Thorn In Your Side

Nice to see you're still on a road of progress , your guitar parts are getting tighter & tighter , it's noticeable. My foot was taping along Great synth bass BTW.

I'd suggest to naturally double track you FXed tracks ( obviously delay & chorus) with the same part but without the FX to get some more punch in your rhythm section. That's what I do on all my heavy tracks and this is sure a great recipe. You could do this on 8 or 16 bar loops if it helps. Begin with the dry track first as it's the one on the beat.

I'd also suggest to practice some groovy stuff with lots of rebound to enhance your rhythm chops. Funk, Hendrix, Led Zep riffs are perfect for this kind of exercices. You'll work your right hand and let it live it's own funky vibe. All this can be applied to all metal riffs with great success. I wish I could get this tip while I was a junior guitarist. Groove is essential.

A typical & fantastic example , once you master these classical riffs with the right groove your'e done for the rest of your guitarist life. , it might take a few weeks / months but the reward is huge :

Definite progress on the mixing there! Sounds waaaay more polished.

With regards double tracking you don’t want to double track chorused guitars every often because what tends to happen is comb filtering results in the sound becoming thinner (phase cancellation) plus because of the offsets it can even reduce the effect. Especially as you get into longer wave form effects like flangers and phasers or just a slow chorus.

To create punch with that either stick to a single guitar with chorus on or in your daw send both channels to a single mix channel where you apply a single chorus effect post. Of course then you’ll be limited to chorus after amp/distortion sounds rather than chorus before.

Mostly it boils down to that as addicting as it can be too much chorus is a bad thing for longer than a few bars, it loses interest and can make guitars sound out of tune and wearing on an audiences ears. Even with guitarists who really used a lot of chorus (Andy Summers and Steve Clark for instance) if you pay attention they either play a very sparse track (walking on the moon), double up and use a lot more raw unprocessed guitar (message in a bottle) or have just a surprisingly light touch of chorus on their instrument (hysteria). Often it’s used just for a moment in a song where you want to emphasize space and often in conjunction with reverb and delay.

It’s a great step forward to be intentional with sound. Not just pick a sound because I like it, but understand why you like it for a song or section. Chorus has a lot of connotations, it can be ethereal and other worldly, and make things sound jangly and poppy.

Try this exercise - make a simple major key chord sequence, could even just be a single chord. Record and play it without any effects. Just a light bit of grit. Maybe make it a nice faster chug thing, 16ths. This is your verse. Now go to your chorus effect, add a slight delay, switch up to a minor couple of chords and instead of playing them fast or with any complexity either play a single chord and let it ring out for a bar or play an arpeggio of the chord slowly. This is now your chorus. Now just arrange that in your daw one following the other, duplicate it a couple of times. You’ve got a song. Listen back and just see how the textural change impacts things.

Now if you like what you’ve got and want to add a lead on this be equally sensitive to what’s going on. Try just a no chorus but higher gain tone and when it comes to the chorus sections add a big delay, I’m a fan of the “main station” preset on the Kemper for delay. Don’t try to fill out everywhere, just play a lead on maybe the second time around for the verse and chorus.

In general when it comes to recording less is almost always more.

Stay with it Larry! Everything's Improving. Real Drums would take it all up a level.

Per explained it very well ! Don't abuse of the chorus , I love chorus but rarely use it on the main tracks, as tight PM parts , tight riffs & power chords will loose lots of impact with chorus. Chorus is the icing on the cake , with the exception of clean parts.

On cleans I like the chorus to be be part of the musical identity (80's stuff) and if you don't abuse of it it's great ( just like makeup on girls = ) . Or I will use to add brightness, even on folks sometimes.

here is a way I treat my cleans with chorus ( notice the background muted guitar notes that make the main' support line' , very important )

Quote from BayouTexan

Do you mean to double track guitar with effects on and then do a second double track with effects off -- making it a quad track

Record them separately , play them twice or quad . i often do 2 natural dry & 2 natural choruses , that means play your parts at least 4 times in loops. This is an excellent exercise to master as you'll be able to tell your takes are good just by looking at the wave shapes. I still have to do like 12 takes on most of my titles for a given part, but this discipline is part of my daily routine , even after 30 years ...

here is another typical example, this was quad tracked naturally exactly as explained above : 2 dists , 2 chorused lines. Here another one with lots of chorus and dry stuff mixed, I'm in love with the double tracking chorus FX, I use it only for this FX.

Don't forget to work the groove, you should be able to groove a single dry riff and attract people's attention with just that.

Quote from BayouTexan

I seem to not like dry distorted chords when I play them but love when others do. They sound very stagnate to me.

This is the key point ! That's why the groove matters so much, it has nothing to do with double or quad tracking.

I'm heavily insisting & I'm sorry about this , but you should be able to make a single part dance able , notice on the Led Zep examples above how the groove alone make the track so desirable and no double tracking here.

Even a single PM syncopated line should have enough dancing qualities to make mosh pitters run into each other

Think about "you really got me" by EVH, these two notes have enough punch to move anyone.

Double up, hard pan left & right. Palm mute and play along with drums (not a metronome, you'll learn feel from a drummer).

Don't be scared, and don't underestimate yourself. Your aim is to stop hiding behind what you think is the "sound good" button. That's a crutch that you will outgrow faster than you realize. It often takes other people to point out "hey you don't need that anymore".

It can take time for your own ears to relax and stop listening for that sound that your brain is equating to "better", which are often not really better at all - psychoacoustic effects, loudness, treble addiction etc. As you stop bamboozling your brain you'll start to see the flaws for what they are and not be so impressed with the shoe polish applied to the horses coat but you'll see it for what it is. The patch will look (sound) worse than the surrounding work.

Quote from BayouTexan

I tried to get this as perfect as possible. I think I am almost getting the hang of this mixing stuff, but the drums are still time consuming. I think maybe the intro is a bit abrupt but what da heck.

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Sounding brilliant, great guitar parts, i love the main riff theme that runs right through it. Mix sounds great too. Which profile did you use? Have you ever tried the drag and drop in EZdrummer? 90% of my tracks are just drag and drop, it might help speed up your workflow if you are finding the drums time consuming. Brilliant track