How to work with mid range as a guitarist

I have a question about mid range.

Popular late 80s/early 90s heavy guitar tones were "scooped", as in, mid range was turned down considerably if not altogether cut. Yet if any amateur guitarist attempts this sound, their guitar signal is lost (practically absent) in the mix.

The explanation seems to be that guitars are very mid-rangey instruments which can't compete with the bottom and top end produced by the bass and the drummer's cymbals. So how the Dickens did the likes of Van Halen and Metallica get away with it?

Also, I've been looking at different tone types produced by different amp types. Apparently British amps (Marshall, Vox etc) have a pronounced upper mid voice. American amps (Fender, Mesa etc) have more of a scooped sound.

Fender's reputation is for having incredibly loud amps that retain a perfect clean sound almost all the way up. How did they become the amp of choice for Motown acts etc with all that brass to compete with if they had a scooped sound? How come the guitars aren't completely lost in the mix?

How is it that a scooped sound works for some people and not others? What am I missing?

Placement in the mix has a fair bit to do with it from a recorded perspective and also through a proper PA with everything mic'd up.

Have a look at hard LCR mixing for examples, bass & drums plus lead vocal down the middle and all of the fruit set off to one side or another.

JMTBW.

Don't try and completely scoop the mids, leave a little bit in there, boost treble and bass with an EQ (parametric) without it sounding fizzy or boomy.

In the past I've tried having the bass and treble a bit above half way and the mid around a quarter of the way up. Still had complaints that no one in the audience could hear me. I've attended other gigs with bands with fairly loud & expensive gear (dual rectifiers if I recall correctly) whose guitars could barely be heard at all. I can hear on their recordings that they've gone for a scooped sound. They've probably found a stereo work around in the recording process, but failed live.

What's the secret for doing this live?

The trick is learning that what sounds good by itself can be terrible in the mix. In a live context guitars often have to be eq'd more towards the treble end as bass and drums (and often keyboards) take up so much real estate at the bass end of the spectrum. Pete Thorn recommends that guitars always have a low pass filter taking out any sub frequencies. In a recording context compression and stereo spread also do a lot to make guitar stand out more.

I always have my amp set pretty bright as eq is better than volume if you want to be heard.

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Originally Posted by Fretworn

The trick is learning that what sounds good by itself can be terrible in the mix. In a live context guitars often have to be eq'd more towards the treble end as bass and drums (and often keyboards) take up so much real estate at the bass end of the spectrum. Pete Thorn recommends that guitars always have a low pass filter taking out any sub frequencies. In a recording context compression and stereo spread also do a lot to make guitar stand out more.

I always have my amp set pretty bright as eq is better than volume if you want to be heard.

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...which I completely understand. What doesn't compute for me is that apparently bands like Metallica used to go full scoop and yet their guitars could definitely be heard live. Or is that just a myth?

Well, they also either turned the bass down (Newstead) or had very bright bass sounds (Burton). It wasn't till later years that they learned how to have a full bass sound and full guitar sounds. The other trick is to avoid modulation effects or use a multi-amp wet/dry rig (That Pedal Show have talked about this in many of their videos)

So the answer would be that while some got around this by compensating with volume and creative mixing, this is generally a bad idea that should be discarded alongside mullets and spandex?

When I first started playing guitar, I was so into the scooped-midrange sound, it's only recently that I've been appreciating a more midrangey tone, hence the reason why I decided to buy myself a decent Marshall amp, the funny thing is, I realized soon afterwards that I've always been into the Marshall sound right from the start, anyway, I tend to keep all the tone controls (low, mid, high) on both amp channels set to the 12:00 position and that works for me, in a live band situation, you definitely want some mids in your tone so that it cuts through in the mix, then add some lows and a little bit of highs to where your tone sounds clear but not ear-piercing or fatiguing, Fender Stratocasters, mine included, do tend to sound a bit too trebly, I think the reason why the scooped-midrange sound became so popular with lots of 80's metal bands is because it made the guitars sound bigger, I agree, the guitar does tend to have quite a lot of midrange in it's tone, try plugging one into a HiFi amp and you'll see what I mean, it will sound thin and weedy since a HiFi amp is designed to have a more or less flat frequency response, most guitar amps are deliberately designed to have a frequency response with a scooped midrange, with a bit of a boost in the lows and highs, a Fender Twin is a great example, Marshalls tend to have less of a midrange scoop in their frequency response, using a Fender Twin and a Marshall Super Lead Plexi as examples again, there's another difference that has a big influence on their tone, and that has to do with the speakers, the Fender Twin has it's speakers in an open-back cabinet, whereas the Marshall Plexi has it's speakers in a closed cab, which means the sound gets projected out the front of the cab.

When Metallica recorded their first album, Kill Em All, they were using Marshall amps and Boss distortion pedals, on the Ride The Lightning album, they switched over to using the Mesa/Boogie Mk IV, the Mesa/Boogie Mk IV is basically a modded Fender amp, modded for high-gain, it uses the same tone-stack circuit as a Fender Twin, but it sure doesn't sound like one when overdriven, the Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier is basically a hot-rodded Marshall amp which borrows design ideas from the Soldano SLO 100, Mike Soldano, the designer of the SLO 100, was one of the pioneers of amp modding back in the 80's along with Randall Smith, who created the Mesa/Boogie Mk I as used by Carlos Santana (it was Carlos Santana who gave Mesa/Boogie it's name after he tried out the Mk I and said that it really boogies).

