I think things need to be slightly more sloppy or imprecise in general. Most modern metal is boring to me because of how perfect it all sounds, in timing and tone. A lot of stuff just lacks that human touch as a result. I should probably add that a little bit of slop is good, a whole lot of slop is very bad.
@@danielbentley7117 I don't think so. what is killing it is the ability to record everything as much as you want even like super small parts until it sounds "perfect"
@@deathlike_silence.0267 That too, but click tracks are still a problem. The reason why old bands sounded different from each other was they all had slightly different groove and chemistry. Playing to a click removes a lot of that. That's one of the reasons why a lot of modern metal sounds the same. All recorded to a click with the same cookie cutter approach plugin presets.
Very true. I have gone to ambient, avantgarde and post-punk like PiL after I've listened to the metal I've known for years... Don't and can't relate to modern metal.
I've always hated that super-tight, over-compressed tone. It just sounds "fake" to my ears. Rock'n'roll should be kinda gnarly and snarly and rough around the edges and fuzzy.
Yup, sterile and over processed sounding. There's no energy in it. I prefer the old school hard rock/metal sound. If a guitarist sounds like that, you walk away feeling like he just took a sledge hammer to your face.
Listen to the "British Steel" album by Judas Priest. That is what metal should sound like. Buzzsaw guitars and clear, distinct yet powerful vocals. Add in the punding bass and drums and it literally is a big, heavy slab of British steel. 80s metal forever!
"boost the mids" guys will fight each other to the death over what exact frequencies theyre talking about....they do not agree... besides, tone snobs are stuck in their own specific genre bubble
Not really, I play lots of stuff, I like my thrash metal and blues tones and clean, and probably a healthy dollop of everything between too, tone is half of the entire thing, I mean, I see some great players but then they use some digital shit and I am out the door, it effects me more than it should, I mostly just feel they are wasted, but I am old school, no effects guy, o don't even really do delay or reverb, although I used loads in an old project.. Sometimes I would just play the delay pedal and switch of my guitar, I guess it's all good.
personally i like boosting mids, however thats just cause i like the sound more than the scooped mids. i still think people should try and get a unique tone, not just whatever metal patch comes first on their axe-fx.
don't know about boosting the mids, but push back against scooping the mids (this is solely from my experiences) comes from playing live. Heavily scooped mids with high gain sounds great when you're playing in your room by yourself, but on a very loud, noisy stage in a noisy venue, that scooped mid sound tends to make the guitars very hard to hear. Then, a lot of guitarists and sound guys alike will try to compensate by simply cranking up the volume. The result is a very harsh, hissy sound that is very hard on the ears of the audience. Simply bringing the mids up a bit can make your guitar much easier to hear without having to crank the volume, so the crowd can hear what you're actually playing instead of a wall of noise that pretty much just sounds like static.
I feel like people should buy whatever gear sounds best to them, not what everyone else says is best (especially not anyone on the internet). That way, maybe rock and metal would be more interesting again
It’s why I’m staying away from the Peaveys and Mesa Boogie amps. I’m happy with my Marshall DSL boosted by a Fortin Grind. If a woman was very powerful and had a clean and sharp business appearance, but was wearing some sexy garter belts and lace panties to show how dirty she can be, that would describe my current distorted guitar tone. As for my clean tone, it sounds like a Goddess just blew into your eardrums. A Peavey or MB can’t get as clean as my Marshall DSL.
@Claudia Solomon My releases that are out now unfortunately don’t have those tones as they were all recorded with amp sims, but I’m working on new material that’ll be recorded with the tones that I described using my Marshall DSL!
The rat is, for my money, the best drive pedal you can get. It's so useable. I use it with a double bass (which is quite hard to make work with drive, for obvious reasons) and it sounds huge. The filter is my favourite tone control on a drive pedal, really lets you dial in that perfect point where it can do silky when you need it, grindy where you need it, and blend in with whatever else is going on in the band. I remember trying to find that spot on a big muff tone control. Never going back to that again.
Dude I just talked about the filter! You are right. It's the MAIN reason why that knob makes this pedal great for modern recording. It's on my synth pedal board for that reason. The volume is also a gorilla if you need weight.
The big muff ... sucks, if I'm being honest. I have never been able to get a tone that I am happy out of one, and even when it is way louder than bypass in isolation, it always disappears into the ether in a live setting.
Remember jamming in garages with real amps and a real drummer? And the equipment you used was the equipment you could afford. Remember original, individual tones? Remember awesomeness?
Yep. Sweating my ass off to a used 70's Orange OR-80, homemade 4x12 cabs full of mismatched celestion knockoffs, with a Boss Heavy Metal pedal, a Thomas Bros wah, and an ibanez UE300 in a hot garage. Those were the days.
I 'member! God, I hate the "silent stage" DI, modeling, digibollocks most of us are forced to use if we want to play live these days. I was at the local pawn shop and I've never seen so many Fender amps for sale. Tweed Deluxe, ltd edition HRD, Twin, HR Deville, Blues juniors and a few others like Laney. All PROPER VALVE AMPS. lots of pedals as well. Seems like the locals have been selling off. Maybe it's covid, maybe it's modeling, maybe it's both.
haven’t even begun the video, but i’m here to say : yes, they have. most metal production these days sounds clinical and lifeless, especially the guitar and drums. we need feedback and sludginess! obviously, doom, sludge, death, etc. are all still very much alive today, but a lot of groups just blur together.
I’ve begun transforming finally lately. I used to be a very big fan of the OD808 into 5150 into V30 and all that jazz. Then I took the tube screamer out of the equation and turned up the amp gain; it sounded beefier, meaner, clearer, fuller. Then I tried a mix of V30 and G12K100, it had more bite and depth. Then I quad-tracked with two 5150/V30/G12K100 tracks and two tracks of a rat into an AC30; it sounded GLORIOUS. (Both were mic’d up with just a 57, two of them for the 5150 tone.) I really wanna hear other people try this method and give their thoughts; blending between a tight metal tone and sludgy grunge tone sounds and feels like the best of both worlds; you get that midrange clarity without sacrificing any fullness or grunt.
Kinda reminds me of how Jerry Finn used to record blink-182's guitar tracks. He'd use two amps, usually a Marshall set with a relatively low gain crunch sound and boosted mids, and a Mesa Dual/Triple Rectifier set with a more high gain scooped modern metal tone and blend the two before sending to tape. He loved how the Marshall sounded punchy and aggressive while the Mesa provided a huge bottom end and longer sustain. Regardless of what you think of blink's music, you have to admit the guitar tones they achieved with Jerry are glorious
Both of you are right imo. Gear does influence alot of writing for some guys, but the writing styles come from what they listen to, and that influences gear purchase. Vicious cycle. Best thing i ever did for myself was laying off gear sites
Have you watched my channel much? Songwriting is my mantra. You may have missed the video below. It's all good. BTW gear stuck to a click with Vanilla Sausage guitar/drums etc can ruin a good rock or metal song. It's a combo of modern production, no live scene, no live rehearsals/recording, songwriting and copycats etc. I go deeper here th-cam.com/video/YCoqAjrGOo8/w-d-xo.html
@@swagnostic132 I remember Testament re-recorded an album because they didn't like the production. The results were awful. Vanilla Sausage to the max. Same songs, different modern gear and the new album bombed. So it's not all about songwriting. Production is a factor.
In Flames Clayman 2020 album re-recording? Same songwriting. Different modern gear. What was the reception like? You can cherry pick but gear and production makes as much of a difference as the melody.
As a synth guy not a guitar guy, I still love pedals and I agree....I love metal but I hate how modern metal (not all, but what is mainstream) has become so crytal clean. I love lows, I love rawness, and I love noise.
