What is your tone blending technique when recording?

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Metalhex
Metalhex
Well-known member
Ive been messing around with blending two tones (amps) together and I was wondering what are the best methods to do this? (I know, personal preference/I have to experiment/whatever sounds best to me, blah blah). But how do YOU blend multiple tones together?

Hard pan one tone/track left and hard pan the other tone/track right? do you quad track with both tones on both sides?

What works for you?
 
If you're multi-tracking guitars, then yes. But you can just pan two different amps together and blend to taste.

Dissimilar tones seem to go together best.

The AiC stuff is 3 or 4 amps blended and spread across the stereo field.
 
its most always in the least a left and right track for me, but after that i cant say i have a preference and ive tried most everything, it really just depends what you are going for. sometimes just a L/R track works, sometimes it takes 5 or 6 tracks with different amps and speakers panned all sorts of ways.
 
RaceU4her said:
its most always in the least a left and right track for me, but after that i cant say i have a preference and ive tried most everything, it really just depends what you are going for. sometimes just a L/R track works, sometimes it takes 5 or 6 tracks with different amps and speakers panned all sorts of ways.
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This gives me a great idea. Thanks.
Do you hard pan? Like full or what percentage?
 
Following this thread because I'm curious. 2nd guitarist in my band is getting an Orange Super Crush and is rather insistent on using that to record his parts (completely fair). However, I worry that it might not blend well with whatever amp I use to record my tracks.
 
Smashedguitaris⸸ said:
This gives me a great idea. Thanks.
Do you hard pan? Like full or what percentage?
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More often than not i hard pan, but sometimes if I want the guitars a little more forward without changing the tone I’ll try maybe 75%, or if I quad track do two hard panned and two at maybe 80% or something, there’s just too many factors like tempo and tuning and what’s going on with the other instruments to know what’s gonna work in any particular song.
 
Hard pan 100 percent left and 100 right on everything. On the rare occasion I’m blending tones I do the same multiple amps on each side. I make my main tone then add another in subtly at a lower volume. One different tone left and one different tone right I’m just not a fan of because it causes problems later on in mixing in my opinion, at least in the music I play.

I think it’s important to know WHY you’re blending amps too and not just doing it to do it. Like if you’re doing a recto and a hm2 pedal, you’re doing it to fill in some extra chainsaw in the recto. Mark and a Marshall to fill in that hole that all marks have.
 
DeathlyFighter said:
Following this thread because I'm curious. 2nd guitarist in my band is getting an Orange Super Crush and is rather insistent on using that to record his parts (completely fair). However, I worry that it might not blend well with whatever amp I use to record my tracks.
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Well that’s why you mic up his cab so he is comfortable thinking he’s using his own rig while you record a DI track which can be re-amped later if need be
 
Guitar > Lehle > 2 amps (sometimes 3) > 2 Captor X > Audio Interface > DAW with 2 (or 3) tracks armed
 
I just do left or right at the studios. Never had time to quad . I once did a quad with Bogner Uber r rev Blue with kt88s and a EVH stealth 120 . I need to post it . It was pretty cool
 
Either hard pan the two tones, or double track each and hard pan the double tracks so each stereo channel has both tones. The latter is for when I want the composite tone to be more like one tone that was double tracked. I've barely experimented with this though so there are likely better ways.
 
I do 3-4 tracks hard panned left and right each. So sextuple or octuple tracking.

The keys to this method are

1. Having the parts down really well so you can layer that many tracks without it sounding like a mess. You need MUCH less gain this way, which helps, but when they're layered together it fools you into thinking there's more gain AND clarity

2. finding finding tones that blend together well in the first place, so you don't have to do a bunch of fiddle fucking around to get it to sound good. I use the same channel strip settings on each tone as a baseline and then subtractive EQ from there, if necessary - but it's rarely necessary
 
As was already said, don’t just do it to do it unless you’re experimenting. Have some reason for doing it, like if your main amp was a 5150 and you wanted it gainy but it made things too smooth, you could try and add something that would cut through like a Marshall. In that case you would be adding the Marshall tracks on each side with each 5150 track.

