Direct recording trick of the day

[OverDriven]

So here's a little trick I came up with that's a lot of fun to play around with. It basically lets you run the high end of your guitar through one amp sim and the low end through another. First, you need this free plugin:

http://www.araldfx.com/downloads.php

Get the one called AraldFX Toolbox. It contains a plugin called AXV5, which is basically a crossover. It will split a signal at the frequency points you specify. It has 5 separate outputs, so you basically apply it to your track that has the direct guitar recording and only the signal below the first cutoff point (which I usually set to 250hz) will come through that channel. Apply an amp sim for your low end after the crossover plugin. Then make another audio channel with the plugin's second output routed to it. Everything ABOVE the cutoff point will come through that channel. Apply another amp sim to that channel that will handle your high end. Then recombine the signals by routing both channels to a bus with LePou Lecab for your cab sim with an impulse loaded.

I like to apply LePou Le456 to the highs and Lecto to the lows, but try whatever you want. You can do weird things like having your highs going through a clean amp and your lows through a dirty amp. You can even use all of the crossover outputs and have different amps for all frequency ranges - like Lecto for 0-80hz, Le456 for 80-600hz, HyBrit for 600-1200 and so on. Or try only applying effects to certain frequency ranges, like reverb only on the highs. The things you can do with this are endless. It really does have practical use in the fact that you can apply different amounts of gain to the highs and lows to make things as tight or as loose as you want.

[benjamin801]

That's crazy. I remember reading an interview with Dave Jerden in like 1991, where he would do this with a physical crossover he'd had built - run the low end of a guitar through something like an AC30, the mids through a Marshall Plexi, and the highs through a Bogner Fish - to get huge tones for his projects in the studio. It's remarkable that it can be done so effortlessly now, just 20 years later.

[OverDriven]

That's crazy. I remember reading an interview with Dave Jerden in like 1991, where he would do this with a physical crossover he'd had built - run the low end of a guitar through something like an AC30, the mids through a Marshall Plexi, and the highs through a Bogner Fish - to get huge tones for his projects in the studio. It's remarkable that it can be done so effortlessly now, just 20 years later.

That's cool. I got the idea because someone posted an amp from Namm the other day (a Randall I think) that had gain knobs for the highs and lows. It got me thinking, and I came up with this way to achieve that (and a lot more).

[Markdude]

Pretty neat! You can do the same thing by duplicating your DI track and using EQ inserts on each track (with different hi pass and lo pass settings), but this does seem like it'd be a bit quicker and probably more resource efficient.

[OverDriven]

Pretty neat! You can do the same thing by duplicating your DI track and using EQ inserts on each track (with different hi pass and lo pass settings), but this does seem like it'd be a bit quicker and probably more resource efficient.

The problem with using an EQ is that the high and low pass filters on an EQ taper off (usually at -12db per octave, and some go up to -24db per octave). If you do this to isolate the high end on one track and the low end on another track and then recombine them, you will end up with a hump in the eq curve where the tapers overlap. With a crossover, you get everything cut off exactly at the frequency you specify (without any taper), which keeps the EQ curve of the whole thing the same as the original.

[Wookieslayer]

Damn that is clever! going to try this. maybe with bass too, because usually I use two DI tracks and different EQs for low and hi freq...

Nice! thank u