock! The mid up and the treble at 2 o’clock!!

Some of these principles are the reason why a live band's sound can be huge. They're tight AF. That would be a cool experiment, measuring tightness to the micro seconds and observing where the line is; the tipping point; the point where a lack of cohesiveness fractures the holistic integrity of the music thereby making the product a sum of its parts rather than something bigger than the sum of its parts.. Kinda nerdy, but an interesting metric off of the floor. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Primus. I heard Ler say he wasn't fond of the early mixing because they had less tools and knowledge. They have a sound all they're own...

Off the back of the improved performance and feel of new strings I'd add to polish your frets when you change strings. Smooth frets feel way better on bends and stuff and those little things matter when you're doing the performance that's gonna be kept forever on your record.

I remember working with a metal band in the studio (it was a one day deal, get a single song recorded, mixed and sent off for mastering on the day) and the guitarist was ADAMANT he dialled in his tone. He'd just rolled the treble almost entirely off and boosted the mids and bass to like 9 o'clock and wouldn't listen at all when I told him we'd need to change the tone for it to sit in the mix because "I've worked forever on my tone, I want it exactly perfect on the record." So I let him have his way, recorded the guitars how he wanted them and LO AND BEHOLD the mix sounded muddy and messy until I did some SIGNIFICANT EQing on the guitars taking up a bunch of valuable studio time that could've been avoided if he'd just let me dial in the tone to suit the song. Guys, please, if the engineer tells you that you need to change your tone, just listen to them. It'll probably save you time and money in the long run.

Many people try to copy the guitar sounds from a record that has many double/quad tracked stems along with bass that may have distortion on it too. Like you say getting a full great sound on the guitar path is great for jamming but for recording once you start stacking them up along with bass it’s not going to work at all. Along with cutting the bass frequencies out carefully, always dial back the gain distortion to the point where it sounds a lot cleaner than the end result. Once you track it a few times the gain accumulates so it’s going to sound bigger and rhythm will be tighter. If you track a bunch of super high gain guitars it’s going to be white noise with no definition.

Sup guys, I'm new to playing with my laptop. So I'm ready to learn ..

Yes, fucking yes, we need to hear more about Woods!

Can you go through how to shape bass tones for metal, using pedal boards and not amps

Yes Glenn more talk about tonewoods

Great vid and perfect timing! Trying to pull out an ultra heavy cover of a KISS song...been struggling with getting that low A string to sound NOT like a bowl of gravy. Now I realize that I've been just worrying about the guitar tone on it's own like a dumbass. Thx eternal Glenn & Scott for the tips! Will send for a mix review when this monsta is done being created

Actual Belgian asking for more Woods of Ypres content. Thank you Scott. Feels like I had the same question 7 years ago 🤣

Yes woods! :D

Tone has to take into account the band, and each song. Always striving for the perfect tone individually is not only selfish, but will hold the band back.

YES GLENN, BRING THE WOODS!! 😁

Glenn... I think I'm going to have to replace the tubes in my Hughes and Kettner Grandmeister soon and I learned that they have solid state replacement tubes... Wondering if that's a viable replacement so that I don't have to spend money on new tubes when they go out again...

I typically push mids. And turn treble up some. My bass setting for guitar is like 3-4

Wish I would have had these videos available to me when I mixed the first album of my old band... We literally had no clue :,)

Wish i had this info 20 years ago

That first Woods album was really good.

I totally hear you guys. But at the same time, some of my fave sounding records do still have scooped, guitar forward mixes. Perhaps there is a balance point between those intuitions and not totally sucking from a pro standpoint.

what i'm getting nowadays is that i can get away with a little bit of scoop so that lead parts and vocals can get through without frequency clashing on the midrange with the rhythm guitars.

Glenn I know this is off topic, but I'm an amateur audio engineer who dabbles in the audiophile hobby. I have recently seen alot of mixing engineers using Sennheiser headphones. I was wondering if you could ever do a video about what kind of benifits you get and how you ended up using open back headphones for your setups. It would be great to get an actual mixing engineer's take on the subject since there's not alot of feedback from actual engineers on mid-high end headphones as opposed to people who speculate on how things 'should' sound like when they purchase a new piece of gear.

