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Song you love with guitar tone you hate.

8K views 95 replies 29 participants last post by  Cycletech 
#1 ·
I was (and still am) a huge Pestilence fan back in the day. Got Malleus the first week it was out, and by the time Spheres hit they were one of my all-time favorite metal bands. I still remember the night this song hit Headbangers Ball and instantly thought "WTF, the guitars sound awful!" but still loved the song, Martin's Vox and Patrick's riffs. A week later I discovered Bolt Thrower and that was the end of Pestilence being my fave band.

The tone is like nothing but pick sub-harmonics squeezed through a way-too-tight hi/low pass filter. Not sure if it's the producer who screwed it up or the guitar players bought all new gear and didn't know how to dial it in before recording or what... but man the guitar tone is awful.



What song do you love that has a guitar tone you hate?
 
#3 ·
Blizzard of Ozz.

Anacrusis' entire catalog as well. Great albums, not so great production. Hate is perhaps a bit strong term for how I feel about the tone, but it could definitely be a lot better.



Even the re-recorded versions from 2009 sound like a low budget early-90's production. :lol:
 
#14 ·
1919 Eternal for sure. Even as an 18 year old when that came out I thought the tone/production sucked. It sounded like industrial metal because of that horribly scooped toneless guitar sound. It's like he's mic'd up the cab with a bit crusher. In a baked bean can.
 
#17 ·
The Rust in Peace album. Killer album, but the the muddy tone lacks that tight gut punch that Metallica always had. Expanding on that, no one has ever wanted Dave Mustaine tone.
 
#20 ·
So far most entries to this thread has been actually OK sounding.

Prepare for one of the worst guitar tones in metal history :lol:



Great song but holy shit did Rolf mess something up with EVERYTHING in the production here.

I don't mind programmed drums on albums (like every Running Wild album from 2000s Victory and forward) but something is seriously wrong here :lol:
This is from 2005 so no real excuse to sound like a 1986 synth wave drum machine

Rolf is also one of those singers that NEEDS a reverb+delay to sound great on recordings.
Albums after this was too dry and FX-less so it really doesnt fit but this one is a weird "bathroom reverb"
 
#36 ·
If you want that unique Dime tone, you can take any amp on the planet, max the gain/treble/presence and then roll off every scrap of mids and lows. Voila! :lol:

I'll take Dave's tone over Dime's ten out of ten times.

The thing is - none of these guys probably gave a shit. Mustaine definitely didn't, and neither did Metallica once upon a time. All of those awesome bay area thrash bands just destroyed the world with whatever amps they could afford. It's not until recently that everyone had to have picture perfect tone and edited-to-infinity production otherwise the album was impossible to enjoy. And by enjoy I mean "be lifeless and sterile".

He's not unique by design. He's unique through poor taste and a bad ear, which in turn makes him not unique
I can't say I'm intimiately familar with his current tone, but back in the day he was almost certainly unique because he was broke. Dave just wanted to outdo his old band, and IMO, he did. Recent 'Death albums don't do much for me but they're certainly a zillion times better than Lulo, Load, and every other shitpile Metallica has released since AJFA.
 
#38 ·
If you want that unique Dime tone, you can take any amp on the planet, max the gain/treble/presence and then roll off every scrap of mids and lows. Voila! :lol:

I'll take Dave's tone over Dime's ten out of ten times.

The thing is - none of these guys probably gave a shit. Mustaine definitely didn't, and neither did Metallica once upon a time. All of those awesome bay area thrash bands just destroyed the world with whatever amps they could afford. It's not until recently that everyone had to have picture perfect tone and edited-to-infinity production otherwise the album was impossible to enjoy. And by enjoy I mean "be lifeless and sterile".

