I don't even start building without a tube screamer haha. level and tone on max, distortion on the lowest. Always makes it easier to get a metal tone. And yes i do play around with the gain settings. As well as di matching plugins. Back to the screamer, i thought it's an iron rule to be set like that. I do use an eq after the whole chain, to remove resonancies and add lp and hp cuts. But i rarely use it before, unless the specific guitar emulation requires it. About the bite, just recently i found that "Fresh Air by slate" and "Satturn by fabfilter" give me that liveliness at the end. And i've been trying to wrap my head around this for years, even trying to learn a real guitar which only set me in debt lol.Are you doing anything to the eq? It does sound kind of shrill... be sure to keep it flat.
How's the input level going in? Try adding more gain before the amp. A lot of amp sims need some extra volume to get in the sweet spot.
Are you using a pedal emulation? Like a tube screamer type pedal. Not only it helps drive the 'tubes' harder, but it shapes the tone too, it cuts some lows and highs. The tone knob can add or subtract high frequencies. Pay attention to your tone and make sure it's not too bright, or too dark. Compare to recordings you like.
With amp sims it's kind of necessary to use an eq before the amp to shape the tone going in, and another after it to remove more nasty frequencies. So essentially, it's a subtractive process. Sometimes you can use the eq instead of the tube screamer, or you can use both.
Once you get a decent tone doing that, you can add a subtle saturation/distortion to the guitar bus to add a bit of extra bite and excitement. That's an old school trick that really makes it "sound like a record".
So, it's a rather involved process to get it right, but once you wrap your head around it you can save track presets and whatnot.
Statistics: Posted by Alyctro — Fri May 03, 2024 10:13 am