EQ Help with 8 string...retaining chug and clarity..

[Riffmagus]

I'd really appreciate some help here!

With the Parametric EQ on my POD X3 I'd appreciate some advice. I'm looking to setup a heavy tone which remains clear on all strings, plenty of definition on the low F# and still has the chugga-chugga factor..

A good point of reference in my head is Kirk's tone from Crowbar/Kingdom of Sorrow.

I can setup a good sounding patch with a stomp infront of the amp, but would really like to know which frequencies are good to boost/reduce to bring out the characteristics described above.

I apologise if going over old ground, but been looking through numerous POD related posts and could not dig out anything.

Any help or advice would be great.

Cheers,

Riff

 

[coreysMonster]

IMO, keep your bass frequencies down. A guitar does not have to have tons of low end, especially an 8-string with a low F# - that's still what basses are for, and what basses deliver much better than guitars.
I know he's not a metal guitarist, but that's something that I read once in a Jimmy Page interview, that when he records he always leaves the guitar rather thin, with low bass and low mid frequencies, so that the bass and drums can really boom through and fill up the mix without it getting too cluttered. I tried this on my own recordings and live, and it instantly sounded clearer and tighter.

Take Meshuggah, for instance. if you watch their instructional vids on Youtube, you'll notice that their guitars are also very, thin sounding, but on record, or live, they sound massive. That's because the bass really makes up alot of the sound you might mistake for the guitar sound.
This not only makes the mix sound better, but makes the low chugging sound alot tighter, yet still heavy.

However, this is my personal opinion and taste. might not be the sound you're looking for.

/long-ass post

 

[Kronpox]

I always had a problem with balancing out the strings, ie, I'd use enough distortion for the low string to sound the way I wanted, and the high strings sounded weak, and if I beefed it up so the higher strings could still chug then the low string was too muddy. After fumbling with this for a year I realised the obvious answer was to put a compressor in front of everything on the POD. Fixed me right up! Now everything is tight and punchy.

And as the other boys said you have to watch the bass- on my Vetta I've got bass cuts all across the board everywhere I have a bass knob, not a single boost, and still my tone is huge and sounds great in a mix.

Don't get seduced by the big bottom's djent! It's gratifying but screws up a mix. I switched to the Bomber Uber and haven't looked back

 

[pink freud]

Somebody on HC was talking about a cool function on the Axe-FX that you could try to recreate:

Put a dynamic High-Pass filter into your effects so that lower notes have less bass, while higher notes retain "full" sound.

If you could somehow do this for your rig, it could solve your problem without altering all of your sound.

 

[Erik Hauri]

Good advice above - and when you do it, try to do more of your work by cutting freqs rather than boosting them (as much as possible). You'll retain more headroom.