D. Effect Switching/Tips

You can assign one footswitch to control multiple effects. This is very helpful to switch from a rhythm to a lead setting, or if you always want to turn on/off 2 effects or more at a time.

You can control the amp volume parameter via the on-board pedal by setting it to be controlled by such. This keeps you from using an additional effects block on a volume pedal effect. Just be sure to set the max value to whatever the current level is, instead of 100%. At 100%, you might distort post-amp effects (see "effect clipping").

You can also use the expression pedal to control drive, or compression threshold. This allows you to move from sweet to searing leads, without doing the pedal-board dance, or adjusting your guitar's volume knob; so you can seamlessly build up gain throughout a solo.

When building a patch, I try to keep the effects order in the Edit software the same as the order they occur in the chain just to keep things simple. If I later want to move things around, I'll take a screen shot or write down my settings and re-do the patch.

Top of Tips and Pitfalls

E. Recording Tips

The best way to get a heavy metal rhythm sound is to double track the guitars. It's quite noticeable if the two tracks are not in perfect rhythm. Tighten those chops up and always use a drum/click track or metronome to keep time.

I go back and forth on how to pan the two tracks - sometimes I like full left/right separation but sometimes I blend them a little. When they're run through the same speaker, you get some phasing. It's not a perfect phasing like a comb filter, but you can hear it anyhow. If you're listening through headphones, full left/right panning can sound harsh when only one side is playing; but it sound much more natural through speakers. Right now I'm leaning towards full left/right.

Also, make sure your monitoring volume doesn't exceed the volume of the tracks you've already laid down or your click-track/metronome. You might end up laying down a whole track only to realize later you inserted an extra beat in the beginning or something like that and never noticed. Similarly, don't overpower your current playing volume with already recorded tracks. Then you're basically playing air guitar and fooling yourself into thinking you're playing perfectly with the existing track(s) when you might not be.

Quad-tracking doesn't seem to offer much benefit to me, unless you're trying to mix in some other tones. If you use the same tones at the same volume, I find it ends up sounding like the tracks are "fighting" each other, just like if you pan two tracks to dead center. You have to basically turn down one left and one right track to subtly reinforce the other tracks. Plus, it's more work to get all 4 tracks in perfect time. If you listen to Meshuggah's Chaosphere or Metallica's And Justice For All, you notice a kind of phasing sound to the guitars in the few places you hear one guitar on the left or right side. I don't know if this is the way they recorded or if it's double-tracked with the same pan, but I'm not a fan of the sound.

The more tracks you lay down the thicker it will sound. But that also means that it can become too thick and sound like mush. If you end up with such a mix, try doing starting off with less distortion on your tones.

I try to start with my instruments pre-mixed more-or-less. I want each instrument to have a unique frequency range emphasized, so that they all stand out and do not clash with each other. For guitars, that's generally around 250-1,500 HZ.

Top of Tips and Pitfalls