Inside Sounds: Wavey Guitars | How To Mix Guitars

In this weeks video Rich digs deep into our Wavey Guitars sample pack.  Exploring a few of his favourite mixing techniques, you'll see how he crafts the demo, sets up his master chain, learn how to mix guitars & how to add that vintage 70's style processing with analogue delays and spring reverbs. 

 

 

Adding Width To Your Guitars

In the demo run through, we added our favourite chorus plug-in to some washed out guitars creating extra width.  The Tal-Chorus is based on the classic Juno synth chorus and has an amazing, lush 80's tone.  With the wet dry set to 50%, you gain the width without losing too much detail - a real producer must have.

 

 

Compress For Control

In this example, the guitars had a fast, spikey transient that needed to be tamed.  Due to this, we've chosen a compressor with both an attack and release setting.

The attack setting adjusts the speed at which the compressor reacts to a signal over the threshold.  I've chosen a super quick compressor time to catch the transients and tame the sound.

The release setting is the time it takes for the compressor to get back to 0 VU or it's normal state.  The guitar part is quite quick in this example so I decided to use a fast release.  This sounded more musical to me than slowing the release and keeping the compressor under compression.  Try out these dials and listen to the changes in tone.

 

 

Check this pack and the rest of our Guitar Sample packs.

 

Get That Vintage Sound With Springs

So many classic guitars sounds included the use of a spring reverb.  Traditionally built into the amp, we've decided to recreate the tone of a classic verb using plugins.   Inside the Outer Space plug-in (a Roland Space Echo copy) you'll find a great, vintage sounding spring reverb that's perfect for the job.  Here I dialled back the echo so it just operates as a reverb without the repeats.  It sets on an Aux send / Bus in Ableton so I can send multiple instruments to the same FX, creating a sense of unity between the elements.

 

Another great example is in Ableton's Echo plug-in.. you can recreate the same sound by dialling back the delays to reveal that lush, tank like spring goodness.

 

 

Now that you've learn how to mix guitars, Why not take your skills onto the next step and learn how to mix using guitar pedals in our latest article.