what ways can you use to change a guitars sound once youve recorded it? like you would change the setings on your amp
i have a dificult guitar part recorded but i dont like the sound i have often used ntrack multiband compresser & voxengo boogex &LFX130 & Free amp se to do this
what do you guys use ?
sorry dont know how ive done this twice
Pretty much what you do. But at some point I just give up and re-record it. Polishing a thing that shouldn’t be polish and all that. Then again, my guitar tones reflect the work of a lazy and impatient person. 
If you recorded the distorted or “effected” guitar tone, well… your methods mentioned are about it. In the future though, perhaps you could record two tracks for guitar. One “wet” and one direct and as dry as Mali in summer. That opens up BIG doors for working with the tones ‘after the fact’. If you want to know more, let me know. (But you gotta have that DRY track first.)
UJ
Experimenting with different eq’s can help shape the tone you’re going for. In particular, high-pass filters are good to mess with if you’ve got other tracks you’re mixing with the guitar. How much to high-pass can be a point of contention.
Sometimes I use n-track echo. To get the right amount of delay I’ve been using that trick where you take 60,000 divided by the bpm to get the number of miliseconds.
A little chorus can help if the guitar was slighly out of tune.
Also, sometimes the guitar can seem weak or thin. A technique I mostly learned (stole?) from this forum, which you can probably find better explained elsewhere, is to: Clone your guitar track, pan one to the far left, one to the far right. Add ntrack’s pitch shift on one track and alter the pitch by just a hair. Then I’ll mess around with- say the right panned track to get the “stereo” sound more sonically interesting. Such as adding an effect like phaser, lowering the volume a tad, changing the high pass filter, nudging the wav file over just a wee bit.
Like UJ said before, it depends how you recorded in the first place. (And I can attest to the fact that Mali is dry, as well as hot- phew, the Dogons!) And if you’ve recorded a dirty sound, I wouldn’t know how to get a BB King tone out of that.
I will say I barely know what I’m talking about when it comes to recording!- these are just some of the things I’ve been trying out recently. Personally, I find myself using my digitech preamp a lot to get the sound I’m going for right off the bat, although that has plenty of drawbacks…
thank you for the ideas
i ahve never got this dry guitar thing to work for some reason UJ i need to read a bit more about it
your ideas sound very intersting geoff i will give them a go.
i have a vamp2 which ive already moaned a lot about on this forum & dont like the sounds i can get with it but after christmas im getting something better, but in the meantime im forced to do it this way!
Tina
No harm in getting some dry takes done in anticipation of your prezzy.
Yep - dry recordings are the control freaks best tool. I try to find the sound I like with what other instruments I’m recording to and cut a simultaneous dry track of the part. That way if the ‘color’ of the track changes I have a guitar track I can re-color in essence to better fit what else is going on.
If I do get a first run track? I usually drag/copy it to two new tracks and pre-delay one low in volume and delay one and pan accordingly, sometimes putting the pre-delay middle original left center and delayed right center. I find it much easier to use new tracks as delays and pre-delays cause working with a delay would mean setting up more fx to deal with when a bit of clip ‘nudge’ is all you need to create an bigger wider sound. Add some dif eq’s on the two new tracks and magic can happen.
Quote: (Poppa Willis @ Dec. 06 2010, 9:33 AM)
Yep - dry recordings are the control freaks best tool. I try to find the sound I like with what other instruments I'm recording to and cut a simultaneous dry track of the part. That way if the 'color' of the track changes I have a guitar track I can re-color in essence to better fit what else is going on.
If I do get a first run track? I usually drag/copy it to two new tracks and pre-delay one low in volume and delay one and pan accordingly, sometimes putting the pre-delay middle original left center and delayed right center. I find it much easier to use new tracks as delays and pre-delays cause working with a delay would mean setting up more fx to deal with when a bit of clip 'nudge' is all you need to create an bigger wider sound. Add some dif eq's on the two new tracks and magic can happen.
thanks for all that
you explained in a way i could understand
im eager to try it out now
Tina
I use the MDA Combo plug-in.
Most of the time, what’s done is done, but amp sims can change things a little.
There are other tricks that are pretty invasive, such as pitch shifting the sounds way in one direction then shifting it back the other way to get it back in pitch. The artifacts are usually terrible, but in the case of distorted guitar it shows up as different distortion and harmonics.
I rescued a live guitar track that was horrible by re-amping in.
Basically I fed the track out to a guitar amp, tweaked until I got a “better” sound, mic’d up the guitar cab and hit record.
tis hard though with an already distorted track.
thanks for the ideas i used the mda combo plugin
id had it for years & didnt know what it did
i know it makes me sound shallow but those mda plugins dont look good so i dont use them!
I like those MDA plugins, but many aren’t that useful. Their interfaces are VERY basic, but side from that most just need a bit of tweaking of the defaults. Of the bunch I doubt there are only three or four that get regular use. Combo, stereo simulator and the mono limiter are my favorats. (don’t remember what those last two are actually called…it’s been a while)
I still use the MDA piano occasionally. I like the sound of it. Sort of imperfect in a useful way.
Quote: (TomS @ Dec. 09 2010, 9:10 PM)
I still use the MDA piano occasionally.
I like the sound of it.
Sort of imperfect in a useful way.
same.
Nice thread…
I like the idea of tracking
(whatever instrument)…
insuring you are satisfied with the performance of the flavor (of course) and then using that track for adding whatever effects you choose by re-recording the signal out of the track to your amp and playing with all the possibilities…
Making sure you don’t screw up the original tack…
The idea works with any type of track
Acoustic-or-Electric or Whatever…
Well…
To my thinking, it brings forward the use of an ISO BOX of some nature to re-record the track…
without actually having to play/record that track from scratch, again…
Thinking Back In Time…
Leonard was a “One Take” tracker…
That idea would never work with One Take Musicians… He used to get pretty upset if you didn’t capture his Take the first time…
Bill…