Ace's Masterclasses Guitar Tracking Tips

Music Radar

If you want to get a chunky, full-sounding guitar mix, there are a few tricks to get you there fast - and Skunk Anansie guitarist and ACM tutor Ace is here to show ’em to you.  In this video masterclass, filmed at London’s Metropolis studios, Ace covers techniques including chord approaches, choice of pickups and panning, all of which should get your guitars sounding massive.

Transcript

00:00Hi, hello, welcome. It is Ace here. Again we are in Metropolis Studios in London and doing some kind

00:12of tricky tricks and techniques for guitars that you might want to pick up on. Today I'm going to

00:19talk about tracking, simple tracking really. Basically about what I'm using is I'm just

00:24going to use one guitar and one amp, okay, but to make a kind of a bit of a kind of concise full sound.

00:30So first of all I am going to track the guitar with single coils. So you can either do like a

00:36Les Paul and a Telecaster or you can just use one guitar that you can change to pick up coils.

00:40And I'm going to use one amp and not change the sound of the amp. So if I switch my guitar

00:44into single coils now, so they're not the humbuckers anymore.

00:47I'll get a bit of a more toppy sparkly thinner kind of sound similar to what I would get from a

00:57Telecaster, okay. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to track the chords with that. So I'm talking

01:05like the open chords, so the more jangly kind of stuff. So I've got a nice bright jangly sound on

01:10top. Then afterwards what I'm going to do is I'm going to track the same thing but I'm going to go

01:17and use some like root and fifths. So, you know, these kind of chords.

01:23So they're like reinforcement chords and I'm going to play them on the humbucker sound.

01:27So I've got a kind of a cross between a Telecaster mixed with the humbucker and what I'll get there

01:32is I'll get all the mids, I'll get the highs, I'll get the lows and it will sound like one big huge

01:37guitar rather than two different ones, okay. So it's a tracking technique that I use a lot in the

01:43studio. So let's put a track up. I'll play along first of all with the single coil and that will

01:49be the chord sequences. Then I'm going to play along with the humbucker afterwards and track

01:54against it with the root and fifths.

01:56Okay, I'm going to now track on top of that and I'm going to use root and fifths now. So just simple

02:11notes so that we can basically blend in, not that out of tune with it but make it really solid. I'm

02:18using humbuckers now, okay. So I've switched into humbuckers, same amp, same setting.

02:37Okay, so we've got rhythm tracks down now. One is single coil on the right hand side maybe.

02:43One is going to be a humbucker played in root and fifths on the left hand side. So we should have a

02:48really massive sounding one guitar type of sound. We're going to separate them a little bit just

02:53so it gives a bit of a stereo effect and we're going to put a guitar down the middle now. So we're

02:57going to play a bit of a solo to see how it sounds against our really full rhythms now. Okay, so on

03:02the solo I'm going to stick on a few effects to make it a bit more exciting. So let's have a bit of

03:07delay I think. Maybe a bit of envelope and a bit of drive. Okay, so let's see how this works on

03:18the track.

03:25So we can see now that, yeah, it kind of works, doesn't it? It sounds like a really fat rhythm.

03:34It's got the tone of the top and the bottom in there. It's weighty, nothing conflicts. It's got

03:40reinforcement in the sound and then when we put a solo on the top of it, it really complements

03:44and it works with a few effects on top of it. So that is my secret of quick tracking for rock

03:49songs to make it sound good.

03:51It's been good.

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