Below linked is a slow groove song by ZZ Top called 2000 Blues. One of my favs by them and recently re-listened to it and noticed that there is some definite Hass mixing on his lead guitar.
BUT…
… there is more than just a static Haas - with some riffs here and there there seems to something else going on too.
My leads are VST played - NI Sunburst Deluxe + Guitar Rig custom spacious preset that works well as is. But I also routed it through a very simple Hass using Cubase MonoDelay as shown above.
And it works fine with my current composition.
Yet I also want to know what Gibbon’s engineer did that gives the guitar that extra wide presence/delay or ?
Make sure to listen to it with headphones if possible because it’s pretty easy to miss that “extra” thing going on if listened to it casually.
The two rhythm guitars seem to be on the same bus with a ping pong delay, that’s not going all the way to the sides, with a slow movement. This bus has some stereo spread on it. And a slap back echo with a really long initial delay.
The lead guitar is contrasted with this by being more centered with its own echo. I think what you’re experiencing is a clever trick of your ear comparing the forward small lead with the back large rhythm guitars. So what they did isn’t some extra thing to make those guitars bigger; the trick is in our brains comparing the lead with the others, making the others seem bigger than they are.
It keeps returning our focus to the forward sounding lead guitar, then the rhythms come back, making them seem arrayed around us (but they are not, it’s just a trick of the mind comparing the call and return, if that makes sense).
The ping pong with the slap back echo is a good trick too. Makes it seem they are in an auditorium so large that the sound bounces around and comes back in the stereo field in all directions, at different times.
With the bass I think I count four guitars. Thought there was only three of them. But it’s another old timey band that should have retired.
@ASUNDER - Some good sonic observations - I wasn’t thinking of the rhythm guitar/s since they seem more like call-response single strums to me. So, yeah, got fooled - but hey, well done foolin’ IMO.
As to the band “should have retired” - this track is 33 y.o. so not geriatric. On the whole I never was that much a fan - much preferred their slow groove blues stuff with a couple of exceptions going back decades.
So some – probably a lot – of bands just don’t do it for me past a certain point. I.e. The Stones - I got turned on to them in the late 1960s at the same time that this new group called Led Zeppelin appeared, but lost interest around 1975.
We likes what we likes, we don’t likes what we don’t likes.
Hi,
that’s a very dense mix. Which guitar sound are you referring to?
I hear a lot of stacks on the guitars as well, different EQed reverbs and all squeezed into the mix together with a B3 and additional layers.
In the 70s Billy Gibbons’ guitar was broadened with a Cooper Time Cube, that is essentially a very short stereo delay hard panned left and right. The song ”Tush” is a great example of that
In the 80s he used Eventide Harmonizers for a similar widening, detuning the left and right sides slightly different.