I appreciate the little dalek Easter egg. Also, that pedal shaped the tone of early Death, Morbid Angel and Obituary albums. There's gotta be something good going on with it.
@@brentcorkins4711 I can't get my sound with a Tubescreamer either. It's too anemic. In many instances, I tend to replace it for a Treble Booster. Or going the David Gilmour route and using a Fuzz + Overdrive.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino nice , have recently started getting into treble boosters .. the twinote pi fuzz which isn’t really a fuzz but clone of the Catalina bread sabra cadabra which replicates a treble boosted laney I.e iommi .. been really thinking about getting one ..
The real problem is people are not playing in real bands anymore, with real amps, real cabs, and LOUD. Bands only come together in the studio to „produce“ and then go their own seperate ways again. „Bands“ of today would be called side projects at best in the past
@Toxic Potato See, I am playing in one. We have a rehearsel space where lots of bands have their rooms. And it's just what you hear from other guys I know there. All the dudes don't have enough time to come to rehearsels. "Oh we can record something at home and share it via dropbox". Etc.. Let me tell you, ten years ago, the place was a living community, you always met other bands, you listened to them, they listened to you, things happened. Nowadays nobody is ever there, although all rooms are still booked
Yeah, every member with their own "great" soloed sound they made in their bedroom, but not putting the hours playing together, not developing a chemistry.
A forum actually complimented one of my latest tones, noting the "mid-range" but what they don't know is that the mids were literally on zero for that sound. I guess what mids you take out is pretty important too. To my ear, if it honks, it's gone!
Honk just ain't heavy. It has its place for if I want certain overdub to stand out with a boxier sound but Owen is right. We should try and come up with sounds that suit the music. The heavier it is, the more vicious it should be instead of copying the same advice from the same forums. This is probably one of my favourite guitar tones I've gotten straight from the amp. It sounds just like it did in the room. th-cam.com/video/dFh25NuzdwA/w-d-xo.html It's kinda Pantera-ish with different mid-emphasis and the signature squelchy "djunn" my palm mutes create. In the breakdown, I used a bitcrusher pedal in front to give an awesome, digital squelch sound!
The RAT is the greatest pedal I've ever owned! I got my first one 30 years ago and while Ive tried a lot of others, Ive always wound up back there. Actually, now I am using a Big Ear - WOOD CUTTER which is a "clone" of very specific RAT pedals and its awesome!
The rat Is Soooo versatile, the rat and rat style circuits like the DRV are super popular in the Coldplay/u2 indie alt crowd as well. Obviously great metal tones, even to doom/sludgy fuzz tones!
Absolutely love this! I personally hate the hyper polished modern metal guitar tone. Just like how too much perfection with melodyne can ruin a great natural-sounding vocal take, I think going for perfect will drive you insane and suck all the mojo out of your sound. It's why I love spitty, velcro fuzz tones, they're unpredictable!
I believe what ruined music was the use of limiters to protect the frail equipment at the time of early recordings. Later the Limiter was used to make sound as big as possible (louder) within the dynamic range of tape. Back then wildly dynamic program material like vocals drums and bass were heavily compressed. The sin was doing this to drums so much that it changed the sound of a kick. Next thing we had drum machines! It seemed the punters couldn't tell the difference. It is hard to blame the engineers at the time as the pressure was on to make the loudest tracks as radio stations noted the loud rms levels attracted listeners. I could go on but the fact is we have a vocal centric sound today and guitar music is not so much the fad but it will return. It was once all about the next big sound and now there is a plethora of gear for the old sound. The next big sound atm is not guitar based but it will come back as a new thing if feel and human groove is allowed to exist without the engineer squeezing the life out of it. Cleaner guitar is quite okay, we can now get clean guitars to sound very big. Music that makes you move will again be new!
What if James Hetfield used what was "the shit" back in the 80s? Would he have created the tones we hear in Master of Puppets? AJFA? Black Album? What if EVH used what was cool and didn't use his ears to get the tone he was looking for? Would we have the brown sound?
Keep in mind that the JCM 800 is a Plexi Super Lead 100 with an extra gain stage and a master volume. After the Variac Plexi, he used a Soldando SLO-100 (Which is a modified Plexi) before the 5150. The 5150 is a copy of the SLO-100.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino The SLO isn't a modified plexi, and the 5150 isnt an SLO copy. Watch the Tone Talk episode with James Brown (guy who designed the 5150). It was a modified VTM120, which was itself a clone of an actual Jose modded Marshall.
@@MrTekbow Alright. The SLO 100 is a modified Mesa Mark II, which started as a modified Fender Princeton. The VTM100 is a clone of a JCM 800, which is a Super Lead 100 with a master volume and a extra gain stage. A lot of game...
@@BrunodeSouzaLino It's probably unfair to say it's a modified Mk II as well, but yes, doubtless, Mike Soldano learned a lot about cascading gain from them. It's also true to say that (in Browns own words) the VTM120 was revoiced heavily into the SLO ballpark, so I mean, semantic difference, sound is king. Personally i don't think the Peavey comes close to the articulation of the SLO unless you're EVH, and in that case you could run a dimed big muff into a dimed anything else and still get that kind of note separation.
@@MrTekbow EVH uses a lot less gain than most people think. And all his distortion comes from the amp. Only pedals in front are modulation pedals. If you go by recordings, EVH didn't do any double tracking. Only overdubs present were there for musical reasons.
I just turned the bass knob on my JCM 800 all the way up and left the mids at noon... how come nobody told me there was a whole 'nother world out there?!
I stumbled back upon my RAT about three years ago after a million other pedals. I don't quite get the "GOD" tone with it, but it is SOOOO musical and does not get lost in our three guitar mush.
Nuno Bettencourt used a RAT to boost is ADA-MP1 in the first album of Extreme and his tone is pretty tight and articulate but in a good way IMO. Also, one of my favorite use of the RAT is by Sunn O))) boosting their wall of Model-T to the max. Saw them live twice and the sound felt like I was covered in a blanket of frequency and volume.
“Rock is dead “ Gain is the audio version of salt. There is a limited amount that you can add before it is no longer food, it’s just salt. It doesn’t matter how it happens. You can get used to very very very salty food, but there are physical limits involved. Nirvana (grunge?) was a reallyinteresting take on heavy given Metallica had just crushed the world with Black. Tool just after. Meshuggah after that. Quirky stuff with attitude. Emotionally intense, with distortion but quirky. Fish and chips can’t take unending amounts of salt. And you can’t quantise and brickwall everything to death in a world where audio is streamed digitally. The ears only taste salt.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE I ascribe to Penn Gillette’s idea that you have to ignore music taste three (7?) years Each side of when you lose your virginity. We just assume it’s all good. I like a bit of stuff from 2001 but it’s 86-97 for me. The production is not a feature but it doesn’t distract like the 70s crap. The sound war is just eliminating the ability of the music to come through the mix. The good songs... what’s a good song? Lots of things move people. I think we’re done with big musicians. Now it’s pure personality like Kanye. Rap has it.but you know I’m jaded. And we are talking about stuff made outside that 6 year window. It’s all salt to me.
1. For me playing in different places and with different people goes best when we work out our group sound so everyone is heard by everyone. 2. I don't like the visual distraction of a screen. Hearing and feeling reign supreme. 3. Most modern remixes suck because people make the quiet parts too loud and the loud parts too quiet. It bores the mind and fatigues the nerves. This is called volume. Old recordings let the transients spike really high and instantly disappear. It wakes the mind and refreshes the nerves. This is called Loudness. Loudness rules.
That's what I appreciate Andreas Kisser and Adam Jones. Because they just go guitar, cable, amp. They don't go for the djent right overdrive boost tone.
I'm still very into od + gate but I realized it's better to use the gate as low as possible that you can get away with for me. Too many people are into having like multiple gates with zero bass and all the mids and the amp starts losing its character imo.
