Hey, what's up guys. David Glenn of davidglennrecording.com and theproaudiofiles.com. I'm gonna switch
it up a little bit in this video. I'm gonna talk to you about producing guitars.
Now, nothing earth chattering about my guitar playing but I want to kinda walk you though.
As a mix engineer, I get tracks sent to me all the time where the guitar player has doubled,
tripled, quadrupled the exact same guitar part. And in some cases maybe that works for
you, you like the way that it kind of gets mushy or whatever, you like the vibe of that
— by all means, keep to it.
What I want to talk about is instead of layering the same exact part over and over again or
twice, I want to show you the variations that you can add by switching that up. So, if you're
not a guitar player, still pay attention because this could work for you when you're recording
or producing guitars. Give them this example, say hey, instead of doubling that, do it further
up the neck or with a different tone, a different pickup, and different guitar, a different
amp, a different mic. Change it up. Something. Something should be changed when you double
it to give it a different character.
And so I'm gonna give you an example. I'm gonna double a guitar part. Just threw on
a loop here I'm using Superior Drummer, got a Fender Strat, Got a UAD Apollo, and I'm
going into an 11 rack SPDIF into the Apollo. If you're curious, let's see... we've got
a guitar, very simple box tone, and I'm running it through the UAD 610B. And let me play it,
this is worth showing you. And if I bypass it.
[playing electric guitar with and without UAD 610B plugin]
And then with it. So you can see those settings. Check that out. Love that tone, love what
UAD is doing with their gear. So, back to the task at hand. We're gonna track a couple
guitars, I'm gonna play a part, gonna make something up, then double it the best I can
to show what that does. Then we're gonna get rid of the doubled guitar and I'm gonna play
a different part to help bring some life to this song.
So let's make something up. We've got some chords. We'll go with the neck, let's clean
it up a little bit. We'll go...
[electric guitar]
Ok Cool. We'll vibe off that. And let's see, how is our — we're going on the right ear
so let's go back to left. And let's turn Low Latency Monitoring on. Excuse me, we've got
a click track. Ok here we go. Let's give it a shot and see what happens.
[recording electric guitar + drum loop in Pro Tools]
Ok. I told you, nothing earth shattering about my guitar playing here. We've gonna move the
next track to the right and we're gonna do the best we can to double it and play the
exact same thing.
[recording doubled electric guitar + drum loop in Pro Tools]
Alright. Now let's get low latency monitoring off. And let's hear that in the track. Let's
see what we got. Turn the click off and this is a doubled guitar.
[doubled electric guitar + drum loop in Pro Tools]
Alright, so not bad. Got like the spacial thing, it's a little bit of a chorusing effect.
Makes it feel like the guitars are wide, but I've got a better idea. I'm gonna try to differentiate
that doubled part. I'm gonna switch pickups. Nothing even crazy, I'm not changing my amp,
not changing the gain, just gonna switch my pickup to the neck position, and I'm gonna
play — so we got the B. So instead of those chords, let's go maybe... alright let's try
that and see what happens.
So let's start from the top, get a little click. I turned the click off. Let's unmute
the click and let's rock out, actually I wanted the drums to come up quite a bit. Let's pull
those guys up so I can hear what I'm doing here.
[recording doubled electric guitar]
You know what, I'm a perfectionist and I hated the way that started. Let's go.
[recording electric guitar double]
Alright, now let's compare the two and let's see what we like better. So, I'm going to
— we'll go with the mute. So right now we're gonna listen back to what we just did. Gonna
mute the click. And let's hear what we got.
[guitar double]
Yeah, very cool. I like that a lot better. Let's listen. A/B it. This is the first thing
we did.
And then back to the second. Very cool. So this just a concept that I want you guys to take, whether you're
tracking guitars or producing. I'm gonna — maybe we'll make a series out of this and we'll
add a couple other elements to it for tracking some guitars, but, that's it for this video.
Give you another way to look at it and we'll catch you on the next one. So don't forget:
david[at]davidglennrecording.com. I've got a great series coming your way soon on my
mix template. And I'm gonna walk you through A to Z how I'm doing my mixing whenever I
import sessions tracks in, clean them up, split stereo files to mono, the bussing, the
routing, the sidechain compression, the mix buss compression. Everything you could possibly
imagine I'm gonna walk you though A to Z and it's gonna be great. So stay tuned for that
and emails to david[at]davidglenn.com. Check out theproaudiofiles.com and hope you have
a great day.