Provided by Sweetwater.

 
Q: I’m working on an album and I’m really having alot of trouble getting the rhytmeh guitar to sound just “right”.

What i’ve discoverd is that it needs to sound more open, with maybe a more stereo feel.

However, the problem I’m having is that when I tracked the instruments I only threw one mic on the amp.

Of course, basically everything else was recorded stereo!

So, now I’m at a loss. What can I do?

A: No doubt about it, this is one of those things that most easily could have been solved in tracking.

Back when tracks were valuable real estate (stop laughing, that time existed!), few instruments got recorded in stereo. Instead, they were recorded in mono, then panned to a position within the left-to-right sound field.

Today, nearly everyone has access to more than we ever dreamed possible, and those holds true whether you’re using a hardware or software based DAWs.

All this really just means that we have more at our disposal to create a more spacious (and more natural) stereo spread, on really most anything, as track count becomes less and less of a consideration.

Since the rhythm guitar is often the instrument around which all other tracks are built, it’s important to give it that big sound field.

Thankfully, however, there is a way to accomplish this aside from initially recording the instrument in stereo.

With an electric guitar, you can usually use a multi-effects processor to convert a mono input signal into an enhanced stereo output via a stereo chorus or panning tremolo effect or by using a delay in which the left side delay is shorter or longer than the right side delay.

Some processors allow you to assign a dry signal to one output and the delayed signal to another.

By using a very short delay, you can fool the listener’s ear into believing it’s hearing two guitars, just because the left image is offset in time a bit from the right.

As always, we welcome input from the PSW community and would love to know how you would solve this mixing issue. Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

 
For more tech tips go to Sweetwater.com