I spent a lot of time doing the "dial in the guitar with the bass and drums playing" because of how I tend to do line and sound checks. Once I get the gear in place and I have mics on what needs mics on it, I just tell the band to "play", and I just start dialing it in. First drums, then bass, then guitar(s), then keys(if applicable) and then vocals. I really try to avoid the solo function unless I'm having problems with something or just to sanity check. I once had to deal with this one band that decided to have 4 7-string guitars, all heavily detuned and wondered why y they usually sounded like crap, and why their mix sounded good through my board. I just engaged the high pass and rolled all that sludge out, leaving room for bass. Building the guitar sound in the mix is so much easier than trying to make that solo'd signal fix in there right.

F#$% Yeah guys. I needed this video. Glenn & Scott. Talk about woods and shit some more. 🤣 seriously most informative video I've seen in a while. Thank you guys 🤟✌️

Funnily enough, as a guitarist when I listen to music, the first thing I listen for are the drums. I'm a sucker for what I call the "gunshot" snare. Danny Carey's snare tone in Parabola, the snare in Switchfoot's Lonely Nation, some of Dave Grohl's Nirvana snare tones. I also carefully listen to the levels of the cymbals.

Leaving room for the bass is great advice, not just for the studio but live, too. Especially if you have 2-3 guitars in the band. Nobody needs to be playing whole barre chords. Skynrd's guitarists would often break up one chord between 2 players while the lead did his thing. I guess it's also why I never got the point of a 7 & 8 string if you're going to get into the bass's sonic space a lot.

I used to make the mistake of dialing in my amp to sound good in the room before recording. Since I added a little extra mids and high's in my amp EQ, I get better mixes. Its easier to cut frequencies in the mix than it is to boost something that isn't already there.

Geez, in your element much? You guys were in the zone. How about that! You're good. I'm really happy with this channel. I'll be as good and happy as I'll ever be watching things as intelligible as this on RU-vid. BTW, no clue what you said. Just saw the universe expanding lol.

So... If making the guitar and bass fit together and not take up the same sonic space is how you get good tones, how would you get a good bass tone? What if you wanted your metal sound to revolve a little more around bass? I don't know much about bass tone period, but if you're not cranking the gain the same way you are on the guitar, do tonewood and pickups matter? I'd love to see a series dive into that

Mr. Glenn, everyone talks about using HPF and LPF to size the guitar sound especially to fit it in with the bass. But nobody talks about guitar "mids" and how they affect the bass when you are trying to get the "top" tone of the bass to stand out a la iron maiden, etc. Especially now that small speakers are the norm, I wonder if if you want to hear bass, you have to boost the treble.

I was never happy with how my instruments blended in a mix, will definitely try dailing in guitar with the other things playing along and also pay a bit more attention to bass (atleast i don't have old strings so i'm halfway there haha)

yes more scott

I think a video on this would be cool. Like from start to finish. Cleans and heavy. Also with bass etc. Most people want to know because they use digital stuff. Most things out there base off of amps and real drums and the process for ez drummer 3 and helix for example is quite different. Iv got an alright sound going but always feel there’s something that is missing Be cool to see it done really basic

That's surprising. I typically like having my guitar with a bump in the mid frequencies and cut the bass/treble. I don't like a lot of low-end in my guitar tone when I'm playing alone. Although, I also play in E standard tuning.

Rabea Massad and John Petrucci had a little video where they each strummed a single power chord. The tone of Rabeas chord... Oh my. That is a glorious thing.

I figured this out ages ago after I saw someone complain that the guitar tone on Blizzard of Oz sucks. If you listen to an isolated guitar track yes it does sound pretty thin and weak. Listen to it as a whole and you see that it was done so it doesn't overlap with the bass.

When a guitar riff is isolated in the song, like a guitar only intro, should you crank the low end up then turn it back down when the other instruments come in? Thanks

This is a great info from guys with experience. I have a buddy that plays with gobs of gain and bass. He says.... that’s my sound. 🤷🏽‍♂️ Quick question guys? Is it possible to get that deep bass sound that you get from a cranked 8x10 cab at lower volumes while rehearsing?

You mentioned the frequency response graphs of guitar cabs and it got me thinking: if cabs are just complex EQs, why not make customizable cab plugins where you can edit the freq spectrum of the thing as you do with an EQ? I mean, there are already ones where you can move a virtual mic, but let's face it - there are a lot of bedroom musicians who never worked with a physical cab in their lives XD

String tone with use becomes dull for two reasons, grime and sweat from your hands and also to a lesser extent metallurgical changes caused by vibration which happens fairly quickly, both reduce the ability for the strings to produce the higher harmonic overtones we associate with bright and spangly. If your strings are old and you really can’t afford new, boiling them in a pan of water for 10 minutes can get them back to a reasonable clarity.

High and Low Pass your instruments kids! It will rock your world!