Beefing up thin guitar sound

Acoustic? Electric?

It depends on how the guitar was recorded in the first place. If it was DI, then my first choice would be to reamp it. Even split the outputs so that you can use two amps/cabs and get a stereo sound that sounds much better than the fake track duplication/delay solution. That way, you can get some air and room sound into the track which I think is really important to guitars (particularly rock guitars).

If you are restricted to processing, then you can get some good results with GAP (although my favorite is Guitar Rig 3) and distortion, bit crusher, extreme EQ and chorus effects. Also, check out a demo of Isotope's Trash - terrific plug.

What sort of sounds are you after? Then perhaps we could come up with more specific suggestions.

Double-track it?

For bass I read somewhere that one could pit it on two tracks, pan one hard right and one hard left, and put a very slight delay on one of them. Make sure the volume ends up being the same or it would sound lopsided.

This could work with guitar as well. Although I really prefer the other suggestion, of having the same signal go into two different tracks in the DAW and putting a different simulated amp on each of them.

Or if you are recording with a mic in front of an amp, split the signal from the guitar at some point, put a preamp on a direct in and put a simulated amp on it.

But the very best way to do it would be to actually record the same part twice, of course. That's how you really get the nuances in volume and timing that make a guitar part sound big- notice that the delay, and every other suggestion is an approximation of what would happen if two guitarists were actually playing the same thing. Or close to the same thing.

And remember that by recording twice means that you can use different voicings, timings, amps, etc.

It's good to keep in mind that a "big" guitar sound, which a lot of folks spend a lot of time going for, is great only in the sense that it makes a guitar sound great +by itself+. As soon as you have a bass guitar, all that low end that makes a six string sound boss is just making the whole track sound muddy. This is true when you add a vocalist and keyboards, well, anything, because a good mix will let everything be in its own place in both what you hear and where you hear it. It's a good reference to have both a spectrum analyzer (to see where your sounds want to live on their own) and a simple chart of where instruments fundamental frequencies tend to lie.

And man, read that thing! I found myself claiming that an average person's vocal range was way outside of where it actually is. This is why I never got hired to mix, say, the Three Tenors or anything. I'd heard that there would be a lot of competing frequencies involving vocals in the 1kHz range and assumed that's where folks sang, but I guess it must be overtones in the voice or something- shows what you get for just listening and not checking into things yourself.

It's fairly easy to make a guitar sound great. I've found it hard to have to mix it down to accommodate everything else. "But my great guitar parts!- No one will ever hear them... I'm ruined..." But no one will hear them if your guitar is competing in the same sonic frequency as every other instrument as well.

I imagine you know a lot of this, but I just thought I'd throw it out there for anyone who didn't. Happy holidays all!

My secret weapon for too dry guitar sounds is sending them through a SpaceDesigner loaded with selfmade IRs from acoustic guitars (body resonances).
For example Fender DLX Strat piezzo pickup with Martin OM 28 IR.
Or Les Paul with Ovation IR for more Jazz Guitar character.

But don't tell anybody else 😉

But if you record acoustic instruments, mike placement is the most important thing.
Mistakes done here are hardly repairable.

Think of a guitar body as a very tiny room.
The reflections inside this small room create resonances that create the typical sound of the instrument.
Creating IRs is the same as in big rooms.
You don't have to put the mikes and speakers inside the body though.
Just close to the instrument that recording room influences are minimized.
The ImpulseResponseUtility programm in Utilities folder makes the whole process very comfortable.
The manual of IRU is also very informative.
If you are done, mix the dry and wet signals in SpaceDesigner to your personal taste.
Turn the latency compensation button on and use the SpaceDesigner EQ if results are too boomy.
Fishman is selling a stompbox that uses the same principle for beefing up piezo acoustic guitars.

For acoustic guitar recording, I almost always use stereo micing techniques to achieve a full sound, so if you have a matched pair of condenser mics and at least a 2 channel pre-amp, I would definitely try that out.

First off, thin sounds can be really cool because they will pan much harder than fat ones. That said, one trick not mentioned here is to copy the track onto a new track and compress the new track really hard. Leave the original track uncompressed. While the song is playing bring in the new compressed track to your taste, it doesn't take much!

This has been said but it can't hurt: get your sounds before you even hit record! That way you wont get into weird eq phase issues and competing parts or frequencies as you add layers.

BTW there is a mix slider in the advanced options when you click on the lower left triangle of the Compressor plug in.

Larry Mal wrote:

...a spectrum analyzer ....and a simple chart of where instruments fundamental frequencies tend to lie.

Larry Mal wrote:

Both great ideas! Where can I get a chart Larry? and can anyone recommend a CHEAP spectrum analyzer?

A simple thing I do when recording my Martin J1 is simply to copy and paste the track and pan one hard right and the other hard left. Takes about 30 seconds and simply makes it sound 'bigger'. I guess cos of the beauty of stereo.

I guess that's only suitable for certain styles though...

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