…at least, with the caveat that it’s always possible I’ll go back and re-record a part or two here and there, and there are a couple songs with “rhythm-like” parts where there’s a riff leading into the solo or in one case breaking up the solo a few times, but I plan on recording that with my Inca Silver Strat that’ll also be used for the lead, so I’m going to hit that all at once. Otherwise, all of the pure “rhythm” tracks are done.

Since I’m reamping everything here and only capturing DIs, there’s not much I can say about tones just yet, so that’ll have to wait for a future post. But, I can share some in-progress video, ands then talk a bit about how I approach rhythm guitars.

First, this is one of the riffs leading into the lead break of a song of mine, where I DIDN’T necessarily want it to sound like a continuation of the same guitar tone. This is a variation of a riff idea I originally came up with on a seven string guitar way back in college, and I refuse to do the math and say exactly how long ago that was, but I had a vague idea of how I wanted this pre-solo breakdown to go andf as it turns out the F#-E-F# followed by the two natural harmonics, stolen from that old idea, worked beautifully as a followup from the octaves. So, me in all my Billy Corgan-esq worst:

This was a quick scratch reamp through my Mark V in Extreme mode – in the final it’ll very likely be my Roadster, which as you’ll notice my Mark is no longer sitting on top of; while warming up for the song I did before this Ch 4 abruptly cut out, so it’s in one of the local authorized repair centers, where they expect to have it back to me easily in time to reamp with. It’s a fun riff – I’ll probably add in another pair of tracks with the same guitar (my Suhr Modern 6), and similar tones, as what I’ll use for the lead just to help not create a “hole” in the mix when the lead guitar isn’t there. Which makes a great segue:

Multitracking

I’ve actually lost track of what the current convention is for rhythm guitar these days, as I’ve found what works for me and generally stick to that. However, I remember back in the day there was a lot of debate between double tracking and quad tracking, the Andy Sneap forum being at the heart of it, and Sneap himself having a change of heart at some point and going back to double tracked rhythm guitars.

Generally, with a couple caveats, I only double track. there are a couple reasons for this – one purely practical one is to quad track well you need to be a surgically tight rhythm player, and I don’t consider myself one. But, from a more philosophical stance, I think this is the right choice for me anyway. Double tracking is kind of a minimum here – it adds a ton of stereo space and depth and makes ebverything sound “bigger” for reasons that don’t seem to have an obvious explanation, though I remember talking to someone once who theorized it’s a way of mirroring, in a recording, the fact that in real life you’re listening through a left ear and a right ear, and they’re capturing the same core sound coming out of the amp but with very different room reflections, so it’s a crude way of replicating that in a mix. Who knows, but it works, and it’s amazing how much bigger even the same exact tone can sound when you’re hearing it hard panned left and right with two distinct performances.

But, one of the things with mixing is, “if everything’s big, nothing’s big.” I write instrumental rock, so I have a finite amount of space that I can fill with guitar sounds. Adding additional layers of rhythm guitar, especially with complimentary tones, can make for a huge guitar sound… but that’s eating up valuable real estate space that I’ll also need to fit my melody and solo tracks into, and while a vocal is different enough in timbre and character that you might have some wiggle room here, lead guitars can be tough. And, I’d rather have a big lead sound, and a comparatively smaller rhythm one, than the other way around. I’m the lead guitarist, I get to be selfish.

In the past, I’ve done some stuff where I’ll work with complimentary tones, often times with different guitars – a bright, edgy rhythm part (a Strat can be super effective here) with a thick, dark, more saturated one, and it can sound huge… but that’s not always a good thing, having huge rhythm guitars. One of the songs on this album I did ultimately end up doing that, two tracks of bridge position Strat rhythm and two tracks of bridge position PRS rhythm, playing the same riff. This was partly because while it was a “heavy” song I ended up demoing the whole thing on my Strat, and I suppose there’s an outside chance I’ll nd up muting the PRS tracks and keeping it all Strat just to do something different. But, if I don’t, I think I’ve got some more leeway here since, for the most part, the riff is being played when the lead guitars aren’t doing anything, and when the lead guitars are playing, the riff is just bass guitar. The various pieces should fit together relatively well without conflict, if I do end up using all four.