I've been G.A.S.ing for a double cut les paul JR with p90s, or maybe a les paul special with p90s. Othwise you're right, but also different people like different things. Nobody is right or wrong, we like what we like. My issues lay in the uptightness, cancel culture, bad attitudes, and lack of comradery in the metal scene/community.
To me, the whole tight guitars/drums/editing etc thing to me is very much an extension of "tab culture". I was definitely in it when I started but I broke from it after a few years. Basically, with the abundance of good transcriptions in playable formats (ie, Guitar Pro), learning to play guitar starts to have way more in common with classical music pedagogy. So you get a bunch of players who achieve technical proficiency very quickly with very weak ears and for whom a lot of playing guitar is about getting "objectively better" -- faster, more precise, more clean, more complex. And that's how classical pedagogy is graded. You start with Mary Had a Little Lamb and end with something like Fantasie Improptu. And it all makes sense in its own way, trying to legitimize the music via "objective" criteria. If you then take that thought process into songwriting, well you almost need that production quality to make it appetizing. I don't think classical influences are bad, but to me the mindset is a creative dead end.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE It's exactly how I started many years ago. Starting with simple text tabs but quickly got Guitar Pro. After only 2 years after starting guitar I was playing shredder material, Vai, Yngwie, EVH, etc. And I came from classical piano before guitar so that mindset definitely carried over. I always wanted to challenge myself more, technically, and I was easily impressed by shredders. I continued along that path for 2 more years and I had very weak ears. I assumed that if I got good technique that writing would just come. Yet I only wrote riffs (never full songs) and a lot of them were odd. At that point, I read an interview with (I believe) EVH saying he never learned to read music. Up to then I interpreted not reading music as "learned by tab", but somehow it clicked that what they REALLY meant was "learned by ear", and I realized that was far more essential to writing. So I started trying to learn everything by ear at that point. Now that I've thought more about it, I can easily see the thread from my early days of learning guitar to the way guitar culture is now.
Yike Lu I learn everything by ear. Everything. With 2-6 different fingerings and voicings. I may not be exactly “right” 100% of the time, but it usually sounds like I am, and it’s always musical. I have very unconventional gear because I don’t buy the name, I buy the sound. You put it perfectly. Nailed why I don’t usually like the “new” players. I thought, “maybe I’m getting old”, which I am, but I WANT TO like the “new”players. I had a very vague rambling set of ideas about the problem, and you just stitched it up neatly. That’s it! “Tab Culture”. I started in ‘84 with 1-3 tabs a month in a magazine which helped me get some of the “language” down, and trying to learn 3 sets of music that weren’t in the magazines. That’s how you get an ear.
Dude I've got to say, you've been saying the same things I've been saying about modern metal and rock being dead. I love my rat pedal, I've been using open sounding borderline fuzzy distortion for years. Keep speaking the truth. Cheers 🍻
This channel is an absolute god send. I would LOVE to see you attempt to recreate the tones of System of a Down's Toxicity/Steal This Album, and Gojira's From Mars to Sirius.
I’d also like to make the argument for a treble booster in front of an amp. It gives it some tightness for metal but also a more vintage feel which I like better than my tube screamer tbh.
I suspect the sanitizing of the low end of guitars might be seen as a solution to unrecognized phase issues, and kills the fundamental interaction between bass and guitar.
Yep. Low-end sucked out of guitars plus turning metal bass into a notched sub of VST distorted bees is the UNFATHOMABLE state of pro production right now. Nobody stops to think that the public hates listening to this method?
@@CIRCLEOFTONE The public's been brainwashed into not being able to recognize quality in all domains, to make it easier to sell low price, high margin and low effort bullshit to them. It's just a marketing problem. They say 50% of everything we buy is in the packaging...
Some people can't see other potential on gears when they're getting old. This is why sometime they need to revisit the classic models and to re learn something from it.
I couldn't agree more! I listen to those early classic metal tones from Sabbath, Priest, Maiden, Motorhead and they all have that looseness and sponginess that sounds pleasing. When I hear these modern super tight "djent" sharp tones in the rhythm, it does seem to annoy me after a while. Hell I love Rise Against, but I've found of late, as much as I enjoy their songs and and albums, their guitar tones are almost too tight and slick!. After playing for nearly 30 years, I finally only got a Rat pedal (Turbo Rat) a few years ago cause it was stupid cheap used at a local music store. I had always never considered one cause I had always heard it was thin, buzzy, yada yada. Maybe if it's plugged into a cheap solid state amp. But when I tried it with my tube amp setup I was stunned! It was the perfect amount of fuzzy, chewy, thick hard rock/metal/punk tone I always crave. I'm a Rat convert that's for damn sure!! Now I have a regular Rat too and it's just as good as my Turbo!
Tight guitars, tight bass, tight drums - it all turns into typewriter music after a while if you aren't careful. There's a time and a place for really focused, compressed tones but I wouldn't say it's 100% of the time and everywhere. I used to post on the Sneap forum a bazillion years ago and that very quickly turned into everybody chasing everybody else's settings, editing everything down to the nuggets, trading waves presets, etc. It would be way more fun to record a power trio with the guitars tuned to standard and see what sort of sounds you can put together.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE Tone on Covenant is absolutely killer. I, like you, am sick of this sterile over processed crap. Let a genre like Industrial use a tone like that, where it actually has a reason to sound that way!
Ah, so that's the pedal behind that tone! I love modern music production tools because they allow me to express myself in ways I could only dream of when I was a kid with a tascam 4 track and DOD death metal pedal. The tone on my bands first album was a no name LP copy into a zoom multi-fx into a no name 50w bass combo from Argos, with a karaoke mic straight into a sound blaster. We used a measuring jug and bongo as a mic stand and taped the whole lot together to stop it falling over. Later we used a digitech metal master into an digitech rp7 which had a primitive cab sim which went direct into the soundblaster card. They were technically "bad" tones but 20 years later people still like them and ask us how we got those tones. Speaking for myself, I've noticed that the vast array of choice and convenience of digital has reduced my creativity. When I had limited cheap gear I used to experiment loads to try and get where I wanted to be with sound. If I wanted to replicate the Fear Factory tone for e.g., I had to work at it and would never come close. But I would end up with cool unique sounds, it would be my version of the person I was trying to match. I was also not trying to clone other players sounds, I wanted to take aspects of that sound and do my own thing with it. I think that experimentation is missing from modern metal because of the overwhelming choice, and the convenience of being able to quickly load up a good enough sound. Add that to the forum hive mind of the tone police, and the fear for young artists to not be accepted if they deviate even slightly, and its easy to see how we got to this point. I'd not even noticed how much I'd gone into that rabbit hole until I started watching videos like yours a few weeks ago. These ideas may have been lost or forgotten, but they can be rediscovered and remembered. Case in point, I tried to digitally recreate the Type O Negative tones after watching your videos on it. I didn't get close but I ended up with a cool new guitar tone using some of the standard overused vsts. Not sure what the point of my ramble was, but watching your videos has got me excited about messing around with guitar tones again, and doing the wrong things on purpose.
RAT's are awesome for bass too. Sure, you could get a fancy schmancy Darkglass rig, but a RAT into a GK bass amp gets you great results too. It's how David Wm Sims (The Jesus Lizard) and Owen McMahon (Cherubs) got their signature grinding and sludgy tones.
Ratt like my favorite the metal zone is often hated because its misunderstood. God forbid anyone make their own tone and opinions versus just blindly following.
