Duh!

I, the self proclaimed opsimath, believe I may have just had yet another breakthrough.  It's no secret that I've been struggling the most with recording and mixing electric guitars and I'm sort of wondering if I just found one of the "tricks".  I say it that way because I have learned that most things in life aren't inherent skills but literal tricks of the trade, and if you don't know them, you're fumbling around in the dark like a lunatic.  When I find one of these things, usually on pure accident, I almost literally squeal with glee.

I also usually punch myself in the head repetitively since these things are usually a "duh!  Why didn't I think of that before?" kind of thing.  Tricks are like that, after all.  I guess you could say that I've been turning tricks (heh, heh).

I'm supposed to be recording today but I've so far gotten fairly caught up in mixing and such.  I was ultimately trying to determine if I needed to re-record the guitars on one of the Wrecking Ball tracks, and this is where maybe the light bulb finally went off.  My initial 2 mic guitar tracks from who knows when (2014-ish?) really don't sound great.  My first question was whether they don't sound good due to potential clipping, an issue I've had here and there in older recordings and hence I usually just re-record.  This one doesn't really sound like a clipping issue, and it doesn't seem a be a phase issue either, which more or less just tells me that the sound itself a) isn't dynamic enough or b) maybe the correct or best choices weren't made in terms of pedals, such as overdrive, distortion, etc.  I believe these guitar tracks fall into the latter.

I get some of my best and most brilliant light bulb moments when I'm NOT working on music, ironically, and in talking this out over the past 24 hours it occurred to me that I should investigate using the amp simulator plug-in's.  First off, do I own any?  Yes, in fact, I own 2, and I had to track those down first.  Next, does this guitar part have a direct signal?  No.  Hmm.  Initially, I thought this was an issue, but what the hell...just run it as a buss off of one of the 2 recorded tracks and see what you get.

It was about here that the 'duh' moment hit me.  I've been saying for so long that a lot of the guitars that I hear on recordings sound SO big and I have no idea how you get anywhere near that wall of tone.  Well, maybe it's not 100% but this technique seemed to get me at least a good part of the distance, and voila...not only do you have a bigger sound, you can totally manipulate a pre-recorded sound to some degree, and it's completely variable since you can adjust the plug-in however you want.  Duh.

I'm not going to get too crazy but I actually think this may be one of the biggest game changers yet for me, and there have been quite a few lately.  If nothing else, I think it'll greatly cut down on re-recordings, provided that the raw tracks are in decent shape.  Now, if only I had thought to try this years ago...  It seemed like cheating, and maybe it is...but then again maybe that's the "trick".  Who knows.