Another thing I alluded to above, is if you have a mix where your lead guitar and rhythm guitar are sitting in different “spaces” in the mix, and you have a section where the lead guitar drops out and your rhythm guitars continue, that can sometimes feel like something’s missing. You can address this to a certain degree with volume automation and just making the rhythm guitars that much louder until the leads come back (and sometimes that sound can be very effective – think about how you want a song to function, and if this helps drive that vision, then that space can be valuable). But, sometimes, you don’t want that “hole” and one potential way to address that is add in one (panned center) or two (hard left and right) tracks doubling your primary rhythm with your lead tone, and just mix it way back so it’s not especially audible unto itself, but when you hit mute you feel the absence. The arrangements on this album, I’m not thinking of any situations off the top of my head where I’m going to want to do that, but there were a few points on Zero Mantra where I had my lead tone mixed back a bit as a third center-panned rhythm part so you didn’t “feel” the absence of the leads so much.

Arranging Guitar Parts

This is all a pretty good segue for another thing I’m thinking about while approaching rhythm guitars – I firmly believe that a good mix starts with a good arrangement, and a lot of that is minimizing the number of conflicts where similar elements are in similar stereo spaces and similar registers, and want similar territory. This is part of the reason I’m trying to use different guitars for rhythm than I plan on using for lead; you can certainly do everything with the same guitar (and while demoing I usually don’t bother to switch things up much), but it’s just one more form of subtle differentiation between your parts in a mix.

Beyond that, I don’t know how conscious a part of my songwriting this is for me, but I generally try to keep the rhythm part in a different register than the leads. If it’s a lower lead melody, then maybe just bass or clean guitar and no distorted rhythm or try to find a higher-register figure that works and then drop down to a more traditionally “heavy” lower register riff when the melody starts moving up… If you’re working with multiple rhythm parts (not double-tracked versions of the same riff, but two seperate parts) try to get them into different areas of the neck, and if possible make sure your melody isn’t too close to them, either. This is, ironically, the only seven string guitar on this album, I think. It’s funny because my suhr Modern is one of my favorite guitars and one of the best sevens I’ve ever played, but when I was working on Zero Mantra essentially everything was recorded by the time it arrrived, so I ended up just using it for one rhythm part on “Red Skies,” doubling the existing part that I thought in hindsight was too dark. Here, just as an excuse to get it on the album, I’m again using one of my favorite lead instruments to play rhythm… though at the last moment if occurred to me that, the second time around when it was palm muted rather than strummed, that opening B chord could be a single low-B chug (not much of a chug in practice, as this is going to be my “brighter” part) before I go into the sliding riff figure on the top few strings.

As it happens, this is the same song with the riff above. This is still just LePou Lecto for all the guitars, and before I punched in some feedback.

Feedback

Which, as a fun note to end on… I’m of an age where Live’s “Throwing Copper” was a formative album for me, around the point where contemporary music started to grab my ear, coming from a musical diet that was otherwise my dad’s Stones, Jimi, and Janis albums, with a healthy dose of Ray Charles, John Prine (I did an instrumental cover of “Angel from Montgomery” after he died that I toyed with including here), and 70s outlaw country (I regret nothing). To this day, I think 30 seconds of unaccompanied guitar feedback is a perfectly acceptable way to end a song.

This has been a real perk of reamping for me – the last rhythm tracks I recorded before considering this done was four total tracks of the last couple chords of the vidwo above, two with my suhr and two with my PRS, and if it would be an exaggeration to say it was with my Mark V wide open, it wouldn’t be by much (channel and master both pretty close to noon, that’s loud), while I had the house to myself. In a “conventional” recording workflow, that’s too loud to do in a home studio, at least if anyone else is within a couple house radius.. but here, it was less than ten minutes elapsed and a few takes of about 30 seconds each, most of that sustain. In a normal workflow, the volume differences between the takes would be too large, and the tonal differences between an amp running quietly and one with some visceral poweramp compression too pronounced, to merge the two seamlessly. Reamping, the DI doesn’t care what’s happening after it, so I now have these great blasts of sustained feedback that I can reamp at whatever volumes I want and it’ll sound seamless. It’s pretty cool.

I’ll probably have a lot more to say when I start reamping rhythm tracks, about tones, mics, and assembling everything into a cohesive sound, but for now I need to start brushing up on the solos and melodies here. I’m running a bit behind schedule, but I thought I was a lot further behind than I was until I realized I only had one last song to record on – a lot of this came together pretty quickly.