Professional Guitar Techs

!_Brian_!

Hey


was wondering if there was such a thing as a pro guitar tech available to the common joe soap to set up your sound?

My quest for the holy tone has become more and more fruitless over the preceeding months, the more I research equipment, the more confused I get!

I just need to find someone who realy knows what their talkinh about, tell them what I want and get them to tell me what to buy, set it up and show me how to maintain it really. Does such a person exist?

Thomas from Presence

I;ve done that type of work before. I do it for my students and I've worked as a tech with The Doves.

The biggest problem I fifnd with my students is that they blame poor sound on poor equipment instead of poor technique. If thats not an issue (be honest) then the rest is easy.

!_Brian_!

The style I'm after is aimed towards low tuned metal. The Doves dont sound quite like that TBH!

Without trying to sound big headed its not technique I have a problem with, its getting a tight low end distortion with clean sounding leads. Ive tidyed (sp?!) up the low end with an EQ pedal to get a nice scooped sound but as we tune down to C standard when I chug away on a palm muted E (or C as the case may be) power chord the low end starts to over whelm things and I get a lot of bass hum kinda thing. I dont know if I'm describing myself very well here at all!

Ideally I want Micheal Ammot's (of Arch Enemy fame) tone and I've looked up what I can about his gear but a lot of it seams to be custom, in particular the wah which is a big contender.

Kenny_D

Well amott has a signature guitar. Have a look here:

http://www.thomann.de/ie/search_dir.html?sw=ninja&x=0&y=0

Might be a step in the right direction guitar wise?

frobisher

Maybe a Mesa-boogie dual rectifier head through a bass cab? You could possibly use a splitter and have a 4x12 for anything above low G and everything else going to a bass cab. Although before going that far I'd look at the primary signal first; your guitar. That low C is pretty damn low. A friend of mine who was into heavy rock stuff ended up having a custom made guitar with 7 strings so he really get the right tone from dropped C. It sounded pretty damn savage!

!_Brian_!

Was never a huge fan of sig guitars, I dont wanna be a clone, just he's the best starting point.

I've looked into Mesa Boogie a lot but I have some quite acomplised guitarists telling me you'll never get the exact tone your after from a stock amp.

I dont think thats the way I'm looking to go. I have a Huges and Kettner Warp 7 which is really good for simply amplifying your tone, I'm just looking for the ideal distortion pedal plus accessories (EQ? Comprssors?) to get it.

Guitar wise I'll be using a ESP LTD Delux M-1000 FM whenever guitarbargains.com get it to me so I think I have it sussed guitar and amp wise, its just the in between!

Saying that tho, I could be totally off!

Eoin Madsen

!_Brian_! wrote:

I've looked into Mesa Boogie a lot but I have some quite acomplised guitarists telling me you'll never get the exact tone your after from a stock amp.

Clearly, that depends on the exact tone you're after. Adding pedals and gimmicks to an amp rarely changes the fundamental "tone", they just colour it. Even EQ can only change the response of an amp in certain ways. Most amps impart certain characteristics that can't be dialled out.

Imo, you need to find the right amp before you worry about the in-betweens. If you can't find an amp that gives the tone you want, get the closest thing you can and then mod the circuit or select different sounding valves etc.

Doctor J

I play in B, sometimes dropped A, what I've found is that a scooped sound will make you sound like **** when a bass guitar and bass drum are added, because you're all fighting for roughly the same frequencies. You need to pay attention to your mids and by pay attention I mean not scoop them out. The mids are what people will hear in your tone. You've already tuned down, there is plenty of low end already. If you're playing in a band, when the bass starts playing, that's where the real low end comes in and too many guitarists make the mistake of trying to have way too much low in their sound from spending too long playing by themselves. I've found a slight low end cut, a mid boost and slight high end boost to yield the best results, also don't go too nuts with the distortion, it's leads to fuzz which leads to bad tone. If you're looking for a distortion pedal, try the H&K Warp Factor on Thomann for €25 at the moment. It's not bad at all for downtuning, though it appears to be designed with ridiculous low end in mind it is quite possible to get a clear and rumble-free dropped tone from it and you can't really go wrong at that price.

Guitar-wise, I've gone from a 7 string Schecter C7 Blackjack with 26.5" scale to using a 6 string Gibson V with 24.75" scale. The B on the Schecter was tighter but a set of 56-13 on the V is doing just fine on the V. I think the tighter your low strings are the clearer your tone will be, so take that into account.

Click on the pic in my sig, it'll open my myspace page and, plugs aside, it'll give you an idea of what I'm talking about. All that stuff is either B or A, recorded using Amplitube (cheap and not great by any means PC based digital amp model) which is largely irrelevant but EQ wise the settings are generally in the region of low 4, mid 8, high 7 which is overkill to be honest but it served the purpose of leaving low end space for the bass and bass drum, low chords don't overwhelm anything and the whole sound sits together better.