To be fair, the metal zone is pretty awful. If a pedal only sounds good when you dial it in one or two ways, it's not a good pedal. All the best distortion and overdrive pedals are versatile and customizable like the rat, boss ds-1, tube screamer, big muff pi, etc. The only thing the metal zone does well is like lo-fi black metal tone. Which is fine if that's the specific tone you're looking for
I love RAT pedals, I have a Retro Sonic Distortion it does get a bit fuzz in dropped D (literally gated kinda fuzz) when cranked up but its awesome. Still want some other RAT variants too as only a few slight changes in the circuit changes how it sounds quite dramatically, I'm starting to try blending RAT and FZ-2 tones with high gain amp tones to get the best of both worlds.
Thanks! I built a Rat clone (using an LM308, and using LEDs for clipping so it's a Turbo, mounted on the face so I can see when its clipping comes in) and it gives my Marshall Studio Vintage the power I need for my heavier side.
If metal isn't ugly, nasty, dirty, chaotic and raw then it isn't metal. Godflesh from the early 1990s is so much more devastating than anything nowadays.
RAT is one of my favorite distortion pedals, but I think my favorite distorted tone might be the fuzz, like the FZ-2 Monolord/Electric Wizard tone. Something about it is just so kickass
I began using a Rat back in 1986. I was playing the Sunset Strip hair metal/shred guitar scene, and I was tired of the dominant guitar tone of that era, which was too polished, and too tight. I wanted a tone that hearkened back to the classic rock era of the 70s, that was a bit more unruly and soulful. The Rat was the magic ingredient. It worked for me through a number of amps from Marshalls to Fenders to Peaveys and Laneys. It's almost, but not quite, an amp in the box pedal. It changes the tone and feel of your amp drastically. Regarding the subject of this video, of how tight guitars have affected modern rock and metal, I'd say yes, they had a deleterious effect on these genres. But pedals like the Rat help correct things and bright the guitar back to life. I found there were too many players in that 80s scene obsessed with "perfect" guitar playing. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, but the enemy of the great, because the truth is perfection is relative. It also changes with time. What I may have considered perfect a decade ago now sounds very flawed to me. What sounded flawed a decade ago now sounds great to me. There is a whole tradition in the world of gear that goes back to the 80s that chases perfection, and it's pointless. Perfection is a very bad thing for new players to focus on. They will never really appreciate the joy of growing with the instrument.
We used the ProCo Dual Rat R2DU (rackmount) on the last album our punk band recorded. A mate of mine left it in my studio when he moved away, years ago. He got it back when we re-formed, all good. (Fun fact: used originally by Pat Davern, who should never have sold it.) Tidy EQ is a mix-down technique, and should be applied there to "carve holes" for instruments to sit in. Raw tone? There's a reason it's called that, and I say Let It Bleed. Homogenized rock and metal guitar sounds? Too horrible to contemplate.
I really have no idea how anyone, especially new players, expects to get a truly good guitar tone strictly by using plug-ins and headphones and studio monitors and all that. You can hear the "fakeness" a mile away. May as well just play a synthesizer or something.
@@dystopiagear6999 My experience is the exact opposite. I hated playing through my real amp because it only has the one sound. With plugins I can dial in tones much closer to the bands I listen to. I've been playing more guitar than ever. (I also love my synth guitar.)
Yeah agreed, reamping with a RAT wouldn't work as the dynamic response is way different than say a 5150 so you have to play differently. I don't play through a real cab because I am in an apartment and damn it makes playing harder and changes how I play unfortunately, I use real amps and decent IRs but the lack of direct response does change how it sounds and how I play.
I’ve never reamped & never will. Talk about killing all the spontaneity & happy accidents. Take chances. Do shit the “wrong way” on purpose. You might just uncover the thing that makes you unique.
Dude, this will be my first time catching one of your vids. What caught my attention was the tight, cleanliness of yur chigs & yur chugs. I had just come from a video where that dude's playing was decent but his recording was loose and muffled & it sounded like a trashy flamming shit. Yours just goes to prove that even a simple riff, that anybody can play, can sound badass if it's all done right. I just wish, unless I missed it, you'd've listed your signal path. What is it? Gibson - Ratt - Plexi - V30 - SM57... were all that I caught... & I'm not sure if you said the Ratt was up front or in z Loop? Anyhow-ways, you got yourself a new subscriber today! Keep it up bro!
Bro this was hilarious and entertaining. I am subbed. I love the guitar sound of the blue album, I agree that some modern mixing sounds like tooooo perfect
@@CIRCLEOFTONE There's the long one about the first album, that ones is great I do love the way it was chaos from the get go. There's also the shorter one from the second album and you get to see the absolute machine he got to play drums.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE It was either the drummer or guitarist but either it's kinda funny. I have been wondering if you have any experience with the Little Bear R.Attack or any of the rat clone line?
it's interesting. I'm 45 years old and I've been chasing a "tight" sound since 1990, though I never called it "tight". I always called it "hyper-bass" because that's what I perceived it as. Basically I've been chasing Gary Holt's sound for as long as I can remember, but I think the old school metalheads have a slightly different definition of "tight" than what modern metal guitarists do, though I do like both.
Yep I did something similar. Ended up chasing tone instead of writing and playing out. I am interested in production though so I suppose it's working out. You may like this vid I did on the Holt sound th-cam.com/video/IsT8TINZ3u0/w-d-xo.html
@@CIRCLEOFTONE yes, I know, I've been a sub for years now. It does sound good, but doesn't sound that much like FD to me. But that's ok, it's better than my sound and I'd be happy to have that kind of sound. I really enjoyed all the backstory in this video, very engaging.
I don't have anything particularly insghtful to add here, but find it refreshing to see that I'm not alone in feeling that modern "perfect" guitar tones have a tendency to... well... suck. Obviously people have different taste in tones - I do get that - but it's defintely a major reason behind why I'm struggling to get into most of the (non retro) metal relased today. And it's not just the guitars either. A lot of the time, every instrument is eq'd with laser precision and the overall mix just feels WAY too nice to my ears. Perfect but lifeless and lacking any sort of tension between the instruments, since the're so separated and never fight for space in the mix. [/old man rant]
Rock and metal production peaked in the 70s as far as I’m concerned. Listening to a Sabbath record with a good pair of headphones feels like you are there with the band.
Totally agree with you. All this formulaic crap they tell you to follow just kills the music and creativity. I have seen many modern recording and guitar gear, but I keep coming back to BOSS and MXR the same way. The imperfections are what really made a lot of classic recordings anyway.
I think a lot of it has to do with the inability to mute strings properly. So afraid of noise and feedback that they choke the sound, when all you need to know is how to keep the strings you don't want ringing out, quiet.
Admittedly I still have a bit of a tin ear when it comes to mixing. Can anyone provide any more specific examples of these modern bands/guitarists that are boosting the mids through a v30 and an SM57? People say that's what everybody does now and that there isn't any originally in guitar tone anymore but I don't think I'm hearing all of this samey tone. Maybe I'm just not up to date with the right music.
I don't really listen to a lot of metal nor do I produce it, but most of what you're saying can be applied to a lot of genres. Especially the internet forum bubbles that forces you to behave a certain way to get an "acceptable" sound. You've inspired me to disregard the rules more when I make music now
Did your Rat pedal come with an adapter, I don’t have one, and have to use a battery. It won’t work on my new Pangoa powered board even with an adapter.
You can get a 9 volt clip to simulate a battery and attach that to a power supply. The way the battery cover attaches to the RAT means you can just tighten the screw and it holds the lead in place without pulling on the internal clip.
I am thinking I will order a JHS Fuzzbender, the Tonebender clone. Have you tried it, or would you recommend something else? I really dig the sound on the last Darkthrone album (Old Star).
@@CIRCLEOFTONE What made it underwhelming to you? I am having a difficult time finding the right alternative to a RAT or some ridiculous boutique Tonebender. Many of the fuzz pedals out there have fuzz that's too dense or American for my taste, although Lone Wolf has/had the Bulldozer.
