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Back in the day we’re talking 20 years ago in live studios what I did was roll back my gain I mean really roll it back and build layers of guitars. I’m an extremely tight and disciplined player so I would usually do around 6 tracks per song and then myself and the engineer could blend everything together and get that full gain sounding distortion with clarity and articulation. This was before plug in’s had the capability they do now. At the time I thought my engineer was nuts and I absolutely hated what I heard while tracking….then when we started blending them together I was shocked with what I was hearing. Sometimes you just gotta trust the process.

I have a track I’ve been working on for a long time now, and I just tried this trick. GOOD GOD did it work so well! The mix was sounding fine before, but this just gave the guitars an edge I didn’t realize was missing!

TL;DR this video is a nice pat on the back, saying "you're on the right track, friend" and this channel is an extrememly useful resource for me. This isn't the first time I picked up a weird mixing habit and everyone told me "you can't do that!" and then this channel tells me "you CAN, and you SHOULD." The validation is a big help, NGL.

I'm pretty sure that A Day To Remember used this trick on Bad Vibrations, and you can really hear it in the intro to Exposed, where they actually start off with the DI track by itself, and then fade in the main guitar tone on one side, with everything coming in on a drop transition.

Personally, I like doing a version of this for my own music, where I have my main amp tone, and tbh I don't have a lot of gain, it's pop punk or maybe lighter buttrock fare level of gain at best, and I honestly aim for more of a "djent" oriented tone from the tone shaping decisions - a crap ton of mids, relatively low gain (around noon or so on my Orange Super Crush, or 11 o'clock or noon on the Rockerverb 50/OR30 amp sims I use from Audio Assault), then use a precision drive as a for boost metallic, glassy sound, or I will achieve the same thing with the gain on a Joyo Oxford Sound around 10 or 11 o'clock with the volume cranked as a boost into a Joyo Meteor bantamp's gain channel with the gain so low it's only an edge of breakup sound if I want to add width - and then I layer that with a straight death metal tone, usually made by layering pedals, sometimes even going into full on chainsaw territory. Examples: Donner Giant Metal into a Turbo Rat into either the clean channel on my Orange or a Sansamp Bass Driver v1 clone pedal (or both if the bass preamp pedal has the blend knob cranked to the dry side), Joyo Uzi with the gain on 0 fed into a TC Electronic Eyemaster with the gain on 0 into a Joyo American Sound, a Guitar Fetish Twin Clean Drive with both sides engaged into the Eyemaster into a Peavey Bandit Supreme pedal; just absolutely broken, fucked up, nasty sounds, that sound like they belong on a Carcass, Entombed, Dying Fetus, Deicide, etc record. I use either a dual amp setup and an ABY, or a parallel patcher to achieve it live or "in the room" but on recordings, I usually just feed NAM captures I made of the pedals I use into amp sims of the same amps I would use, anyway, or I reamp the same DI take into the other tone setup.

Then, for the kicker, I actually use different IR's for each layer, with a really dark, scooped sounding IR of a Seismic Audio cab/speaker with Behringer B906 on the cap edge and an XM8500 off axis on the cone angled toward the edge of the speaker that I actually made myself for the death metal or chainsaw sounds, and then I use a blend of Orange PPC412 IR's of Redback/e906 and G12K-100/off axis SM57 speakers, both over the cap center, that I bought from SeacowCabs/Audio Assault for the other tones. It keeps all the clarity, all the articulation, of the lower gain takes, but all the weight and aggression from the other take, and the two drastically different gain levels meet somewhere in between, and their main frequencies balance out. The end result is a sound that is very distinctly "Orange amp flavored" and kinda djenty at surface level, how I basically imagine Periphery would sound if they used Orange instead of Peavey, but it has the wallop of something recorded with a VH140C. Put a nice bass guitar sound under it, and it really fills out and pops.

Glad you're so back mate!
Still waiting for your new studio tour, hope everything will work out, cheers!

Great video and great song too

Amazing I'm oing to try this, Thanks,

....I've been at this for over 20 years and I just learned this tonight. No seriously, I've never heard of this before. Thank you for the wisdom!

This is a super fantastic bit of info!! thank you

thank you a lot for that tip , man !

That's awesome, dude! Thanks for the video, mate.

I’ve done this with Bass guitars but not heavy guitars….This is a great idea, can’t wait to try it! Thank you bro!

Very cool video!! Much appreciated!!! 🖤🖤🖤 For me it was largely confirmation. I had heard of the idea of mixing in the clean channel a long time ago and I tried it...didn't like the result *until* I made pretty much the exact same moves you did - distort it a little, EQ it to more mid range focus and compress. Then it worked like a treat!! It can also be cool and interesting to track that clean as a separate recorded track rather than a double, depending on sub-genre and what you are going for. 🖤🖤🖤

great tip

I've seen many use double amp/cabinets on one guitar, but the way you use it for adding pick definition is brilliant.

Must say that that guitar DI is tracked by a fck crazy precise right hand, which could be a must for that trick to work so good.

Cool technique mate! Will give it a whirl. Thanks for all you do :)

This comes at the right time. I recently turned off the post EQ on the rhythms. I was In the mindset of "it's there so I have to use it" less is more sometimes

I like mixing the "Lead" and "Crunch" amps from one amp suite with different IR's, drive, and tone settings. It keep latencies the same and I feel like the amps vibe together this way since the developer usually chooses to have these amps in the same amp suite for a good reason

I've been having fun using Fricker's George Lynch Fostex trick IR on my DIs.

Oh this is what I've been doing when working with Amp Sims!
I'm gonna use the "Little Difference to the L and R" trick and see how much it helps my mix!