My top 30 profiles for metal rhythm guitar.

  • Hi guys, wanted to share this video that I put together yesterday. There is info on the Youtube page but I think it's important to write it here:


    A few things to note:

    -Preemptively answering this because someone will probably point it out, yes the guitars are deliberately mixed loud here. The point of this is to show guitar tones.
    -There is NO EQ on any of the profiles. They are RAW. The ONLY processing on the guitars is slight compression and automated volume adjustments. I didn't even add high pass filters. This is EXACTLY what these profiles sound like.
    -The song used for this demonstration is "Last Shadow" from my album Minimum Safe Distance, which will be available from November 9th 2018.
    -All of the information I present in the video is pulled from the information provided by the sellers on Rig Manager.
    -This is MY personal taste. Hence why some amps are more prevalent than others.
    -The order of the profiles is completely random.
    -Some of the profiles are more "mix ready" than others.
    -I'd like to think this list is completely unbiased.
    -Whilst I have over 2000 profiles (plus all the free ones in the rig exchange) I have of course not tried every profile on the market. If I missed your favourite ones, let me know!!
    -The guitar used to record the DIs that I used to reamp is an Ibanez Prestige RG2570Z with a DiMarzio Crunch Lab.


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    If you open the video on Youtube I added timestamps for each profile, and links to each seller's page.


    Let me know what you guys think!

  • As I said in the other thread, great work, man.


    I find it tricky to extrapolate how things would sound using my standard tuning, but it was interesting to listen to what you did, Charlie.


    If I were pressed to come up with a criticism it'd be that across the board the rhythm parts lacked a little bite, forcing me to "listen in" / make an effort to hear the detail of what they were doing.


    That said, there was an admirable consistency throughout, so it stands to reason that you achieved the mix presence you were after.


    Bravo for all the hard work, man. Excellent. :thumbup:

  • I always find a lot of online demos difficult to make my mind up about the sounds, due to the guitars being multi tracked. I'd prefer one guy, playing chords, riffs etc, just on his own without any backing, so you can ascertain a profile's merits. Likewise, some long dreamy Gary Moore solo type thing will provide me more of a reference point or example, than a thrashy chord riff session.

    Obviously tracking/layering guitars results in a wall of sound, but it's no real reflection on some guy in a bar band or the like, or the sound he'll achieve.


    I'm not criticising the sterling demo by 'Random 13', here, just making a general discussion point that I feel.

  • LiamUK it isn't actually as layered as you might expect, the guitars are only double tracked here. I didn't apply any processing to the guitars apart from very light compression, so what you hear is what you get. It won't sound exactly the same if you were to play the same profiles though because our hands are different, and we use different guitars, pickups etc. Hopefully though the video shows the differences between the profiles!


    Monkey_Man I assume the profiles "lacking bite" is probably because I didn't EQ them into the mix at all. If this were a release mix, or like the final mix I have for this song on the album, I add a fair bit of top end and high mids to make the guitars more aggressive and cut through the mix. As I didn't want to do that here (because different profiles may need different EQ) I opted to just turn up the guitars to make them easier to hear.


    Thanks for the feedback both :)

  • Ahh... thank you, Charlie!


    Yes, the combination of the "lower" tuning, the lack of fairy dust and my listening through a CrapMac™ mono speaker with ZeroBass™ driver must be why. If the speaker had even a little bit of bass, that would've helped based(!) on what you've said.


    Thanks again, bro'.

  • I always find a lot of online demos difficult to make my mind up about the sounds, due to the guitars being multi tracked. I'd prefer one guy, playing chords, riffs etc, just on his own without any backing, so you can ascertain a profile's merits. Likewise, some long dreamy Gary Moore solo type thing will provide me more of a reference point or example, than a thrashy chord riff session.

    Obviously tracking/layering guitars results in a wall of sound, but it's no real reflection on some guy in a bar band or the like, or the sound he'll achieve.


    I'm not criticising the sterling demo by 'Random 13', here, just making a general discussion point that I feel.

    I get this, believe me. It's just that the KPA is not just a live device, and for many of us, it spends more time in the studio. So from my perspective, I could not care less what the profile sounds like with one guy playing by himself, because it tells me nothing about how it sits in a mix, and so is just not very useful to me.


    I also play live in a 2-guitar band, and I feel like everything above applies to that as well.


    I think different people just analyze things differently, and prefer things different ways. For me, as long as the post-processing is minimal to none, a mixed demo gives me so much more of an idea of how it can fit in a mix, live or in studio.


    And I think you touched on why a bit, when you mentioned different musical styles. It does me little good to hear the guitar by itself, or with sparse accompaniment...it's just not something that I run into often playing in a modern hard rock band.


    I can also see the attraction in hearing the raw, single-tracked sound of the profile. It's honest.

    Disclaimer: When I post demo clips for profiles, there will be some minimal post-processing, unless stated otherwise. I normally double-track hard L/R, and add to the main buss a small amount of EQ and a limiter/comp set pretty light as well. Sometimes I get test profiles in advance of release, though 90% of my clips will be from packs I have purchased.