What’s missing from modern guitar tone
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- čas přidán 17. 06. 2024
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Josh Middleton of Sylosis talks guitar tone
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God bless it it’s refreshing to hear someone say all this
I think a lot of people agree but the djent guys are always the ones who get the loudest when your tone isn’t exactly a 5150 with a boat load of mid
100% agreed. Nevermore has some amazing tones on their albums where you really feel the low end of the chugs in comparison to open notes.
Factual, my acid words main riff
Nevermore is greatly underrated. And Jeff's tones were basically 2 amps tracked twice (quad tracked), with overdrive. A little wah on some of the solos. A little delay/ reverb here or there. But that main tone is brutal. And such clarity on those fast heavy riffs.
guitar tone you can hear at 10:13
that slight scoop on rhythm guitar tone really helps with lead guitar parts, bass tone, and obviously, the part that should shine in the first place, Vocals.
unless there are no vocals!
@@jordanliubenov thats boring though gotta have vocals
Agreed. Guitar forums started giving mids mids mids advice and this went hand in hand with the general public losing interest in modern metal. Not enough people are pumping the breaks on the forum advice not panning out (sic) long term.
funny how they try to add more mids when the thing that they always put on before their amp is literally a mid boost pedal, tube screamer.
@@alrecks619My fav is they dish out all this money on mesa etc gear for huge low end then take it out in the first step of mixing. Forums turned guitarist into Agent Smith of the Matrix copying and pasting themselves until they choke the undergroundwith clones. Guitar, boost, amp, vintage 30 panned left and right, plus low end taken out ADNAUSEUM created a lot of faceless bands.
Midrange is very difficult to get right, imo. It has to have precise levels to soften the highend, but it gets too overbearing, quickly. Most modern ampsims have that blob at 500hz that just makes everything sound congested. 500 is enemy of the chug in my opinion.
@@SashaGarciaIt's horses for courses re what tuning, 7 string etc. Statistically we have a million metal musicians with access to recording vs a thousand back in the 80's and early 90's. We should be DROWNING in amazing metal but forum/youtuber/Facebook group advice is STILL pushing a failed model.
@@CIRCLEOFTONEmy guitar player uses a mesa badlander with one mesa v30 cabinet and another cabinet that has Jensens in it and the jensens really give you the pissed off aggressive top end and it really compliments it.
Guitar tunig has a big impact on this. Being above the B or C tuning (or even higher) makes the sound more tight and that helps control the low end more easily, so you won't have to put a filter on 80 or 100 hz...same thing for the string gauge, i tend to prefer bigger sets like 0.12 on a C# tuning. That helps to get a brighter sound.
For instance i mixed the latest album of my band which is a death/thrash/black metal band called Barbarossa (the album is The Great Carnage) and we were tuning in C#. Amp was a Victory Kraken and cab was a Marshall with greenbacks. My filter was at like 60-70hz just to make room for the bass and kick...and we got a tone which is tight and aggressive as very few others.
Don't be shy and boost that high and low end, there's so much energy and excitement you're missing you'd be surprised.
slightly scooping mids is underrated.
Everything that ever happened is underrated.
he's not wrong, but its confusing because on the stl tonality middleton plugin every single preset has a high pass at 88-100hz and low pass from 9500-12k.
it's probably being set by the STL guys to make it more "mix-ready", not Josh himself.
You can still dial extra low end in on the amp sim which will raise the amount of low end before the high pass filter. Push against that filter from behind and you can get a bit of that bloom back.
100% agree with the mids thing, as well as people cutting all the lows and highs and then asking how to "widen" the guitars! :D
What a great chat! Everything he said is on point, this is exactly what I think misses from modern tones. I love mixes that aren’t perfect, it makes them special.
I agree with most of what you say, but it's good to see more mids in guitar tones than the old hyper scooped mushy sounds of the old school. What I find missing from modern mixes is the lack of realistic panning and the misconception of the LCR style of panning, the Left - Center - Right school. Take a listen to any Mutt Lange mix to see that he used the entire stereo spectrum for his mixes, with layers of guitar tones placed appropriately across the spectrum to provide the most dramatic effect to the listener. This of course is just my opinion, feel free to disregard.
I think the reason modern metal guitars have so much midrange, is because modern guitars are typically close-miked, and when you close-mic a speaker, the midrange is very weird and dominated by either fizz or stuffy low end. It's impossible to get it to sound like in the room, so the only solution is to turn up the midrange to get closer to the room sound, but although the resulting midrange fills out the sound, it also sounds weird, because it is exaggerated. My go-to reference for a great midrange is Iron Maiden's Piece of Mind album, but that album was recorded with room mics and probably also close mics blended in, and according to interviews with the band from that era, the room sound was very important for the result on the album. With most modern metal relying on close-miking, I don't see a way to ever get a realistic tone that is just right and natural.
