So, what led to the muddy guitar tone? An enquiry, part I

Our dear friend JT Spangler wrote me a couple of days ago, apropos of the recent “muddy guitar” series of posts, with this question:

It might be beyond the scope of your list, but I'd actually love to read your suggestions for working producer-to-artist to overcome the bad idea that led to the bad guitar tone in this initial post in the series. I think the soft skills of a producer are nearly as important as the knob turning skills.

What a great point. And, agreed! So much of production happens before, or ancillary to, or adjacent to, the actual recording process. The most important parts, arguably.

So, let’s revisit the situation that started this series of posts:

A person I’m working with really wants to have her electric tenor guitar on as many tracks as possible. I'm having an issue where the pickup in her guitar first of all makes a really quiet sound that I have to really crank the input gain on, and, secondly, is just muffled and muddy. I was able to improve it somewhat with trial & error in EQ & compression, but it doesn't hold a candle to what a good electric guitar tone should be. 

And let’s break this down a bit! There are a few factors here that led to the bad guitar tone. Let’s look at those individually. This ended up being a long post whe I wrote it out initially, so I’m breaking it up into a few parts; this is part 1 of 3.

I discovered as I was investigating this “muddy guitar” situation further that the main issue in this case was actually the producer! Because they’re still more toward the beginning of their learning curve, they made a key technical error in recording this guitar part. They were plugging the 1/4” cable from the guitar directly into their interface — which can be fine if you know to use the hi-Z input, which they didn’t. So they had a catastrophic impedance mismatch, which resulted in that terrible guitar sound.

So, thought one: even though the artist was using an unusual instrument, the bad tone wasn’t necessarily their fault. And that’s good to keep in mind. It’s good to keep a balanced perspective. And, indeed, tomorrow we’ll look further at where the production went a bit off the rails here, because it’s instructive.

Dead ant, dead ant — jamie