Getting The Ultimate Guitar Sound – Part 4 – Audio Premium

In this week’s Audio Premium content, Bobby Owsinski continues his series on getting the ultimate guitar sound. Bobby has spent a lifetime achieving just that, and the series is based on his new book, The Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook.

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Every guitar player, engineer and producer wants a great guitar sound when recording a track, but sometimes finding it isn’t all that easy. In this series, based around my new book The Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook (written with Rich Tozzoli), I’ll outline why acoustic and electric guitars, amplifiers, speaker cabinets and effects sound the way they do, and the best way to record and mix them after you’ve gotten the sound.

Unless you’re totally an old school purist, most guitar players use a variety of foot pedals as a means of modifying the sound of the instrument. The problem is that sometimes a pedal or effect is purchased solely on reading an advert or an artist interview without knowing too much how the new pedal can help your sound. In Part 4 of this series, we’ll take a look at numerous effects that are common to a great guitar sound, as well as some of the downsides that comes with adding them to the signal chain.

It wasn’t that long ago when most engineers were pretty down on guitar players using their effects pedals, especially when it came to delays and compressors. “Let me do it in here,” became a commonly heard phrase that left guitar players shivering in terror at the prospect of losing their sound. That’s mostly changed these days as most engineers would now prefer the guitar player to get the sound at the amp and just capture that. That said, it still pays to have the tidiest signal chain possible in order to keep the noise down and the recording clean. Here’s how to do it.