I don’t have it.

Producer YouTube is full with promises of how something will sound like you always wanted it to sound. Sure, there are tricks and little mechanics that help.

But as a autodidact, I always found it quite cumbersome to separate the wheat from the chaff. When it really comes down to it, you have a basic set of tools and a context, a purpose to use it for.

These tools are: Volume, EQ, panning, compression.

So when a friend of me asked today what silver bullets I‘m using for guitar sounds, he got me on the wrong foot. I don’t have any.

Even worse: I don’t have much guitar in my tracks anymore.

So here‘s what I said:

- get the best DI signal you can, with the right pickup selection and tone knob twist for your context

- spend time with microphone placement. It makes a humongous difference. Speaker selection, too.

- play well

- double or even quadruple track with different pickup selections for the „wall of sound“

- use high and highly dynamic crunch to low gain sounds in combination. This way, you‘ll have lunch and density.

- pan to taste but wide for the wall of sound

- you‘ll have nasty frequencies in the 2kHz to 5kHz range that you probably want to reduce with a bell EQ

- ger rid of most >7k Hz content

- seek the right mid frequency (~400Hz to ~3.5kHz) in the context of your mix that makes the guitar sound shine and flatters its character. Boost it a little. Make sure it does not interfere with vocals or synths. If it does, prioritize and use adaptive EQ.

- Get your low end under control. What sounds fat out of your amp, causes problems and reduces tightness in the mix. E.g with a bass also playing, you probably won’t need as much <100Hz content as you think. Definitely compress low end (~100-300Hz) for heavy and tight genres.

Sure, there is glue compression, adaptive subtractive EQ like soothe and all that but there is no general law to applying any of that. Certainly none that I know.

Now go out and play.