I can't say I'm intimiately familar with his current tone, but back in the day he was almost certainly unique because he was broke. Dave just wanted to outdo his old band, and IMO, he did. Recent 'Death albums don't do much for me but they're certainly a zillion times better than Lulo, Load, and every other shitpile Metallica has released since AJFA.
Not disagreeing with anything here, but the point was about uniqueness. Dave sounds like any 15 year old fresh metalhead trying to impress is girlfriend in a guitar store. Cant dial it in for shit, just wants it to be loud and brash.

I guess this is why I could never really get into Megadeth. Not in a big way anyway. Dont get me wrong I've proudly owned many a CD of theirs. I just feel like all the other bands from the same era sounded way more muscular, thicker, clearer, and all round heavier.
 
#41 ·
You say nobody gives a fuck about the tone but I disagree. I think they were VERY particular about their tone. It was that a) the motivation and end-goal was completely different, and b) there was about 5% of the options that there are today, so you had to find all kinds of work-arounds.

For the most part, what was being used then is still very desirable and held in high regard today (basically JCM800s and Mesa Mark series). I'm someone who will take that stuff any day over what's current.

I think also engineering has moved on. There were techniques at play here that just arent desirable today because we've collectively figured out how to get better tones from 30+ years of trial and error.

Does that mean those tones were bad? Hell no.

Does Dave Mustaines tone suck even in the context of the era?

Yes.

Yes it does.

Edit: jacksonplayer basically beat me to it :lol:
 
#43 ·
You say nobody gives a fuck about the tone but I disagree. I think they were VERY particular about their tone. It was that a) the motivation and end-goal was completely different, and b) there was about 5% of the options that there are today, so you had to find all kinds of work-arounds.
I disagree. If you think angry young alcoholic Mustaine was staying up late at night obsessing over the proper notch in his low mids in his rhythm tone instead of making Hetfield voodoo dolls, I doubt I'll be able to change your mind. :lol:

Edit: jacksonplayer basically beat me to it :lol:
The prog guy isn't exactly the definitive source on Bay Area Thrash. :wub:
 
#42 ·
I do love Pantera, but I have never been a fan of the tone, but it has grown on me. I remember the first time I heard a Pantera song, I was like "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?! IT SOUNDS LIKE AN ICEPICK IN THE EAR!" I don't even know what song it was, and nowadays none of Pantera's songs have tone that bad (though I'm still not a fan of Dimebag's tone), but it might just be that I've seriously damaged my ears over the past 20+ years and I just can't hear those high frequencies that originally bothered me so much about Dime's tone. :lol:
 
#46 ·
Eh, it's not a make or break type thing, it's ultimately one small part of the overall equation.

There is actually usually an inverse relationship sort of thing going on. Most of the records with guitar tone that people cite as bad still totally rule because the guitarist stayed in their fucking lane and they have awesome drum and bass sounds and pleasant amounts of reverb and all that shit.

There's like a billion cases of guitarist led projects or projects where the guitarist has too much say where other guitarists are like, high fiving eachother on "great tone" and everything else is totally flat and lifeless and milquetoast at best.

Nearly 100% of the tone I hear people doing the "DAT TONE THOUGH" shit, I am listening to the same thing thinking the track would have overall been better if they hadn't focused on the guitar tone and left everything else as an afterthought.

As a guitarist, of course I recognize that it's natural to have a sort of solipsistic guitar centric view. But at some point most people have to realize that the guys with truly great sounds don't spend a ton of time obsessing about being the most three dimensional shit ever. That's not the guitars role. The drums and bass are there to provide depth.

There's no question in my mind which is better, a record with somewhat 2D sounding guitar tone and 3D rhythm section sounds or a record with 3D guitar tone and one dimensional rhythm sounds.

Ultimately you are better off letting the other roles do their job for a solid final product than being a "All about the guitar tone" glory hound.

 
#47 ·
Ultimately I like pretty much every guitar tone people cite as awful. :lol:

"stay in your fucking lane and let the other instruments do their thing" is way better advice than "do something about that tone".