This is why COT is my favorite guitar channel. The Rat is by far my favorite distortion pedals, when I need it slightly tighter I have a tube screamer before it but I make sure it's the dominate tone. I feel like there isn't a genre of music that can't benefit from using a Rat.
Now I love the convenience of my plugins for writing as much as the next dude but there’s a reason I keep my dank ass homemade 4x12, Line 6 and Boss metal pedals, and an almost dead Marshall 8100 - coz it still kicks my ass when I plug them all in! And nothing sounds like that anymore.
![일상 속 기분 좋음 [Proto disco meme]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DwmEIaZ7XGQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![⭐ฮิตในTikTok!! ( มะมะมะหมูเด้ง MooDeng ) Ver. แดนซ์ ReMix BY [ ดีเจกิต รีมิกซ์ ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4noyAoMa7bQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Damn.. now I want to go buy a Rat pedal!
To hit it with a baseball bat?
GLLEEEEEEEENNNNNNAAAAA
hi
Like you didn't have one already... On a side note, I've been quite happy with the Thunder Claw ^^
You can't go wrong with a RAT. So many massively successful albums were made with a RAT and they were and are used across so many genres.
As the old metal proverb states: RAT = Phat.
This is my safe space hiding from the onslaught of Neural DSP SLO 100 promo videos quantized and edited to high heaven and mimed guitar playthroughs.
It never occurred to me people would mine their play throughs. Hmmmmm.
Honestly, the SLO 100 isn't so bad and cookie-cutter if you just don't boost it with an overdrive!
It's been perverted: Duane Allman, Clapton, etc... It's not exactly a Mesa Badlander, VHT, Diezel, Engl, etc...
Amen, brother!
I think things need to be slightly more sloppy or imprecise in general. Most modern metal is boring to me because of how perfect it all sounds, in timing and tone. A lot of stuff just lacks that human touch as a result.
I should probably add that a little bit of slop is good, a whole lot of slop is very bad.
I think it's click tracks which is killing new music
@@danielbentley7117 I don't think so. what is killing it is the ability to record everything as much as you want even like super small parts until it sounds "perfect"
@@deathlike_silence.0267 That too, but click tracks are still a problem. The reason why old bands sounded different from each other was they all had slightly different groove and chemistry. Playing to a click removes a lot of that. That's one of the reasons why a lot of modern metal sounds the same. All recorded to a click with the same cookie cutter approach plugin presets.
Very true. I have gone to ambient, avantgarde and post-punk like PiL after I've listened to the metal I've known for years... Don't and can't relate to modern metal.
Check our noise violation SludgePunk ep out on SoundCloud!
I've always hated that super-tight, over-compressed tone. It just sounds "fake" to my ears. Rock'n'roll should be kinda gnarly and snarly and rough around the edges and fuzzy.
Yup, sterile and over processed sounding. There's no energy in it. I prefer the old school hard rock/metal sound. If a guitarist sounds like that, you walk away feeling like he just took a sledge hammer to your face.
Couldn't agree more. Where's that high gain/ crunchy sound of rock and metal from the late 70s and 80s gone?
Listen to the "British Steel" album by Judas Priest. That is what metal should sound like. Buzzsaw guitars and clear, distinct yet powerful vocals. Add in the punding bass and drums and it literally is a big, heavy slab of British steel.
80s metal forever!
Saying what Metal "should sound like" seems like the least metal thing but okay boomers
@@Skelly5962 agree late 70s-80s thrash metal was the best and it was not tight but fuzzy power!
sounds killer dude. Definitely has a darker, old school tone
"boost the mids" guys will fight each other to the death over what exact frequencies theyre talking about....they do not agree...
besides, tone snobs are stuck in their own specific genre bubble
Not really, I play lots of stuff, I like my thrash metal and blues tones and clean, and probably a healthy dollop of everything between too, tone is half of the entire thing, I mean, I see some great players but then they use some digital shit and I am out the door, it effects me more than it should, I mostly just feel they are wasted, but I am old school, no effects guy, o don't even really do delay or reverb, although I used loads in an old project.. Sometimes I would just play the delay pedal and switch of my guitar, I guess it's all good.
personally i like boosting mids, however thats just cause i like the sound more than the scooped mids. i still think people should try and get a unique tone, not just whatever metal patch comes first on their axe-fx.
don't know about boosting the mids, but push back against scooping the mids (this is solely from my experiences) comes from playing live. Heavily scooped mids with high gain sounds great when you're playing in your room by yourself, but on a very loud, noisy stage in a noisy venue, that scooped mid sound tends to make the guitars very hard to hear. Then, a lot of guitarists and sound guys alike will try to compensate by simply cranking up the volume. The result is a very harsh, hissy sound that is very hard on the ears of the audience. Simply bringing the mids up a bit can make your guitar much easier to hear without having to crank the volume, so the crowd can hear what you're actually playing instead of a wall of noise that pretty much just sounds like static.
@@JossshyB You can scoop a certain frequency like the 500hz range but keep everything else and experiment and it'll still sound good
I feel like people should buy whatever gear sounds best to them, not what everyone else says is best (especially not anyone on the internet).
That way, maybe rock and metal would be more interesting again
"If it's not Mesa or Strymon it sucks." I hear you.
It’s why I’m staying away from the Peaveys and Mesa Boogie amps. I’m happy with my Marshall DSL boosted by a Fortin Grind. If a woman was very powerful and had a clean and sharp business appearance, but was wearing some sexy garter belts and lace panties to show how dirty she can be, that would describe my current distorted guitar tone. As for my clean tone, it sounds like a Goddess just blew into your eardrums. A Peavey or MB can’t get as clean as my Marshall DSL.
@Claudia Solomon My releases that are out now unfortunately don’t have those tones as they were all recorded with amp sims, but I’m working on new material that’ll be recorded with the tones that I described using my Marshall DSL!
The rat is, for my money, the best drive pedal you can get. It's so useable. I use it with a double bass (which is quite hard to make work with drive, for obvious reasons) and it sounds huge. The filter is my favourite tone control on a drive pedal, really lets you dial in that perfect point where it can do silky when you need it, grindy where you need it, and blend in with whatever else is going on in the band. I remember trying to find that spot on a big muff tone control. Never going back to that again.
Dude I just talked about the filter! You are right. It's the MAIN reason why that knob makes this pedal great for modern recording. It's on my synth pedal board for that reason. The volume is also a gorilla if you need weight.
The big muff ... sucks, if I'm being honest. I have never been able to get a tone that I am happy out of one, and even when it is way louder than bypass in isolation, it always disappears into the ether in a live setting.
Remember jamming in garages with real amps and a real drummer? And the equipment you used was the equipment you could afford. Remember original, individual tones? Remember awesomeness?
Well I have have my 4 15’s sunn into an aby box too a 4x12 orange 120 so to save space r2d2 will blast the beats from now on good sir
some of us not only remember it, we live it.
Yep. Sweating my ass off to a used 70's Orange OR-80, homemade 4x12 cabs full of mismatched celestion knockoffs, with a Boss Heavy Metal pedal, a Thomas Bros wah, and an ibanez UE300 in a hot garage. Those were the days.
Shiiiieeett, I plugged in to a kustom PA with my zoom 505 II and squier affinity. Metal! 😆
I 'member!
God, I hate the "silent stage" DI, modeling, digibollocks most of us are forced to use if we want to play live these days.
I was at the local pawn shop and I've never seen so many Fender amps for sale.
Tweed Deluxe, ltd edition HRD, Twin, HR Deville, Blues juniors and a few others like Laney. All PROPER VALVE AMPS.
lots of pedals as well. Seems like the locals have been selling off. Maybe it's covid, maybe it's modeling, maybe it's both.
haven’t even begun the video, but i’m here to say : yes, they have. most metal production these days sounds clinical and lifeless, especially the guitar and drums. we need feedback and sludginess! obviously, doom, sludge, death, etc. are all still very much alive today, but a lot of groups just blur together.
