Audio engineer guitar players...

[Donnie Frank]

Hey doods!

A forum search for "Guitar tone" turned up nothing useful, so starting a new thread.

After 10+ years of mixing, I feel like I'm sort of "getting it." My mixes sound pretty good to me. The band is happy with their monitors. The audience is happy with the band. The club owner is happy with the volume. So, generally speaking, I feel like I'm doing a good job. I've addressed the "elephants." Now it's time to address the "ants."

As you can imagine, I work with a myriad of guitar players. Tone ranges from "glorious" to "horrid." I've always shied away from coloring a guitarist's tone, because I assume that that is the tone he wants. But as of late, I'm rethinking that.

As a drummer, I've come up with a pretty flawless formula for getting good drum tones through the P.A. I've reached a point where, with the right tools, I can make almost any kit sound good. So I started thinking the other night, "Maybe guitar player / audio engineers have the same skills when it comes to getting good guitar tone."

The problem...

What I'm seeing a lot is thin tone. I know WHY the tone is thin, and I've coached a couple guitar players. As much as I hate to ask, I'm looking for a general cure-all. Just something general to massage the tone a little more towards "palatable."

As much as I hate experimenting during a performance, I toyed with boosting the low mids. I generally high-pass the channel @ 100Hz because I don't think that's where the "meat" lies. After messing around, it kind of sounds like the "meat" may be a fairly wide, gentle 3dB boost around 400Hz??? I don't know. I'm just guessing.

Here's a video of the band with the offending tone. Ironically, the stage left guitar player (who is playing piano in this piece) has awesome tone. It's not loud and I can hear every note. The stage right guitar player is the exact opposite. I feel like he's too loud, but I can't hear what he's playing. There's no "meat" in his tone.

I should qualify this by saying that Joey is a really nice guy and a great friend. He's also a smart guy and open-minded. But he's very adamant about his rig and his on-stage tone. So, before I push too hard, I'd like to see if there's something I can do at the console.

I know some guys are going to cite, "Junk in, junk out." I get it. But for now, I'm looking for the magic egg that will generally phatten up thin guitar tone.

The mic he uses is an SM57 on the outer edge of the bottom right cone, pressed against the cabinet. Perhaps different mic placement can help? I'd prefer to stay with that mic, as it has worked well with other guitar players. So, in my mind, though a different mic might help, I'd like to try to repair the tone in the channel strip or with different mic placement for now. I know this may paint me into a corner, but I'd like to have an initial plan of attack before moving on to actually fixing their tone at the source. Some casual gigs, I honestly don't know the guitar players well enough or have the time to coach them through better tone. I DO have time to turn some knobs....<;^)

https://youtu.be/rJ-BQ7xVDeQ

The guitar solo starts @ around 2 minutes.

Thanx for any help you can give!