Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars From Hell

[Drew]

Fuck off.

[Jeff]

Fuck off.

I'm just as guilty of not recording, but I did think that was ever so slightly amusing.

[Slipperman]

Hey Slipperman - somehow I never noticed your post here until now. Thanks for dropping by, man - I was absolutely floored when I first found that a couple years back, and I still refer to it every so often when I'm looking for inspiration. Thanks a ton.

Yer certainly welcome.

Everything with a grain of salt, and all in good humor(as some of you guys have already noted).

In the end we all find what works for us and take it from there.

Which is what makes it so much fun and worth doing!!!

Best regards and sorry I didn't get back here sooner,

SM.

[ferret balls]

How awesome would it be if Slipperman made an audio book version of this

It would be so fantastic.

[Chris]

Wait. Lets back up here. Try this: Take a guitar amp that has separate clean and dirty channels with gain controls that feed a master volume output knobbie. Set the 'pre' channels to about the same o'clock on both channels and crank the master volume with the dirt channel engaged. Then hit a big chord. Twist it up to 'Stage Volume'. Now, right in the middle of a riff........ SWITCH TO CLEAN. Hurts huh? FUCKING LOUD! Now switch back to the distorted channel. TINY! By comparison.

FUCKING TINY.

The pummeling impact and SHEER OPPRESSIVE VOLUME of that 'clean' sound that's ripping your face off is caused by the transients lost by the distortion process. The more distortion, the fewer transients (Not really a totally factual statement, kind of a BLANKET answer, but close enough for our purposes here). Anyways. It's amazing how many twanker bozo's can't get a grip on the concept that increases in distortion MAKE DIRTY GUITARS SOUND SMALLER, NOT BIGGER. Nu-Metal guys are gonna have trouble buying into any flavor of this concept, and we agreed we would "Work with what they gave us" Right? 'Their Sound'. In my shop...When "Your sound" is swinging 12Db common on palm mutes WE GOTTA PROBLEM. I'm going to be compressing the living shit outta your ass one way or the other.
A lot of guitar purists state... 'NEVER COMPRESS DISTORTED GUITAR' on input or mix. The wisdom is based on observations (and their logical extrapolations) of the phenomena we just got done discussing. That is... Heavily distorted guitar sounds ALREADY ARE COMPRESSED (for lack of a better term) by 'square wave rectification' of the signal in circuit that's being used to produce the 'dirty' sound in the first place. By and large, I agree. If I can get away with clever EQ rips to 'tame' a guitar 'To tape' or 'In mix' I will always do that first. However, we live in a big shitty world full of fukwit fools who will insist upon capturing OUTRAGEOUS amounts of 'Swing' from a rig.....So I say... SMASH THE FUCK OUT OF THEM. But BE CAREFUL; if you don't set up compression correctly on input, you stand to shovel yourself into a hole you will NEVER get out of for love or money. Lousy compression CANNOT be undone after the fact. Period.

Awesome.