Recording - July 2011 - 36

Fat Guitar Tones
Without The Mud
are totally non-interacting. You can buy these on Ebay for $300, and for the price it is a great deal! Now if you’re an old analog dog like myself and still use a mixing console, you know the natural thing to do is use the eq already embedded on the board. So that is actually my first go-to because that’s where the audio signal is going through in my case. I have a vintage Trident recording console, so I use the onboard channel eq to carve those tones for guitars.

getting the best of both worlds, the High and Low shelving eq and the LA-2A-style T4 opto-compressor section. When I was tracking and mixing Randy Coven’s recent solo album, Nu School, I found the Portico 5033 5-band eq and the Trident CB9066 a real pair of lifesavers. Because Randy is a virtuoso bass player, both on piccolo bass as well as regular bass, he played many of the melody lines, so there had to be a lot of separation of frequencies in the mixes. Add to this the huge sound of Leslie West—I really had to be on my toes to make sure everyone had clarity in the mix. I would bring Randy’s bass up on one of the channels on the Trident mixer and use the insert points for the CB9066 or the Neve and then compress the crap out of the signal through the Universal Audio 1176 or the Purple Audio MC77. Worked like a charm! Conclusion I always tell musicians to trust their ears; they don’t lie.

In practice When I was producing the release Fretworx, I was up against some guitar tracks that had been sent to me via email, and I found that some of the tracks had a muddy tone. In fact, the articulation of the guitar notes seemed to disappear within the mix, drowned out by the frequencies of the bass guitar and kick drum. I found that compressing the track through the Urei LA4 tightened the tone. But I still needed to cut some of that low-mid out and boost a little high-mids, so I daisychained the signal out of the LA-4 through the Trident CB9066 Parametric, which took the output of the eq back into the return of the guitar channel. It worked perfectly in the mix, and highlighted the finger articulation of the guitar, without stepping all over the other instruments. For another song I ran the guitar through the Universal Audio LA-610,
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RECORDING JULY 2011

If the mix sounds wrong, then 99% of the time it is wrong. Boosting the levels of instruments to try to compensate will just make a bad mix louder and you’ll find that all of your faders are pegged to the top without any headroom to move. The best solution is to use a Program Equalizer that will blend the guitar perfectly within the mix. A little goes a long way; for example, a small boost at 3.3k or a cut at 300 Hz will be very effective. Don’t be afraid to use the knobs—that’s why Rupert Neve, Malcolm Toft and Bob Orban engineered them! Brian Tarquin (tarquin@recordingmag.com) is an Emmywinning recording engineer and guitarist, who runs the guitar-centric label Bohemian Productions based in New York (www.bohemianproductions.net).

http://www.bohemianproductions.net

Recording - July 2011

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