Electro Harmonix
Electro Harmonix
how to get a good guitar tone?
alright, so i have been playing guitar a while (like 5 years) (just to clear things up...)
so anyway i was practicing with my drummer yeaterday and i really did not like my guitar tone. it sounded flat, and boxy. i had the bass at 7, the mid at 9, and the high around 5 on an Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff.
can someone tell me how to get a better tone? btw i play metal, and use a 7 string Schecter Omen
The Metal Muff can really color your tone a lot, and not always in a good way.
My first suggestion is to lower your gain by 10-30%. This may not sound great when playing solo, but when in the mix you should be able to hear yourself a lot better, as too much gain tends to just add noise and actually weaken the clarity of your tone.
Next, raise your treble and cut your bass. You're right on with the mids, although you may or may not need to drop them a little bit, it depends on how deeply the Metal Muff cuts mids. I haven't played it personally, just heard it, so I can't say for 100%. Bass on a guitar can either make drums and bass guitar sound muddy, or vice versa. Not good times. Try cutting your bass down to 5 or 6, or possibly even lower. If you can cut your bass just on the Metal Muff, or even on your pickups, that would be better. Lower bass coming into the amp, so you can keep or raise your bass on the amp itself.
Does your amp have a presence control? Jack it up if it does.
What I meant by lowering the bass on your pickups is slanting your pickups down slightly so that they're lower on the bass side, ie under your bottom/thick strings than vs under the treble/thin strings. This changes your tone - you lose some chunk, but gain a lot of clarity. Doing this allows you to raise your bass later in your signal chain to make up for it, but still tends to increase perception of your tone and your dynamic range... this helps keep you from sounding as boxy, in other words.
Got an EQ pedal? Might be a really good investment. Pushing mids, ie raising mid frequencies before the Metal Muff will increase the saturation/thickness of the distortion - it will allow you to actually lower the gain and still have a nice thick sound. You can always cut it afterwards, ie on the pedal or on the amp. Push a few db between 400 hz and 1.2 khz, where will depend on your guitar, your pedal, your pickups, your amp, etc.
Putting EQ after a pedal can help tame too much bass, or reduce certain muddy mids (between 400 and 800 hz is where the mud is at... or warmth... depends on your setup, again), or increase clarity (bump up 3 khz by a few db, increases the perception of "attack").
That should be enough to get you started. Once you start talking high-gain sounds, so much of the sound starts to depend on how you EQ... sadly, not many players realize that, and spend lots of time and money being frustrated at how their tone doesn't sound quite right. A 120$ rackmount stereo EQ would give you so much control over your sound it isn't even funny, but no, let's buy new pickups, maybe this pedal will work, etc etc.
Other than upgrading your speakers, these suggestions are probably the best way to go. I hope they help!
Saul
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