How to help a muddy guitar sound — part II

Yesterday, I shared some ideas for how to fix a muddy guitar sound in the mix.

However! If you have the option to help the guitar sound better on the way in, that’s always better than recording a bad sound and then trying to fix it later. So today, some quick ideas for that:

1. If your interface has it, use a hi-Z input, as opposed to using a line-level input and cranking the gain, which tends to sound like crap.

2. Record through an amp instead of going direct in.

3. Go direct in, but record through an amp sim.

4. Go direct in, but record through a modeled preamp and crank the gain there, to add some harmonics. A Neve-style preamp can be great for this. As can a solid-state model! Different sounds. (And if you’re double-tracking the guitar, try a tube preamp model for one track and a solid-state preamp model for the other; you’ll get different harmonics, which can complement each other nicely.)

5. Go direct in, but record through any analog-modeled gear that you have, and crank the input there — the nonlinearities you can get from abusing analog input stages — including modeled ones! — can be helpful in helping give a sound some definition and character.

Working a bit harder to get the sounds we want — jamie