In a live band giging situation, you really have to be careful how you EQ each of the instruments so that they have space in the mix, otherwise they can compete and you end up with one instrument having a masking effect on another, that's why the scooped-midrange tone tends to get lost in a live mix, usually because it competes with the bass and you end up with the guitar sounding thin and trebly.

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Originally Posted by Andy123

So the answer would be that while some got around this by compensating with volume and creative mixing, this is generally a bad idea that should be discarded alongside mullets and spandex?

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You just need to add a bit of midrange to your tone, enough to get it to cut through a live band mix.

Talking about clean amp sounds, the clean Fender sound has varied over the years. The original '50s tweed amps have a much more mid-forward sound than the later '60s blackface amps. Don't forget that the first Marshall amps were based on a tweed Fender Bassman circuit, with almost no change in the circuit. And the difference between a tweed and a blackface sound may only be 3dB in the mids, not a -12dB change from turning your mid control right down.

A clean guitar sound will always cut through a mix better than a distorted sound at the same volume. Distortion adds lots of extra harmonic content to the basic sound of a guitar, which pushes a lot of the energy in the sound into the higher frequency range, so for an equal energy sound level, the distorted sound is spread over a much wider frequency range, (even though the guitar speaker itself filters off a lot of the high-end sound), so theer is less energy in the mid-frequencies.

Also, look at the Fletcher-Munson/ISO 226 curves for human hearing responses (it also varies depending on the loudness of the sound):

Attachment 27190

The human ear is most sensitive to sounds in the mid-range, and far less so to bass and treble frequencies. So if you scoop the mids, then you are reducing the frequencies that the ear hears best, so the overall volume has to come way up to compensate, which means the bass and treble are then far too loud.

These two videos best describe how not to get a good metal sound live (second one on next post as you can only include one video per post).

http://youtu.be/aYtXBUS_kwY

You'll probably find that the guitars on metal albums are EQd differently depending on how exposed they are in the mix. A guitar-only intro riff may well be quite scooped, whilst within a full-band context, the settings on both the amp and the mixing desk will be quite different.

Second video:

http://youtu.be/jKTm8YmwD7E

When I did my Diploma in audio engineering in the mid 80's we spent a lot of time on the 'tricks' used for that killer tone...

The one studio trick that springs to mind is to use two (or more) channels on the mixing desk for that difficult guitar sound. One channel to be set up and used for the verse and chorus section of the tune. The level, Eq and Fx set so it sat nice behind the vocals. The second channel (possibly/most likely on a different guitar amp) is set for the guitar solo to shine, with level, Fx and Eq optimized for those ever so few incredible moments. A Third channel might be used for that surreal guitar intro. Each channel was only used for its part in the song, and blending of any two or three channels was at the discretion of the producer/engineer. Then, repeat the process if you wanted stereo guitars, and repeat again for every other guitar in the mix.... and then the keys, and the bass, and the drums... and anyone else on stage....

With that thinking a 40ch desk fills up quite quick, and Fx racks multiply like rabbits.... Biggest live mix's I encountered back then with this thinking in mind was at Brisbane Qpac theatre which on one show used two 40ch Yamaha PM3000 consoles (each costing similar to a CBD apartment) which had 32 sub groups and controlled by combined/linked 16VCA fade controls, and was accompanied by five 19" racks standing 5' tall chockers full of EFx gear and a few smaller sub-mixers to re-integrate the outboard gear into the main mix....Some channels were only opened for less than a minute during the entire performance... (and for the life of me I can't remember who was playing.. It was a band though (one that I had nil interest in at the time), not a play or orchestra...)
With everything I've just said I will include that I remember there were a lot of noise gates in the racks of Fx, and a few A/B switches on the stage, and more amps than needed for a band that size.

Expo 88 also had big mix's with a 40ch and a 32ch FOH desks both used at once on certain shows though there were far fewer EFx racks. Typically most shows 'got by' on the River stage with only the 40ch and 1/2 a rack of Fx so I suspect most guitars only got one channel in the desk and had to manage their own tone and stompbox Fx.

So it can be done live as it was done in the studio... Ya just need the gear cos trying to do it all via one amp is probably the harder way ... and then also a sound engineer who knows what to do when...

As a player from years gone by, I always had my amp - a Holden 100 valve combo - tone settings such that a fair amount of the bass signal was cut and the treble advanced just beyond the neutral mark so that the guitar would indeed cut through; I used the tone control on the guitar quite a bit! The first outboard FX I used, apart from reverb and echo, was a Boss 7 channel EQ stomper which I used to add some oomph to solos, intros, codas etc.

That said, I used to try and find my own "voice", as it were, tonally, though not with any great success as fashion in tone moved so much faster than I did! :-)

I have no idea of what I'm doing but I run a compressor at the front of my signal, then that feeds an EQ pedal so the signal leaving there is my dry signal sounding the way I like it, from there it can go into drives ( I don't use much) and modualtions. My Egnator feeding a Jensen Falcon does a pretty good fender impersonation.

A lot of it is finding out what works for you, and using your ears and letting them tell you what sounds good.

Preferred tone is a very personal thing and having used Marshall & Vox amps for guitars I love their inherent upper mid grunt compared to some of the yankee stuff. Heaven for me is plenty of mid range through a 4x12 closed back cabinet.
As others have said, if playing live what you are hearing on stage may not be what the mixing guys do out front, particularly if overall sound is quite loud.