Doom Eternal´s Gnarly Guitar Tone - Part I (Production Related Tip)

Hello friends,

How are you doing? I am not sure if that is of any interest for you. However, I thought to share with you from time to time music production tips. 

So one thing that I always liked is that really super heavy gnarly scooped guitar tone that almost does not sound any more like an electric distorted guitar but more like a guitar plugged into an amp without a cabinet. Well..some sort of.  

As a matter of fact when you look at bands like Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, M. Manson..there was this producer Sean Beavan. And his technique was pretty much recording a guitar an octave above target pitch and then using a tape machine and recording the riff at half speed. Now Mick Gordon also used that technique trying to create for certain Doom songs a very aggressive gnarly guitar tone. On the GDC Video in 2016 he spoke a bit about this. Now..how to get that tone? There is not that one way..I guess there are various techniques, however I will present one of these that I tried out and provide you a step by step tutorial. Let´s get started:

First an that is crucial before you proceed: It is important that you think ahead and reverse engineer your riff idea. In other words: the Riff you are aiming for is not what you record but what you pitch and slow down later. So take your time thinking really about what kind of riff you want to hear in your final result.

1.  So, first you record your riff idea. You can use a classic amp->Cabinet->Mic Setup or alternatively you can use a descent plugin, profiler or a modeler. However..try with something really simple..just an ascending chromatic or tonal riff. Now you have to think in advance here: The target pitch and speed of the riff will be half of the riff speed that you are recording. Since we doubletrack the guitars later on, go and record the riff at least twice. Depending on the amount of repititions make sure to record enough bars.  (Sound Example 1)

2. Now you record a second riff line that is even an octave above the Riff from bullet point1). (record here also the guitars twice because later we need these takes to merge and to have for left and right channel doubletracked guitars). (Sound Example 2)

3. Pay attention to use thinner strings on your guitar or at least mix them with heavier strings. You can play a guitar riff on the same pitch on the guitar using either the thicker strings or the thinner ones. However, since we are "transposing" the riff an octave, thinner strings provide more clarity and a sharper sound. Why is that important? Because we will change pitch and speed later on in a range..where we still need some sort of definition.  

4. In the next step you layer both Riffs from 1). + 2). and do a mixdown. The loudness between both of the lines is up to taste. If you want more weight on the higher line decrease volume on the lower line. It is really experimenting. So the question might be: Why recording 2 lines which are an octave apart? I feel that it creates a thicker sound with more upper harmonics that can help add more tonality to the riff that is slowed and pitched down later.

5. Import the mixdown (Riff 1 /2) and apply some EQ: Boost a bit lows, Scoop the mids a bit and add a bit of highs. Everything is also up to taste. Since I like the more scoopy american I  did that. Also it takes out a bit of that mid "bread" sound on the guitars. (Sound Example 3)

6. Having done that, do another mixdown here for both guitar takes.  

7. Import the mixdown of the guitar take 1 and 2 again. Put them on two different mono Channels. 

8. Now comes the fun part: Use a tool to slow down the riff 50 % and pitch it down an octave. I am working in cubase and I am using just Cubase Audio Morph tool (it is under Audio). The algorith that was used in that example is the Elastique efficient tape. Now there is no need to use cubase, you can most likely use any other decent slow / pitch tool from Reaper, Ableton or Logic Pro stock or any third party plugin. (Sound Example 4)

9.  Then add an overdrive / Saturator (like Radiator from Soundtoys) and then Trash 2 (distortion plugin) on each of the slowed down Guitar takes. The chain could be like: 1). Radiator to drive up the signal a bit, then Trash 2 to obliterate it more. (Sound Example 5)

11. Create a group channel and route both guitar takes to the group channel. You can name the channel "Guitar Bus". Add a limiter on the guitar bus channel and add a lot of gain and compression. Pan the channels 35 left / right. You can of course do that also..more up to taste and go like 80 left / right or even 100 left / right. However, the more you go side, the more the riff will embrace the mix and sound more upfront. Depending on the rest like drumsound spatial placement it could sound too much disconnected. So pay attention to this! (Sound Example 6)

12. Add some more eq: Boost a bit at 100 kHz - 200 a bit and 4Khz, Atten at 1-2 kHz a good amount. Put the EQ before the limiter (Sound Example 7)

13. Then you should have something similiar in the example above.

I have also attached all single stages so that you can also listen to the sounds separately to get a better idea what changes sonically from the first step to the final result. I hope that production tip was useful and if you have any questions, just comment or shoot me a mail! Please let me know if there is more interest into things like that, since I have yet another cool one how to create that epic chainsaw / guitar tone thing.  

Horns up, 

Alexander