A bunch of the tones people are impressed by are on tracks that are glorified sales demonstrations for guitar gear where everything else is an afterthought. :lol:

It's way down the list. There are a bunch of tones on tracks that would have done better overall if the people involved had spent less time on guitar tone and more time on tuning toms to match bass.

That to me is way more noticable and momentum robbing. I'll get into pretty much any guitar tone on a track where the drummer has their toms tuned to suit the bass. A track with the greatest guitar tone ever is always going to suck if it's one size fits all modern metal toms.
 
#48 ·
It's like when producers say, "The vocal IS the song". No one says, "the guitar tone is the song".

You also have to take into account the vastly different ways music listening has changed over the years. A room stereo, bookshelf speakers, headphones, earbuds, car speakers, 5.1 etc. etc. etc. All the technical terms involved like crosstalk and all that.

There are a bunch of older albums from the 80s that sound way underpowered and mild on modern headphones and not anywhere near as attention grabbing as a modern mix if you play them back to back.

But if you play them on a room stereo with a receiver and everything it's magic and a whole separate thing. Then you play the modern ones on that set up, and it's just a slightly bigger version of the exact same thing it was on phones.

Like, anything around 1982 is going to perform way better on room speakers with big drivers driven by a 100 watt AV receiver. It's going to be underwhelming in a context where more modern tones and textural conventions have the edge.

That's why audio philes are so into the "you gotta get a headphone amp" kind of stuff. Audio switched over to a kind of scene where the majority of stuff is powered by kind of whimpy built in amps. Some stuff needs specific equipment to come alive. Some of the records with awful guitar tones sound like a million bucks on big speakers driven by a discrete power amp, in contrast, the more modern ones that had an edge on other setups just sound like total shit.

"Cross talk" is one of the biggest terms people throw around. One of the biggest problems with headphone listening or less powerful speakers. On phones obviously, the right side is going into your right ear and the left side is going into your left ear. None of the signal from the left side is bouncing around the room going into your right ear, unless you have a crosstalk emulator or DAC or whatever involved at some point. On speakers, that's not the case.

People tend to not focus on how the track is creating a stereo image on the gear its being played back on when they talk about tone. There are some tones that like, they don't make sense at all as being great on a stereo image created by closed back headphones, but they fucking rule on a big room stereo.
 
#49 ·
There are a bunch of older albums from the 80s that sound way underpowered and mild on modern headphones and not anywhere near as attention grabbing as a modern mix if you play them back to back.
All of this.

It's also worth mentioning that those albums were recorded and mixed with LP mastering in mind. The harshness of a Marshall JCM800 would be tamed by going through several stages of analog recording and mixing signal paths, and then ultimately being played back on an LP or cassette through yet another analog signal path.

One example that I ran across was Fates Warning's No Exit. I remember the LP sounding pretty awesome back in 1988. When I got the early '90s CD version recently, I was shocked to find that it sounded weirdly harsh and flat by comparison.
 
#50 ·
^FM radios fidelity also tops out at 15khz. It doesn't carry frequencies above that. That's not even getting into all the limiting and sweetening commercial terrestrial radio does.

So in the age when a lot of these records with tones that are surprisingly obnoxious were made, most listeners wouldn't have actually even heard the obnoxious bits. Quite a few of the areas that have the really obnoxious frequency ranges are areas outside of the frequency range intended for traditional broadcast. All the transitory steps of how it would translate are always in flux.

In the category of "why is the classic rock radio version more fun to listen to than my CD version? I remember this sounding way better when I hear it on the radio for the first time, maybe I am just jaded". :lol:

edit: People already mentioned Ride the Lightning era stuff that might sound grating hearing the CD, but you might miss on FM radio, but I would say Randy Rhoads stuff is a more super obvious example.
 
#56 ·
The transient thing is obviously its own wormhole, doesn't only apply to the tape it's recorded too either, especially for solid state tones.

Interesting stuff for sure, people usually hype up tube amps as "more responsive and alive feeling", but in actuality, they can't match the transient response of solid state.
 
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