How to blend them is generally a matter of how much low and high end to filter out of each one and adjusting their relative levels to get what you want. Like if you’re mostly happy with the 5150 track and just wanted some more cutting grind or something from the Marshall, you would probably end up filtering more lows out of the Marshall track and mixing it in under the 5150 until the aspect of it you want comes though just enough.

Mixing different amps on each side can be hard to get to work right depending on your arrangement and what you are hoping the end mix sounds like, but it’s perfectly viable. In metal and hard rock, the more different the hard panned tones are, the less of a cohesive and powerful sound you will have from the guitars. However it could work if they have the right kind of similarities.

In country/americana music and shit like that it’s very typical that you have acoustic guitar panned hard to one side and an electric hard to the other, or two different electric sounds to either side (i.e. a humbucker equipped guitar to one side and a strat or tele to the other) and primarily because of the arrangement and the mix focus being on the vocal and then the rhythm section it works just fine. It also has the benefit of the guitars not having phase issues if played back in mono.
 
I always turn the gain down to a level that's barely comfortable and pan them hard left & right. Just one track per side. Doing this specifically with my Deliverance and Mark III has been my go-to recording setup practically forever.

I've quad-tracked some stuff before, just to try it. I was actually pretty happy with the result, it just never seemed necessary to the point that of doing it on a regular basis. I should probably mess around with that some more honestly.
 
If I have to, I'll quad track. 2 tracks of each amp on each side.

The reason I won't do each amp on one side (dual or quad-tracking) is it's always hard to balance the stereo field so that it doesn't sound like everything is shifter slightly to one side.

Also, when you quad-track, you've got more liberty mixing stuff. Usually I find the mixes that work best together is when one amp sounds killer, but is missing a little something, and then one amp sounds like shit, but it's got that little something the other amp is missing. Or when both amps sound like shit, but have got what the other is missing. If you got two killer-sounding amp tracks per side, it kinda just meshes into something that is not worth blending two amps in, IMO.

But overall, I prefer dialing in a killer sounding single amp, and then just quad tracking it. It's more straightforward, it doesn't sound worse, it's quicker, and when I'm blending amps, sometimes I feel I'm just watering down one with the other.

Oh, and also, always multitrack. If you do a single perfonance through several amps, it's so easy to just run into issues that don't yield to good tones.
 
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I don't know which amp has or is missing which frequencies, so I'm doing it just to experiment. It's like, oh this amp sounds cool, and this other amp sounds cool but different; put them together and then...well now I hear both amps. I'm not sure if it's better or not but I hear them both. It sounded good with one amp on each side, and now it also sounds good with two amps on each side, just different.

Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing.
 
Metalhex said:
I don't know which amp has or is missing which frequencies, so I'm doing it just to experiment. It's like, oh this amp sounds cool, and this other amp sounds cool but different; put them together and then...well now I hear both amps. I'm not sure if it's better or not but I hear them both. It sounded good with one amp on each side, and now it also sounds good with two amps on each side, just different.

Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing.
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Some amp blends, I'll pull down the fader on one amp to like -16 dB.

Seems pointless to have it in there, but when you toggle it off.. it's amazing that even being mixed in that low, it affects the tone !
 
If using two different amps, you can assign different roles to each amp. For example a Dual Recto dialed in rather dark to give the bigness and a Marshall layered over it living in the mids and high mids that cuts through the mush and gives the clarity.

Here is an example of how Blink 182 did record their guitar tone. I know it`s not everyones cup of tea, but it gives you an idea of what is possible to do an how it`s done

Edit: this is actually the better video. Go to min 9:00 to here the different amps and the blend

 
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DeathlyFighter said:
Following this thread because I'm curious. 2nd guitarist in my band is getting an Orange Super Crush and is rather insistent on using that to record his parts (completely fair). However, I worry that it might not blend well with whatever amp I use to record my tracks.
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I love my Orange Super Crush 100. The mids stand out so depending on your amp, might be a perfect blend.
 
I like what he was saying in the Blin-182 video. When I was doing a lot of recording, it was great to have a Mesa type amp panned one way and a crunchy, Marshall type in the other side.
 
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