Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: July 30 2013, 11:11 |
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| Quote (Priabonia @ July 29 2013, 11:11) | | to get close to Mike's sound I had to add monster amounts of treble before the amp, then a fair bit afterwards! |
Perhaps I can let you in on a few secrets there!
The main factor in getting that cutting, screaming kind of sound is the attack - get a good, sharp transient on the beginning of the note and you'll get something which comes across as brighter, because you're really bringing out the higher harmonics of the sound at that point (our brains make particular use of the beginning of a sound to work out what it is - a fact used in the design of the Roland D50, where they mated sampled attacks with synthesised waveforms for the sustain portion of the notes, the theory being that the sampled attack would help the sound be perceived as more realistic). You can make quite a huge difference in the whole character of sound you get out of a guitar by changing how you pick it, and it's all stuff which you'll struggle to achieve with EQ (because it's working in the frequency domain rather than the time domain...and I think it's always a super-useful thing to get your head around which of the two it is you're dealing with when you're approaching a problem, it can save no end of frustration).
If you're playing with your fingernails like Mike does, I'd suggest trying something like the classical guitar 'rest stroke', where you're bringing the picking finger across the string and bringing it to rest on the one below. I think it's important to make sure you're picking in a direction that's as parallel to the string as possible - that might sound really obvious, but I find it's worth really consciously thinking about these things and checking (just looking down and making sure really helps, but doing it in front of a mirror can sometimes reveal further things). Anything that's going to impede the string at that moment is going to soften off the sound - if you pick more with the pad of the finger than the fingernail, for example, you'll get more of a Mark Knopfler chunky kind of sound (though he'll sometimes pick with enough force that there's a bit of a slap off the frets, giving a different kind of brightness to the attack).
If you're using a pick, I'd suggest trying a pointy one rather than one with a rounded tip (I'm personally a fan of these, which give a nice amount of control over the sound), so you're again getting a nice precise unimpeded attack. I think again, it really needs to be brought down as parallel to the string as possible, though it's definitely worth experimenting with angles of attack, as you get get a nice jazzy plumminess, or indeed a bit of a metal-style chug on power chords, by holding it at a slight angle so the tip rubs across the string a bit more.
Mike using really light strings (sometimes as light as 8s) on a Gibson really would have contributed as well, that'll have helped him get that (often quite heavy) side to side vibrato going without needing a arthritis-inducing amount of effort! I'm sitting with a Fender-scale guitar strung with 12s as I write this, and it's certainly not for the faint hearted...I find it needs more downward pressure than an up and down type of vibrato (and also a bit of a squeeze to make sure that initial attack doesn't get softened). The other thing that's key is making sure that downward pressure is coming from the arm rather than the thumb - as soon as you start clinging onto the neck for dear life, any type of vibrato gets really difficult and is in danger of losing its fluidity.
It's worth trying all this on an unamplified guitar (either electric or acoustic, really) - if it doesn't sound like Mike before you plug it in, you'll really struggle to make it sound like him when it is.
Once you've done all that, it shouldn't actually need too much electronic shaping afterwards, though I'd tend to generally pull out some of the stuff around 300Hz and below, and would often have a high pass filter in there somewhere (depending on the exact register I'm playing in...but especially with higher parts, there's often a fair amount of low-end thuddiness that you can just chuck away), so the mix doesn't get too muddied up with all that stuff. Obviously if you're starting from scratch and just going for a hefty slice of raw cooking transistors like Mike often used to do, it'll need more work (like some taming of high-end fizz, and something to give it a bit of a ~1-2kHz peak), but an amp/amp simulator should take care of some of that (especially if you're working with a speaker or speaker simulator).
Well, anyway, just some things for you to have a go with there, and I hope it comes across as being some things you might enjoy experimenting with rather than that I think your cover (or playing) is bad! I enjoyed it, there's clearly a lot of work gone into that...must have been fun!
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...or maybe you meant the level of the guitar - to which my reply is, I am a guitarist, other instruments, what other instruments?! 