I’ve begun transforming finally lately. I used to be a very big fan of the OD808 into 5150 into V30 and all that jazz. Then I took the tube screamer out of the equation and turned up the amp gain; it sounded beefier, meaner, clearer, fuller. Then I tried a mix of V30 and G12K100, it had more bite and depth. Then I quad-tracked with two 5150/V30/G12K100 tracks and two tracks of a rat into an AC30; it sounded GLORIOUS. (Both were mic’d up with just a 57, two of them for the 5150 tone.) I really wanna hear other people try this method and give their thoughts; blending between a tight metal tone and sludgy grunge tone sounds and feels like the best of both worlds; you get that midrange clarity without sacrificing any fullness or grunt.
Kinda reminds me of how Jerry Finn used to record blink-182's guitar tracks. He'd use two amps, usually a Marshall set with a relatively low gain crunch sound and boosted mids, and a Mesa Dual/Triple Rectifier set with a more high gain scooped modern metal tone and blend the two before sending to tape. He loved how the Marshall sounded punchy and aggressive while the Mesa provided a huge bottom end and longer sustain. Regardless of what you think of blink's music, you have to admit the guitar tones they achieved with Jerry are glorious
Gear isn't the problem. Writing is the problem dude!
I think gear and especially recording software/hardware makes all modern music have the same digital vibe.
Both of you are right imo. Gear does influence alot of writing for some guys, but the writing styles come from what they listen to, and that influences gear purchase. Vicious cycle. Best thing i ever did for myself was laying off gear sites
Have you watched my channel much? Songwriting is my mantra. You may have missed the video below. It's all good. BTW gear stuck to a click with Vanilla Sausage guitar/drums etc can ruin a good rock or metal song. It's a combo of modern production, no live scene, no live rehearsals/recording, songwriting and copycats etc. I go deeper here th-cam.com/video/YCoqAjrGOo8/w-d-xo.html
@@swagnostic132 I remember Testament re-recorded an album because they didn't like the production. The results were awful. Vanilla Sausage to the max. Same songs, different modern gear and the new album bombed. So it's not all about songwriting. Production is a factor.
In Flames Clayman 2020 album re-recording? Same songwriting. Different modern gear. What was the reception like? You can cherry pick but gear and production makes as much of a difference as the melody.
Obituary uses a RAT pedal to this day.
Rat uses obituary also
Slowly we RAT!!
As a synth guy not a guitar guy, I still love pedals and I agree....I love metal but I hate how modern metal (not all, but what is mainstream) has become so crytal clean. I love lows, I love rawness, and I love noise.
Yep it's essentially sanitized rock and metal. Both audibly and as a counter culture.
I appreciate the little dalek Easter egg. Also, that pedal shaped the tone of early Death, Morbid Angel and Obituary albums. There's gotta be something good going on with it.
I've wanted an old RAT ever since I herd that James Hetfield used it on Kill Em All.
Just found that out a couple months ago
I saw morbid angel use a RAT in to two JCM 900's and it was the best live sound I ever heard!
RATs are great! I use a RAT2 and Turbo RAT in sequence and its dirty, fuzzy and has this nice oscillation..
Love the Turbo!
The RAT is incredibly versatile if you know how to use it.
Yup .. I can’t get “my sound “ out of them but live the sounds people
That can .. haha ..
@@brentcorkins4711 I can't get my sound with a Tubescreamer either. It's too anemic. In many instances, I tend to replace it for a Treble Booster. Or going the David Gilmour route and using a Fuzz + Overdrive.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino nice , have recently started getting into treble boosters .. the twinote pi fuzz which isn’t really a fuzz but clone of the Catalina bread sabra cadabra which replicates a treble boosted laney I.e iommi .. been really thinking about getting one ..
@@brentcorkins4711 Big Muff Pi + BK Tube Driver is another winning combination.
The real problem is people are not playing in real bands anymore, with real amps, real cabs, and LOUD. Bands only come together in the studio to „produce“ and then go their own seperate ways again. „Bands“ of today would be called side projects at best in the past
Preach. I talk about that here th-cam.com/video/YCoqAjrGOo8/w-d-xo.html
@Toxic Potato See, I am playing in one. We have a rehearsel space where lots of bands have their rooms. And it's just what you hear from other guys I know there. All the dudes don't have enough time to come to rehearsels. "Oh we can record something at home and share it via dropbox". Etc.. Let me tell you, ten years ago, the place was a living community, you always met other bands, you listened to them, they listened to you, things happened. Nowadays nobody is ever there, although all rooms are still booked
Yeah, every member with their own "great" soloed sound they made in their bedroom, but not putting the hours playing together, not developing a chemistry.
A forum actually complimented one of my latest tones, noting the "mid-range" but what they don't know is that the mids were literally on zero for that sound. I guess what mids you take out is pretty important too. To my ear, if it honks, it's gone!
same here. cant stand "caw caw caw caw"
HONK!!!
Likewise
The song in question.
th-cam.com/video/_USmcgLJW14/w-d-xo.html
Honk just ain't heavy. It has its place for if I want certain overdub to stand out with a boxier sound but Owen is right. We should try and come up with sounds that suit the music. The heavier it is, the more vicious it should be instead of copying the same advice from the same forums. This is probably one of my favourite guitar tones I've gotten straight from the amp. It sounds just like it did in the room.
th-cam.com/video/dFh25NuzdwA/w-d-xo.html
It's kinda Pantera-ish with different mid-emphasis and the signature squelchy "djunn" my palm mutes create. In the breakdown, I used a bitcrusher pedal in front to give an awesome, digital squelch sound!
I haven’t even watched the whole video yet but I already love it deeply due to your t-shirt.
Good man, and we just won tonight’s game too.
The RAT is the greatest pedal I've ever owned! I got my first one 30 years ago and while Ive tried a lot of others, Ive always wound up back there. Actually, now I am using a Big Ear - WOOD CUTTER which is a "clone" of very specific RAT pedals and its awesome!
I have a similar experience. In my first cover band I used a RAT and I keep looping back round to them.
I say it all the time and get nothing but flack for it from people in the COT group, RAT IS KING.
The rat Is Soooo versatile, the rat and rat style circuits like the DRV are super popular in the Coldplay/u2 indie alt crowd as well. Obviously great metal tones, even to doom/sludgy fuzz tones!
Absolutely love this! I personally hate the hyper polished modern metal guitar tone. Just like how too much perfection with melodyne can ruin a great natural-sounding vocal take, I think going for perfect will drive you insane and suck all the mojo out of your sound. It's why I love spitty, velcro fuzz tones, they're unpredictable!
I believe what ruined music was the use of limiters to protect the frail equipment at the time of early recordings. Later the Limiter was used to make sound as big as possible (louder) within the dynamic range of tape. Back then wildly dynamic program material like vocals drums and bass were heavily compressed. The sin was doing this to drums so much that it changed the sound of a kick. Next thing we had drum machines! It seemed the punters couldn't tell the difference. It is hard to blame the engineers at the time as the pressure was on to make the loudest tracks as radio stations noted the loud rms levels attracted listeners. I could go on but the fact is we have a vocal centric sound today and guitar music is not so much the fad but it will return. It was once all about the next big sound and now there is a plethora of gear for the old sound. The next big sound atm is not guitar based but it will come back as a new thing if feel and human groove is allowed to exist without the engineer squeezing the life out of it. Cleaner guitar is quite okay, we can now get clean guitars to sound very big. Music that makes you move will again be new!