It's nice to hear this. I started leaving in more low end in the guitars and I like how it sounds. In my remake of Metallica's album St. Anger, I don't remember exactly but I only did a soft slope high pass up to like 80hz max, and cut out a tiny bit of the low mids, as shown in the video. Cranked the gain and master volume of the crunch channel in the amp sim, going into an oversized Mesa cab IR with creambacks or blackbacks, and the guitar tone is huge. I like the tone so much that I changed my real amp setup and am using the same basic formula for my next project.
Josh knows his shit. All the things he said about tuning, ale totslly correct.
Yes! I love lots of low end and highs on the guitars. The mids more flat / slightly scooped sounds better too and sits better in a mix.
Also if you remove too much lows and highs the mix sounds narrower too.
Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the super low tuned guitars. A simple D standard tone fits so well in the mix with a mild mid scoop.
I agree. I've been following this sorta advice, not really knowing what I was doing. It always felt 'wrong', like I was carving out some important energy. Fuck it. I'm doing it all scooped now, I don't give a shit. If it sounds good, IT IS GOOD.
Me too, I was always too conservative while cutting mids in an esoteric hope that it would make sense later down the mix. Nope, i still hear the honk.
hell yeah! I have also, sounds so much bigger, I can get one guitar to sound massive! czcams.com/video/qJpGCoZ4dts/video.htmlsi=dOrAqIHzxpw-Xg4q CC is English! Cheers!
Tastefully scooped 90's metal tones that sound unique, slightly raw and have personality to them will ALWAYS beat a modern mid heavy and overly processed tone IMO
back then they have to work with what they (or the studio) have, nowadays it's yet another 808 pedal before 5150 through a mesa oversized cab with v30s miked with sm57, in whatever amp sim software they are using.
That is definitely an opinion. Personally that shit hurts my ears
90s death metal tones were disgusting in a good way.
What's scopped? Like mids and treble basically non existent?
@@metalheadblues "Scooping the mids" means you cut out the mid frequencies so the EQ curve ends up looking like a smiley face sort of shape. Some people just take out as much mids as they can and while it sounds cool on its own it doesn't work well in a band setting as the guitar is a midrange based instrument. I personally prefer when bands/producers cut out the boxy and honky sounding mid range frequrncies but still manage to keep the guitars full and present in a full band context, hope that clears it up haha
I've been leaving more low end in my guitars and it's nice to feel validated
Yeah, scoop the fucking mids people. My favorite are the deniers who boost lows and highs and play through a Recto cab. 🤣 People have shit tone these days because they're too busy doing what people tell them to do instead of what sounds good. Also C# best tuning.
To me the issue is not the mix but the production. Modern metal often gets produced like pop - thinking in beats instead of songs. So when it comes to mixing, the guitar tone needs to be as clean as possible. Thus all that nice character gets lost. Some recent albums sound to me like AI has generated them...
Tonal preferences will come and go as with music styles. I miss mixes where the guitar has detail, growl and real guts in the mid detail. There's a lot of new wave/old school thrash bands who just nail the sense of detail in the guitar tones, rather than just being everything and all. It provides space for the rest of the mix to exist. Sure, it can get dialled out but at least it exists in the first place to BE dialled out. One tone that is super underrated in terms of grease, growl and disgusting dirty mid detail was Mick Mars' earlier 80s tones. Some of those were just filthy, and it was simply a José modded Marshall. Used well, classic amps still deliver the guts and grease that can be supplemented with other reamped tones.
Check out also Iron Maiden's guitar tone on Piece of Mind. Some of the best and classiest midrange I have ever heard.
@@metalinsights9664 Absolutely. I think that back in the era when mixing and mastering didn't have the concerns of relative loudness, the technical disciplines of making records and the equipment associated with that didn't make certain aspects subjunctive to the process like modern processes. A lot of things have changed, some for the better, some not. You couldn't imagine anybody recording anything like early Maiden and being able to get the same feel now. We don't listen to music the same way as we did then, we don't record it like that either. Every track is competing with another band's track, we're not flipping vinyl or listening to the radio. This is entirely why we need to value and understand music of its time for why it was the way it was. I digress.
