Today I will be recording the guitar parts for my EP. This is a hugely important aspect of my work and there I have taken care to put a lot of thought and planning into the session ahead. I have given myself 6 hours in the studio to ensure that I get all of the guitar tones that I want. Helping me will be Jamie Proctor, a first-year Audio Student. Jamie has kindly agreed to bring along his Peavey Valve-King amplifier, which will be important in getting a high-gain distortion sound, which I need.

As Muse’s guitar sounds are varied to the point of not really having a ‘signature tone’ I have picked out a few tracks from their first three albums which I want to try and replicate. These are: Plug-In Baby, Stockholme Syndrome, Micro Cuts, the middle section of ‘Citizen Erased’, New Born, and Showbiz. These should be achievable goals with the resources available to me. On one of the tracks, Antagonise, I will attempt to replicate Tom Morello’s guitar sounds on tracks such as Renegades of Funk and Microphone Fiend from Renegades.

As I have detailed in posts such as ‘Guitar Tones’, ‘Pickups’ and ‘Digitech Whammy’, there has been extensive research into how the guitar tones from the four albums I am researching were created and recorded. While it has been difficult to find out exactly how the guitar parts were recorded (in terms of microphones used, placement, etc.), I have been able to identify the key effects and amp tones used.

I will use techniques of multiple mic recording, and closely recording two identical guitar parts in order to create a stereo image in several of the guitar parts. These techniques have been used all over Muse’s first three albums to make them sound like more than three people (see my ‘Muse’s Minimalism’) post for more details. Re-amping will be useful in creating completely identical guitar parts with different tones, for the sections in my track that need to be 100% in time with each other. I intend to split the signal before the amp to be D/I’d straight into Pro-Tools in order to do this, meaning I’ll have a D/I signal ready to re-amp if it is needed. Recording the same part twice was also used by Rage Against the Machine on Renegades. ‘Renegades of Funk’ is a good example of this.

While this stage of the task will be difficult, the research I need has all been done to shape the guitar tones in question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K626gMvu2ds