Creating BIG GUITAR TONES with MONUMENTS!

hello boys and girls today I want to talk about High Gain guitar tones interesting and unique high-end guitar tones because I know that's what you love today I want to show you how the progressive metal band monuments that we all love dialed in the guitar tone for their latest single here we go these days it usually works like this the bands record that the eye tracks at home they send them to the mixing engineer who will eventually reamp those tracks if you're lucky through a real rig sometimes only through plugins it's kind of boring right so monuments did not do that at all they decided to dial in the guitar tone during the actual recording session which I think is very smart and they really went crazy with this Not only was this all analog no plugins no digital they actually split the signal into several amps several cabs several microphones a highly complex setup they kind of got everything in phase and recorded that so the mix engineer already got like a final tone but still a bunch of microphones and a bunch of options how to combine them and yeah some like different options to choose from and they had a very different approach from what I do don't get me wrong I love blending different guitar rigs for a larger than live tone blending m splending different cabinets blending different speakers and microphones but what I do is I use different tracks like several performances that I send into different directions and then I combine them I even did an entire course about blending guitar tones including multi-tracks showing how you find the right tones that combined you know become something bigger I think it's a 29 course or something there's a link below check it out what they did was different they actually used one performance and send it into several amps which is not easy to do and that makes it interesting it was my buddy Adam Steele who recorded the guitars together with monuments guitarist John Brown and now I want to pass it over to Adam who's going to show us the rig and who's gonna explain how he did what so uh have fun with Adam here we go let's talk about well the guitarist so that's that's John Brown and he's an absolute monster of a player and he was playing his new signature guitar but that was going firstly into a DI box so we could capture a clean di from there I went into a gate I went into the dead wheeled Golem which is a fantastic gate and then we split out the signal using a Saturn Works splitter one of those signals went through a tube screamer into this Marshall over here which is a modified Marshall with the legendary tones hot mod in it which makes it kind of more soldanoi it's a 100 watt vintage Marshall so it's very angry very clean very clear but that mod just gives it more gain and the other amp is the Mesa Road King which you might have seen Christian Kohler playing with before I love the road king it's very meaty very chuggy and that was boosted by the peppers pedals dirty tree which is very similar to a 1433 and so the reason we use two amps at the same time was because of something that George lever suggested to me which was that there um a really good thing to look for in tones is for kind of half the tone to be kind of lower gain very high transient very clear very crisp and the other half of the signal to be a much more High Gain kind of slow response amp which is where the Jill rectifier Road King came in because then AMP one has their thing and amp 2 has the kind of zero definition angry monster Behemoth of a thing and you combine the two together and you get a huge sound now both of those amps when with speaker cables under the floor from our control room to the live room that's something I highly recommend no matter where you are if you're working with relamps try and find somewhere where you can put the guitar cabinet in a separate room otherwise you're gonna have no perspective at all on whether the sound is what you're looking for so the Marshall was going through a traditional 4x12 by Zilla but very similar to like a traditional Mesa 412 with speakers in that were different but the one I used was the Marshall g12h 30 anniversary very kind of again Crystal Clear angry but not as mid forward as a vintage 30 and the road king went into a six by twelve an absolute monster of a cabinet which had the Vintage 30 in the top miked up from there I used an sm57 on both cabinets but then on the traditional 412 the Marshall side I used a tip that I've taken from Andy Snape which is to use an Austrian audio oc818 which as he calls it the best 414 you're gonna get because it is based on the akg414 type design because it's the same design team that we're working on that but it's much more consistent and so by combining the 57 and the 818 that gave me a very clean clear Punchy sound now on the 6x12 I used a modded sm57 you don't have to mod yours but I had that and the lewit 1040 which is complete Overkill uh it's like a three and a half thousand four thousand dollar valve mic it's my main vocal mic but I just I had it in there I wanted to use it so why not for that I would usually recommend using some sort of condenser that's not quite so expensive maybe a Roswell lk47 or something like that that's in a much more sane price bracket but I just happen to have the 1040 on the stand already so I went there you go all four of those mics then came into some nice preamps back here the uh Marshall ones went into the cranbourne Camden preamps and originally the 6x12 ones went into the drama 1960 preamps I then took those out and put them into audience ASP 880s instead which are really good preamps again Ulrich wild likes them I like them they're clean they're clear they're full and then they were all sent over it Wild Style to this mixer down here the Behringer mixer so all four mics went into the Behringer mixer and I decided for my own sanity with editing that I panned the Marshall ones one side and Panda Mason ones the other side so that I could have two separate signals coming out of that mixer to