@@TristanJCumpole I agree. By the way, I also love the midrange in Mick Mars's tone. I love how tight his tone is in the low end. The best example of that would be "Live Wire." Great tone. I wonder what recording techniques were employed to capture the tone like that. Anther great example that I keep coming back to is Randy Rhoads on the Blizzard album, with "Mr. Crowley" being a good representation of that tone. Both Mick Mars's and Randy Rhodes's tones are similar overall to Piece of Mind in terms of basic ingredients: strong midrange; lean, tight low end; just a touch of sparkle on top, and lots of sustain.
@@metalinsights9664 A lot of that would have been a consequence of there not being any sort of good template for the sound in terms of how to capture and record them. As such, they were probably put to tape similarly to how they sounded in a room or live. The modded JCM800 sound Mick had later was probably not the TFFL tones as the JCM800 was new in 81 and not easy to get outside of the UK. Randy was a Plexi guy from what I understand. It might well be that Mick also started with similar.
I needed to hear this.
Some really great points here, I never really thought about how the 100 HZ region was affecting the mud in mix tonally. This just opened my perspective on how to approach Eqing the low end of my guitar tones.
imo 100hz area only becomes a problem if it conflicts with the bass (you want them only in palm mutes, most of the times), whereas the 200-400hz area will always muddy up your mix and buries the snare drum which is also a crucial part for metal these days, and 400-1200hz will clash with vocals and bass, and perhaps other instruments such as keys and whatnot.
Can't agree more. Alot of tones are so quacky now. I miss a bit of that shitty, guitar center, no mids tone lol.
I used to play in the C-D# range, with occasional B, and had a strong distaste for tunings lower than that.
Then, one day, I got a new retro guitar and arbitrarily tuned it to what sounded best for that particular guitar, with 10-52 strings.
The tuning turned out to be G#, which I found out only after writing and recording a bunch of riffs with.
When people hear the riffs either on the record or when I play them, I often get asked about the tuning, and when they hear me say it's G#, people go: "What-what-what tuning you said this is in? It sounds like C."
Because everything is about riffs meeting the sound.
Some riffs sound massive in D, some riffs don't sound heavy despite being in E, a full octave lower than the standard, precisely because of that tuning.
The same riff might sound heavier and heavier, the higher the tuning goes from that low E.
As for the low frequencies absent in modern metal recordings, yes, that's one of the biggest things I dislike.
People got told to cut off everything below 100 hertz, and just did that because a random voice on CZcams who mixed zero of their favourite records said so.
Overall, I have a trouble time listening to modern metal precisely because most of it sounds like garbage. It tries to be aggressive, but achieves exactly the opposite result.
All these brutal metal bands sound weaker and lighter than something like Shihad's FVEY, which is barely metal at all.
With a tight performance you can get away with any guitar tone mostly.TOTM and Butchered at B are milestones in tone for me, as long as you keep the parts interesting you can get away if not overdone IMO.
I think it's really fun as a home studio musician to experiment with different ways of mixing. Personally don't think there is a right or wrong way to mix guitars, it's more based on the listener type that feeling your going for. Also depends how much you love bass guitar in your mix. If you take away just alittle low end on your guitars the guitar tone will remain very thick though the bass guitar will get pushed back in the mix. I like to find the a balance to where the guitar and bass guitar have a perfect marriage where they both sound great and both have a place in the mix, though that's just me. Then there's other times where I'm like "fuck the bass" lol
Agreed
Yeah man there has been alot of over producing going on. Keep some rawness in the mix .
Guitar low end is super underrated
I high-pass guitars at 80 Hz max, sometimes just as low as 60 Hz. I’ve also never listened to that “more mids!” advice, since I never liked the sound. My default rhythm sound coming from the amp is therefore still scooped, and then I just boost with the EQ in the DAW specifically in those mid-frequencies where I cut the vocals: Which is between 1000 and 1200 Hz, where vocals have those nasal frequencies that you want to get rid of anyway - therefore leaving space for the guitars to slip into.
So many albums these days in extreme metal, I end up not liking because the guitar tone is too thin, "round" and anemic... no grit or fuzz, no sizzle.
Love hearing someone else share this point of view. Guitar tones in modern times make me yawn. Also really cool to hear a shout out to Chris Clancy. He mixed and mastered my EP and man did he do magic, especially considering that the raw takes I gave him were low budget recordings done in my bedroom.
Here's a pro tip from a guy who produces in Brazil and have seen a lot of crazy low budget instruments: ALWAYS ask the tuning and the type of guitar/bass they intend to use for tracking.
low tune + low/mid range instruments = a 50-50 chance to get f'd at the mixing stage.
