Happy FAQ Friday everyone! We have had quite an exciting week over here, with Graham Coxon joining us for Wednesday’s video and talking all about Blur’s “Song 2” and the making of that great track! I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did!
Graham will actually be back with us for another video on Monday, where he will be going through an full breakdown of Blur’s album “Modern Life is Rubbish”! That is going to be a great time, so make sure you tune in for that!
The featured question from today’s FAQ Friday is this: What tips and tricks could you share with us for widening electric guitars?
This is a great question! We’ve done quite a few videos on widening guitars and guitar sounds in general in the past, but it is always great to learn even more tricks to get the best sound possible.
A great way to make your guitars sound wider is to pan one guitar all the way to the right, and the other all the way to the left. After this, the number one trick I use to make guitars feel wider is to put reverb on them. Now, I am sure we all put reverb on our electric guitars, but I take this part one step further by panning the reverb opposite of the guitar it is on. So, if I have a guitar that is panned all the way to the left, I will then pan its reverb all the way to the right, and for the guitar panned all the way to the right, I will pan its reverb all the way to the left.
Something else I will do to make guitars sound wider is to filter out the highs and the lows on the top and bottom. This keeps the reverb from getting too messy! If there is a lot of low end on your electric guitars, it will fight with your kick drum and your bass, and if there is a lot of high end, there will be a lot of chaos that you just really don’t want to hear.
- RELATED: How to Record Electric Guitar
Wiping off this low end is really important with electric guitars, especially distorted ones that are really full. If you wipe off the low end on the guitars, they tend to stay in the position you have put them in. In the track I show you in the video, I kept the fundamental low end on the guitar and boosted it, but wiped off the low lows that would compete with other instruments and create a lot of messiness. This actually ends up making the guitar sound like it has more low end, because I have boosted the fundamental parts, while getting rid of the extra low lows.
Watch the full video below to learn more and to see some other great FAQ Friday questions!