go back to the converters but before the converters they went into the drama 1960 at line level which is an optical valve compressor What compression on guitars oh yeah yeah that good three to five DB of compression on heavy Rhythm guitars for me is a bit of a magic trick it's a bit of a secret sauce people say oh you shouldn't compress guitars they're already compressed enough okay I'm getting great results with it it's something that you should definitely try um if I had a universal audios la3as I would be using those because those have the kind of the Transformer saturation richness but I already had the drama 1960 which I set to a very fast attack and release as far as Optical uh compressors are concerned and that gave me a big warmth sound I stereo linked them as well so that the two amps didn't kind of fight with each other in terms of pumping compression didn't want that to go weird and then that went into the Converters on a couple of different channels on my audient rack there which went into Reaper what I really want to do to get the phase test is to record them both at the same time and just use specifically some chugs I've got this big lump then a bit of a hover and then down now these are not going to be identical in between the two microphones because they are different mics and different tonal profiles but the large parts of it should be very similar and you can see these two dips don't line up the one on top gets into that big dip first and what that tells me visually without even having looked at the microphones which let's look at the microphones I it tells me on screen that the top one is being the top one is being recorded first that's because of physics and the speed of sound when sound comes out of the speaker it hits what's closest to it then further away then further away then further away so now to play The Phase game I'm gonna go back in there and move that mic that's too close back a little bit and probably by yeah a little bit and test it again so bingo these big slopes and notches are about as lined up as I'm gonna get them I think but this is where I've got five six seven and eight on my audient 880. all running and if I go you might remember that when I when I Marshall it sounded a lot more like now it sounds like like an angry dog let's try one more time there all those little upswings that are on that relatively high frequency all hit exactly the same time [Music] thank you [Music] yeah that sounds like it was coming out of one microphone but thicker and Fuller the thing for me now is with the two amp characteristics Blended and all the microphones aligned the only difference is now are the amps response and the micro micro fluctuations that you get with different weights of capsules and kind of different response patterns which all combines into something so that when we go back to mixing uh in the outboard we get this thing that I call the 3d effect which is when I record this lot uh pan to one side and then again pan to the other side it gives a thing where it sounds bigger than it actually is that is very hard to replicate digitally so on we go [Music] yes that sounded better yeah I got that riff as well that I wrote the same time which is thank you I need a click to get the thing you write but I just like that [Music] interesting are you pulling another string to make the flap yeah yeah I mean yeah that's why I wanted a trap taking advantage of the trip that's why I wanted to trim for ages I've got a Floyd but I haven't changed strings ever since I got it because changing strings on the Floyd Rose is a pain in the ass so I've got this one now and then I'm like yeah I'm gonna write oh I'm gonna anyway well she commit and double track it it must have been on purpose yeah right other side yeah and a one and a two and a three and a four [Music] [Music] tight enough for submitting a demo if not tight enough for a record that was pretty good sounds alright to me and then the other if [Music] [Music] I hope you enjoyed a little journey into a pretty unique analog guitar recording experience was that correct I don't know it was fun if you want to see more Adam did an entire course about this session which is I think one and a half hours long where he goes far more into detail shows you everything if you want to see that check out the link below which leads you to Modern metal guitar recording with Adam Steele of course that is a lot of fun you'll find the course inside my Academy Cola audio called if you don't know what color audio called is shame on you now it's it's actually uh the most sexy and most evil recording mixing and mastering Academy for all kinds of heavy music out there if you want to learn anything about dialing in guitar tones and mixing and mastering all the other stuff and recording drums and bass and ball check it out um I think what's very special about this Academy is that if you actually subscribe you will get all our courses from day one that means you can either just get like Adam's course or you subscribe and you dive in a whole universe of really cool courses a lot of courses coming from me but then other courses from whatever Herman hamideovic orients bogren or Adam Steele and a lot of other great people check out Cola audio call if you want to learn something if you want to become better and yeah hopefully you will enjoy this entire course um let Adam entertain you that's all for today don't forget to subscribe to this lovely Channel and to ding dong ring the bell if you want to see more content like this leave a comment say hello to your grandma have a beer be more metal I see you in hell [ __ ] bye bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Kohle Audio Kult

Views: 31,760

Keywords: guitar, metalguitar, metalguitarist, monuments band, john browne, recording guitars, guitar amp, tube amp, mesa road king, marshall, guitar cabinet, kristian kohle, kohle audio kult, neural dsp, riff hard, soldano, guitar session, impulse responses

Id: mJUJvDHsSJM

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023