I think that tight guitars have their place, but I love loose, wooly guitar sounds and I wish they were better represented in today's music.
What if James Hetfield used what was "the shit" back in the 80s? Would he have created the tones we hear in Master of Puppets? AJFA? Black Album?
What if EVH used what was cool and didn't use his ears to get the tone he was looking for? Would we have the brown sound?
Keep in mind that the JCM 800 is a Plexi Super Lead 100 with an extra gain stage and a master volume. After the Variac Plexi, he used a Soldando SLO-100 (Which is a modified Plexi) before the 5150. The 5150 is a copy of the SLO-100.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino
The SLO isn't a modified plexi, and the 5150 isnt an SLO copy.
Watch the Tone Talk episode with James Brown (guy who designed the 5150).
It was a modified VTM120, which was itself a clone of an actual Jose modded Marshall.
@@MrTekbow Alright. The SLO 100 is a modified Mesa Mark II, which started as a modified Fender Princeton. The VTM100 is a clone of a JCM 800, which is a Super Lead 100 with a master volume and a extra gain stage. A lot of game...
@@BrunodeSouzaLino
It's probably unfair to say it's a modified Mk II as well, but yes, doubtless, Mike Soldano learned a lot about cascading gain from them.
It's also true to say that (in Browns own words) the VTM120 was revoiced heavily into the SLO ballpark, so I mean, semantic difference, sound is king.
Personally i don't think the Peavey comes close to the articulation of the SLO unless you're EVH, and in that case you could run a dimed big muff into a dimed anything else and still get that kind of note separation.
@@MrTekbow EVH uses a lot less gain than most people think. And all his distortion comes from the amp. Only pedals in front are modulation pedals. If you go by recordings, EVH didn't do any double tracking. Only overdubs present were there for musical reasons.
I just turned the bass knob on my JCM 800 all the way up and left the mids at noon... how come nobody told me there was a whole 'nother world out there?!
There's too much "takatakataka" and "djentdjentdjent" not enough "oomph" or "chuggachugga".
Science is sound
I stumbled back upon my RAT about three years ago after a million other pedals. I don't quite get the "GOD" tone with it, but it is SOOOO musical and does not get lost in our three guitar mush.
Nuno Bettencourt used a RAT to boost is ADA-MP1 in the first album of Extreme and his tone is pretty tight and articulate but in a good way IMO. Also, one of my favorite use of the RAT is by Sunn O))) boosting their wall of Model-T to the max. Saw them live twice and the sound felt like I was covered in a blanket of frequency and volume.
“Rock is dead “
Gain is the audio version of salt. There is a limited amount that you can add before it is no longer food, it’s just salt. It doesn’t matter how it happens. You can get used to very very very salty food, but there are physical limits involved.
Nirvana (grunge?) was a reallyinteresting take on heavy given Metallica had just crushed the world with Black. Tool just after. Meshuggah after that. Quirky stuff with attitude. Emotionally intense, with distortion but quirky.
Fish and chips can’t take unending amounts of salt. And you can’t quantise and brickwall everything to death in a world where audio is streamed digitally. The ears only taste salt.
You can't keep a good band and a song down. I go into depth of why rock and metal is dead. th-cam.com/video/YCoqAjrGOo8/w-d-xo.html
@@CIRCLEOFTONE I ascribe to Penn Gillette’s idea that you have to ignore music taste three (7?) years Each side of when you lose your virginity. We just assume it’s all good. I like a bit of stuff from 2001 but it’s 86-97 for me. The production is not a feature but it doesn’t distract like the 70s crap. The sound war is just eliminating the ability of the music to come through the mix. The good songs... what’s a good song? Lots of things move people. I think we’re done with big musicians. Now it’s pure personality like Kanye. Rap has it.but you know I’m jaded. And we are talking about stuff made outside that 6 year window. It’s all salt to me.
@@Xplora213 Kanye actually has a lot of great songs
Love the channel foever man! Killing it.
1. For me playing in different places and with different people goes best when we work out our group sound so everyone is heard by everyone.
2. I don't like the visual distraction of a screen. Hearing and feeling reign supreme.
3. Most modern remixes suck because people make the quiet parts too loud and the loud parts too quiet. It bores the mind and fatigues the nerves. This is called volume. Old recordings let the transients spike really high and instantly disappear. It wakes the mind and refreshes the nerves. This is called Loudness. Loudness rules.
PS All Rats are Good Rats and so is your vid.
That's what I appreciate Andreas Kisser and Adam Jones. Because they just go guitar, cable, amp. They don't go for the djent right overdrive boost tone.
Is it true Adam Jones used a Fender Twin for Anarchy?
@@CIRCLEOFTONE ? th-cam.com/video/HEVu7WTeQHw/w-d-xo.html
I'm still very into od + gate but I realized it's better to use the gate as low as possible that you can get away with for me. Too many people are into having like multiple gates with zero bass and all the mids and the amp starts losing its character imo.
Kisser doesn't go straight into the front.
I've been G.A.S.ing for a double cut les paul JR with p90s, or maybe a les paul special with p90s.
Othwise you're right, but also different people like different things. Nobody is right or wrong, we like what we like. My issues lay in the uptightness, cancel culture, bad attitudes, and lack of comradery in the metal scene/community.
Totally agree, good point. I really like old school metal tones, which have just the tight amount of looseness
To me, the whole tight guitars/drums/editing etc thing to me is very much an extension of "tab culture". I was definitely in it when I started but I broke from it after a few years. Basically, with the abundance of good transcriptions in playable formats (ie, Guitar Pro), learning to play guitar starts to have way more in common with classical music pedagogy. So you get a bunch of players who achieve technical proficiency very quickly with very weak ears and for whom a lot of playing guitar is about getting "objectively better" -- faster, more precise, more clean, more complex. And that's how classical pedagogy is graded. You start with Mary Had a Little Lamb and end with something like Fantasie Improptu. And it all makes sense in its own way, trying to legitimize the music via "objective" criteria.
If you then take that thought process into songwriting, well you almost need that production quality to make it appetizing.
I don't think classical influences are bad, but to me the mindset is a creative dead end.
That's a good point. It's like an extention of copying bands tone, style etc. I never thought of that
@@CIRCLEOFTONE It's exactly how I started many years ago. Starting with simple text tabs but quickly got Guitar Pro. After only 2 years after starting guitar I was playing shredder material, Vai, Yngwie, EVH, etc. And I came from classical piano before guitar so that mindset definitely carried over. I always wanted to challenge myself more, technically, and I was easily impressed by shredders.
I continued along that path for 2 more years and I had very weak ears. I assumed that if I got good technique that writing would just come. Yet I only wrote riffs (never full songs) and a lot of them were odd.
At that point, I read an interview with (I believe) EVH saying he never learned to read music. Up to then I interpreted not reading music as "learned by tab", but somehow it clicked that what they REALLY meant was "learned by ear", and I realized that was far more essential to writing. So I started trying to learn everything by ear at that point.
Now that I've thought more about it, I can easily see the thread from my early days of learning guitar to the way guitar culture is now.
Yike Lu EXACTLY!
Yike Lu I learn everything by ear. Everything. With 2-6 different fingerings and voicings. I may not be exactly “right” 100% of the time, but it usually sounds like I am, and it’s always musical. I have very unconventional gear because I don’t buy the name, I buy the sound.
You put it perfectly. Nailed why I don’t usually like the “new” players. I thought, “maybe I’m getting old”, which I am, but I WANT TO like the “new”players. I had a very vague rambling set of ideas about the problem, and you just stitched it up neatly.
That’s it! “Tab Culture”. I started in ‘84 with 1-3 tabs a month in a magazine which helped me get some of the “language” down, and trying to learn 3 sets of music that weren’t in the magazines. That’s how you get an ear.
@@yikelu ?