Educate yourself with some gandalf guitar tech voodo magic like fixing the octaves and pickups height, this knowledge can save you from your worst nightmares
You'll thank me later
And the strings are probably from the same era as gandalf. Br here
i've been playing metal for more than 30 years, and recording and producing! I agree with all said, but I don't see much people talking about how much low end guitarist remove before hitting distortion with amps or plugins! Todays tones are very tight, so tight that fundamental notes not there and you barely can understand what note they are playing! That happens even more on extreme down tunning guitars. Alternative bands using fuzz always seem to have the biggest and heavier guitar tones!
Yes! I also feel that the mids thing went too far the other way. Riffs should be able to stand on their own, without resorting to lo-fi it everytime.
Yeah, I have a 7 string, I take it down to drop A or drop G as needed, but... I gotta be real, my HSS Strat in E standard through drop C is my happy place. It sounds absolutely huge and cutting, as opposed to just low. And, really..... it's just so much less work. Keeping the low tunings clear and articulate is hell.
Also the top end. We've been suffering from "Bubble bath" guitar tones for almost 20 years. It happens in the top end fizz. Guitars are going "frosh frosh" instead of "vwom vwom".
Bring back the fire, brimstone. Drain the bubble bath.
very, very well put.
can you share a fire/brimstone example? or how you would mix a heavy guitar in the mix?
@@justisjustis Don't get me wrong, I'm no expert, no engineer. I would not pretend to know shit from shinola in regards to "how". But without know the technical stuff, in line what these guys were talking about, albums like Immolation's first two or Death's Human, Even Metallica's Justice (as problematic as that is in other ways) all had huge guitar tones that were "Dangerous" (as these guys say) had that low end "vwom" and the top end gristle crackled with life, energy, power and again a feeling of "danger." .....compare that later to say Severed Savior's 'Servile Inserection' - which is very well produced and balanced in every way ....but the guitars sound like a bubble bath. Incinerate's 'Anatomize' comes to mind as well, but there were a ton of records not off the top of my head that came out in the 2000s that shared that bubble bath tone. And I was like "Is no one else hearing this? What are we doing??" I felt like I was taking crazy pills.
@@swanofnutella4734 oh hell yeah. I feel it. Thank you for your insight.
E standard
I'm not very experienced in mixing but... I just love how low mids sound,200-250 on guitars, 430-460 on the mixbus,not much , just a tiny bit, like 1-1,5 DB, maybe is just personal taste but I find it very pleasing
Thanks for the info! I gotta try your recipe for this! Thanks!
He is absolutely right, why hi-pass your guitars to the point where the only lows that are left are the muddy frequencies 150Hz and up?
People using the bass only for the low end, EQing the low end out of guitars, it sounds like there's only bass down there. It's "clear", but heavy music is not clear. Plus, literally your fundamental is down in the low end. Let the guitar do its thing. When I think of a mix that sounds amazing where you can tell there is low-end left in the guitar but where the bass fills in more of it (instead of being the only thing down there) is Arch Enemy's Wages of Sin album - thing absolutely rips and it's 22 years old.
Wolfheart, baritone, ultimate tone
Tube screamer ( vol 10, gain 2, tone 5) +Rectofier and scoop 750hz -16db = instant old school Metallica tone. Works on any modeler, any VST or the real thing. Also it's pretty close to the Ampeg Dying Fetus tone.
If you really want the DF tone, check out a modeler called Flextron.
I completely understand everything he’s saying and I agree though I’m also a hypocrite. I am as of very very recently just getting away from old habits. I do low pass really low in general though. Like 6500hz
let's goo
I think some of the best modern tones have come from BFMV. Sounded like shit when Carl Bown was showing his EQing on here. Sounded crisp in the mix though.
Who is this guy in the video? Excuse my ignorance😊
Enrico Pallazzo! :) (Josh Middleton)
Which NTM is this?
Sylosis
Guitar tones are getting real weak. Stop hi passing at 100 hz plus, and low passing at 8k. Miss the aggression.
EXACTLY….Finally, someone said it. Stop being afraid of low end and high end.
I started dropping my high pass to 70hz instead of 90-100 for drop G# much better
@@dannyriffs imagine that! It’s almost like, you don’t need to cut out as much low end as the internet would make you think you do. People that make records don’t think like this anyways. If something needs to be cut, they cut it. Nothing is done “just because”, it’s just total nonsense. You can pump tons of low end in your guitars if you know how to control it and the mix is solid. People have gotten wayyyyy too over the top with this. Not surprised that with the way the world is where up is down and down is up, that somehow more mids and less lows and highs is somehow “heavier”. Glad you are getting sicker tones!
