Designing an ear-catching tone and recording a masterful performance with it are fundamental to getting a great guitar part in any track, but if you don’t make the right moves at the mixing stage, too, all that hard work will have been for nothing. Get those riffs and solos sounding their best with these tried and tested production techniques.

You Did Record The DI, Right..?

As a prefix to the purely mixing-related advice to come, we have to start with an oft-stated recommendation for covering your back at the recording stage: whenever you record a guitar through any sort of processing chain (amplification, pedals, rack effects, etc), always, always record the DI signal to a separate track of its own at the same time. With the clean version of your perfectly nailed performance in the bag, you can relax, safe in the knowledge that you have the required source material for reamping if the processed recording ultimately refuses to work in the mix for whatever reason – too much distortion, overcooked wah-wah, etc. Whether you need to merely tweak the original processing chain for take 2, or set up a completely different one using plugins, hardware or a combination of both, not having to record the whole thing again from scratch (replicating a performance that might have been as good as it gets!) to do it is a huge time-saver.

Find The Sweet Spot With EQ

Although the universal application of high-pass filters to every channel in the mix is a controversial topic, few engineers would argue that a 12dB or 18dB/octave filter set to roll off the lows at around 80Hz isn’t a requirement for just about all guitars, which are essentially mid-range instruments and thus only really contribute rumble at the bottom of the frequency range. Beyond that, in very cursory terms, parametric EQ can be used to bring out warmth at 200-250Hz, reduce mud at 250-350Hz, up the ‘body’ of the guitar around 500Hz, emphasise pick transients and/or suppress harshness at 1-3kHz, and boost presence at around 4kHz; while a high shelf can be just the thing for adding air and sheen from 10kHz up.

Don’t Pan The Lead

While frequency-rich rhythm guitar parts will probably need to be positioned off-centre to a greater or lesser extent, in order to keep them away from the vocal, lead guitar lines – which usually alternate with the vocal, of course, rather than coexist with it – ought to be placed in the middle of the field, effectively serving as the focus of the track at that point and keeping the perceived stereo image properly centred. This doesn’t mean you can’t push that screaming solo out into the stereo domain using effects, though. Stereo delay, reverb or chorus, for example, are ideal for imbuing mono guitars with width – just keep the dry/wet mix very much on the dry side, so as to not compromise the all-important central signal.

Go Wide With Double-Tracked Guitars

Whether they’ve been recorded manually or ‘faked’ in the DAW, double tracked guitars are at their best when splayed far and wide across the stereo field. Not only does this just make them sound bigger and better in general, but, again, it also handily gets them out of the way of the vocals and other central elements, which they can easily overwhelm with their thick, dense aggregate sound.

Keep Distortion Under Control

Distortion is a signal processing technique that demands the exercising of restraint in any music production context, but when mixing rock guitars, the desire to achieve an ever ‘harder’ or edgier sound can all too easily end up in an excess of overdrive and saturation, the counterproductive result of which is a loss of definition and impact, and a detrimental effect on tone. To mitigate for this, based on the presumption that we’re likely to apply too much distortion rather than too little by default, once you’ve set what at first blush seems to be the right amount for a given guitar channel or bus, dial it back a smidge and live with the sound for a while. If, with your primary listening attention having then moved elsewhere, you notice that the guitar is too clean, crank the distortion amount back up, select a rougher saturation type, or just raise the channel volume a little. Don’t forget about the dry/wet mix control on your distortion plugin, either: this alone can be very handy for reining in over-enthusiastic saturation while maintaining the character of the distorted component.

Shape The Sound With Compression

Whether or not – and by how much – to compress a guitar part will be largely determined by the amount of distortion bestowed upon said axe, as heavily distorted guitars are already compressed due to the nature of that particular process. That’s not to say that further solidity or punch can’t be elicited using short- or long-attack compression respectively, but the deployment of dynamic contour shaping and range reduction won’t be as clear-cut in its necessity as it often is with clean rhythm parts and acoustic guitar lines. In those cases, compression is a vital tool for levelling out dynamically variable performances, and controlling the transients and sustain of the guitar itself, and the specifics of those factors, as well as the genre of the track, will determine the compressor settings to be dialled in. And as with any other grouping of related instruments, when dealing with multiple guitars on a bus, a touch of ‘gluing’ compression, using a brilliant bus compressor, is invariably a good move, pulling them together into a cohesive, embedded ‘section’.

Do you have any treasured guitar mixing techniques to pass on? Share them in the comments.