My Guitar Effects Setup

Ok so a lot of people have emailed me in Friendster and MySpace asking how I setup my guitar to get that munchy in-your-face metal guitar as heard in some of our recordings. I have had good and bad comments about that tone, (most notoriously the comment in Pulp Magazine) and so here it goes. I admit that its not the actual tone I wanted, and it really sounds mushy without any distinction to it…. but it eventually had a wall of metal guitar sound to it so its a 50-50 love for me. But many people have commented it has been by far one of the heaviest guitars they’ve heard in a local recording.

Since I was stubborn and refused to listen to the engineers suggestion to setup like the other bands used to, it took an hour before my guitar was finally allowed to be setup the way I wanted it to be setup. Well I had great respect for the engineer Eric Apuyan (who handles big shot artists like Sharon Cuneta, Regine Velasquez) and Mally Paraguaya (the bassist of the most kick-ass funk band in the entire Philippines… P.O.T.) but I wanted to sound different from all the rest of the bands and I refused to play it the way they wanted it.

They wanted me to just simply plug my guitar to a distortion pedal and plug it to the Fender amp. Less Hassle, less frills.

What I really wanted: I brought along a complicated schematic of how I wanted it to be recorded, and a lot of reference CD’s. ( I was aiming for Meshuggah wall of metal kind of guitar sound). I wanted a sound that would blow you away when you listened to it with your headphones. Well I don’t know if I did get it, but I guess a dozens of people commenting how that guitar sound on the final product was the heaviest tone they had ever heard from a Pinoy band, so I might have done something right.

Okay back to story. When they finally agreed… it took another hour and a half to setup the tone the way I wanted it setup.

That wall of metal guitar…. is the sound of my guitar through a simulated Mesa-Boogie Dual Rectifier on 4 x 12 cabs done with a Korg DPE on the main channel and split channel through a real and organic Fender 100w studio combo amp for the high range and a minor channel through another digital amp simulator but set to just overdrive and a cabinet simulator.

So in effect, I plug into three amps, and have the three tones together in the mixer to form one composite sound output. The purpose here is that I now have three seperate amps to control instead of BASS MID and HIGH. I fiddle the Mesa-Boogie to adjust the low-mid and the Fender amp for the highs. The digital amp sim eats up the center mid frequencies so I have a full bodied sound.

Then I play all tracks twice…. once on each of the left and right channels to create the impression of a “wall of sound” when you listen to it with your headphones. During our monitoring in the studio with the unmixed sound, it gave me goosebumps just listening to something that sounded really heavy and evil.

The other channel was connected to a digital amp simulator that recorded an overdrive tone for the purpose of putting some weight on the riffs, but unfortunately I think this was lost in the mix. This is the part that I really wanted to go back and have remixed but unfortunately they already signed the production forms so they song is as good as mixed forever.

I wish I could correct this mix in the near future cause I definitely think the tone in that recording lacked power….. they left out the overdrive mix. I hope they did not do it to deliberately to piss me off.

I tell you, I hated that recorded sound and is still wishing i could go and have it remixed if had my way.

My live setup

My guitars are a Gibson Les Paul Gothic Edition with PAF pickups and a Gibson Les Paul Classic Cherry Red Sunburst. I had them both reconfigured and rewired (simplified the wirings) and my pickups are set to about 3mm above the strings if the depressed.

I go through these pedals:

Boston Electronics Volume Control/Wah pedal

Yamaha Compressor/Sustainer

Marshall Shred Master

BOSS Hyper Metal 2

Zoom G2 Digital Effects Processor + CASIO Expression Pedal

BOSS Harmonist.

I carry all these pedals in a pedal board only in major gigs, and usually just pack the Digital Effects Processor for small bar gigs.