Depends on the mix, Scar The Martyr is all low-passed at 8k, it sounds massive and aggressive af.
There is little after 8k that makes guitars sound heavier and not lighter, but that, also, is not universally the case.
because guitar speakers are meant to do both jobs for you, so why add more which can mess up the phase of your guitar when the speakers already do it?
Vanilla sausage
It’s all song dependent for me. If the bass was produced with more growl and grind than guts, I’ll leave/add more guts to the gtrs. Sometimes, a more neutered guitar is what’s needed of the bass is big and gross (in a good way).
Who is this from what band?
Josh middelton, architect n sylosis
Tired of these "modern" sticky guitars. I'm definitely going against more heavy rock guitar sound. Less distortion and less highs.
Old strings will help in that regard and we shall not mention the mental modern metal drum sound.
Old strings are great. You get a stable sound for a long time and it’s not pushing too many crystaline high frequencies into the distortion stages.
I'm finding this vid quite hypocritical, you guys are strong advocates of low end cuts on guitars , now this, c'mon seriously
Agreed, I think Joel needs to a/b an old mix of his and joeys like attila against a modern will Putney mix if he thinks he had more low end
@@skymoon3471 I think it also shows that one size does not fit all. We tend to be a little narrow-minded with eq, automatically everyone hi cuts , automatically notch harshness is found then removed, but seriously if it sounds good already and it sits well in the mix, why do it
My problem with guitar nowdays is the lack of high end.
Yep yep yep…..everything is so soft, everyone is so afraid of edge, or being different, and wants to be so safe.
@@truckguy3 that's the word, everything sounds "soft". Sounds too safe and padded, yep
I just adjust it till it sounds punchy, there is no magical setting. Everything is offset by how you pick, your pickups, interface presets, daw setup, and what you’re using as an amp. Some amps have tone knobs where the difference between 1 and 10 is like hardly anything.
Iv been listening to a lot of slam bands and the guitar tones are awesome they basically dont follow any trends and everything is super exagerated like completely scooped mids so its mothing but bass and treble and bass drops are so cranked they distort the entire track
Everyone is afraid of high end. Everyone is afraid of edge. Everyone is afraid of low end, and want way too much fucking midrange in their guitars. Stop it. It doesn’t sound good. It never has. The key to heavy tones is literally never “let’s add more midrange”. And honestly the guys at URM/NTM definitely push some of this by the “producers” they have on many times.
Tubes! 😂
Of course you can add some analogue picking at weirder synths generated sounds and put both in the virtual cabinet, but a real guitar sounds differently to the well breed ears. Namastè.
U have to mix your tone with the other instruments, your bass is where the lows are and should stay, the guitar is a midrange instrument, it shouldn’t be super low or high. Drums are an important piece to finding your guitar tone. U will drive yourself nuts doing the guitar time in a room by yourself.
A lot of tones are just weird and blended too much with synth and bass to a fault so it’s just like a weird indiscernible wall of noise. Example would be the new ADTR song. But bands like knocked loose are using more gain and lowened in a tasteful way.
oh man those guitars on that new album sound like a cardboard box setting on fire. Maybe awful but maybe great?
Bottom end is the fuckin KEY. ABSOLUTE KEY.
About time someone said this. Modern Metal guitar tones are atrocious. Incredibly congested, cloudy, quacky and fatiguing. A good Metal tone needs a mid scoop, it was always that way and it will never change. That 500 Hz range needs a dip, often the 200-300 range needs a slight taming and the 1.2k range needs a dip. The tone has to be clear, transparent and slamming and those modern metal fart noises are the exact opposite of that. At some point a bunch of morons on the internet starting pointing out that "gUiTaR iS a mIdRaNgE iNsTrUmEnT" like it's this really smart thing to say. Well first off, that's in terms of the tonal range of the instrument within an arrangement, you dorks. Secondly, it stops being a midrange instrument when you tune everything down to drop-X!
More often than not, modern metal tones have a very unflattering midrange, to my ears. No dimensionality.
Wow u don’t get it lol
Many use guitar plugins and plugins just don’t have that low end
iirc most amp sims probably capture their IRs in an isobox or something like that, which deadens the sound so it can be as flat as possible (while retaining the character of the cabinet itself), which is rather different from recording the cabinet in a live room.
Iv been using olas ir and it has too much bass
A lot mids suck.
Sims are for simps
They lack depth. Why use 10 words to say one? 😂
1.25kHz boost is the worst thing ever.