Filthy distorted guitars = poser-repellent.
Dude I've got to say, you've been saying the same things I've been saying about modern metal and rock being dead. I love my rat pedal, I've been using open sounding borderline fuzzy distortion for years. Keep speaking the truth. Cheers 🍻
We've gone from "scoop the mids" to "boost the mids" and now we're full circle. Weird.
This channel is an absolute god send.
I would LOVE to see you attempt to recreate the tones of System of a Down's Toxicity/Steal This Album, and Gojira's From Mars to Sirius.
I’d also like to make the argument for a treble booster in front of an amp. It gives it some tightness for metal but also a more vintage feel which I like better than my tube screamer tbh.
That's how Tony Iommi got his black sabbath guitar tone, using a treble booster in front of his Laney amp
Hey mate, yeah I love my rat. Running clean channel then rat thats my hole sound, we are a pretty heavy rock band tunes down to drop c. Great video
I got one of the R2dU rack versions recently - gives that Tampa 90s death metal vibe - 10/10 on the never sell or trade list
Could you imagine if all the 80s thrash bands bought in to pronounced mids Bullshit, it's scary to think about
You can hear it today with thier new records that don't sell. Haha.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE Yeah hahaha
I mean, Kill 'Em All was hella mid heavy, tight as a clenched butthole and as far as I know they even used the RAT.
@@RÅNÇIÐ I think kill em all was more treble heavy than anything
@@plasticfork2449 that too. which probably even enhanced the tightnes
I suspect the sanitizing of the low end of guitars might be seen as a solution to unrecognized phase issues, and kills the fundamental interaction between bass and guitar.
Yep. Low-end sucked out of guitars plus turning metal bass into a notched sub of VST distorted bees is the UNFATHOMABLE state of pro production right now. Nobody stops to think that the public hates listening to this method?
@@CIRCLEOFTONE The public's been brainwashed into not being able to recognize quality in all domains, to make it easier to sell low price, high margin and low effort bullshit to them. It's just a marketing problem. They say 50% of everything we buy is in the packaging...
Meshuggah disagrees
@@brandonheat4982 I hate Meshuggah and their horde of braindead clones with a passion.
Some people can't see other potential on gears when they're getting old. This is why sometime they need to revisit the classic models and to re learn something from it.
I couldn't agree more! I listen to those early classic metal tones from Sabbath, Priest, Maiden, Motorhead and they all have that looseness and sponginess that sounds pleasing. When I hear these modern super tight "djent" sharp tones in the rhythm, it does seem to annoy me after a while. Hell I love Rise Against, but I've found of late, as much as I enjoy their songs and and albums, their guitar tones are almost too tight and slick!. After playing for nearly 30 years, I finally only got a Rat pedal (Turbo Rat) a few years ago cause it was stupid cheap used at a local music store. I had always never considered one cause I had always heard it was thin, buzzy, yada yada. Maybe if it's plugged into a cheap solid state amp. But when I tried it with my tube amp setup I was stunned! It was the perfect amount of fuzzy, chewy, thick hard rock/metal/punk tone I always crave. I'm a Rat convert that's for damn sure!! Now I have a regular Rat too and it's just as good as my Turbo!
Tight guitars, tight bass, tight drums - it all turns into typewriter music after a while if you aren't careful. There's a time and a place for really focused, compressed tones but I wouldn't say it's 100% of the time and everywhere. I used to post on the Sneap forum a bazillion years ago and that very quickly turned into everybody chasing everybody else's settings, editing everything down to the nuggets, trading waves presets, etc. It would be way more fun to record a power trio with the guitars tuned to standard and see what sort of sounds you can put together.
Trey Azagthoth used that for most of his stuff if I recall.
Yep.
He uses the rack version
Yes sir. I think he goes between pedal and rack. I have seen photos of his pedal board with the pedal on board.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE Tone on Covenant is absolutely killer. I, like you, am sick of this sterile over processed crap. Let a genre like Industrial use a tone like that, where it actually has a reason to sound that way!
@@blakecurtis7809 Now if only someone can convince him to stop abusing his whammy bar like Kirk abuses his wah pedal.
Ah, so that's the pedal behind that tone!
I love modern music production tools because they allow me to express myself in ways I could only dream of when I was a kid with a tascam 4 track and DOD death metal pedal. The tone on my bands first album was a no name LP copy into a zoom multi-fx into a no name 50w bass combo from Argos, with a karaoke mic straight into a sound blaster. We used a measuring jug and bongo as a mic stand and taped the whole lot together to stop it falling over. Later we used a digitech metal master into an digitech rp7 which had a primitive cab sim which went direct into the soundblaster card. They were technically "bad" tones but 20 years later people still like them and ask us how we got those tones.
Speaking for myself, I've noticed that the vast array of choice and convenience of digital has reduced my creativity. When I had limited cheap gear I used to experiment loads to try and get where I wanted to be with sound. If I wanted to replicate the Fear Factory tone for e.g., I had to work at it and would never come close. But I would end up with cool unique sounds, it would be my version of the person I was trying to match. I was also not trying to clone other players sounds, I wanted to take aspects of that sound and do my own thing with it. I think that experimentation is missing from modern metal because of the overwhelming choice, and the convenience of being able to quickly load up a good enough sound.
Add that to the forum hive mind of the tone police, and the fear for young artists to not be accepted if they deviate even slightly, and its easy to see how we got to this point. I'd not even noticed how much I'd gone into that rabbit hole until I started watching videos like yours a few weeks ago.
These ideas may have been lost or forgotten, but they can be rediscovered and remembered. Case in point, I tried to digitally recreate the Type O Negative tones after watching your videos on it. I didn't get close but I ended up with a cool new guitar tone using some of the standard overused vsts.
Not sure what the point of my ramble was, but watching your videos has got me excited about messing around with guitar tones again, and doing the wrong things on purpose.
This sounded way better than I expected!!!
RAT's are awesome for bass too. Sure, you could get a fancy schmancy Darkglass rig, but a RAT into a GK bass amp gets you great results too. It's how David Wm Sims (The Jesus Lizard) and Owen McMahon (Cherubs) got their signature grinding and sludgy tones.
Don’t forget Krist Novoselic! (Also props for mentioning D W Sims. One of my fave bassists ever)
Ratt like my favorite the metal zone is often hated because its misunderstood. God forbid anyone make their own tone and opinions versus just blindly following.
To be fair, the metal zone is pretty awful. If a pedal only sounds good when you dial it in one or two ways, it's not a good pedal. All the best distortion and overdrive pedals are versatile and customizable like the rat, boss ds-1, tube screamer, big muff pi, etc. The only thing the metal zone does well is like lo-fi black metal tone. Which is fine if that's the specific tone you're looking for
Wtf..who dislikes a vid before it even starts??
Vanilla Sausage deniers. Hit like if you hate what modern production has done to rock and metal.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE It's that easy. I was so glad that bands like ghost went for that 70's tone and earned success
Probably a bot.
@@bingefeller hopefully
@@bingefeller, Russians did it...
I love RAT pedals, I have a Retro Sonic Distortion it does get a bit fuzz in dropped D (literally gated kinda fuzz) when cranked up but its awesome. Still want some other RAT variants too as only a few slight changes in the circuit changes how it sounds quite dramatically, I'm starting to try blending RAT and FZ-2 tones with high gain amp tones to get the best of both worlds.
Just realized i've got a Turbo Rat. Probably give it a whirl sometime tomorrow. Anyone know anything about it? Appreciate any info.
Thanks! I built a Rat clone (using an LM308, and using LEDs for clipping so it's a Turbo, mounted on the face so I can see when its clipping comes in) and it gives my Marshall Studio Vintage the power I need for my heavier side.
If metal isn't ugly, nasty, dirty, chaotic and raw then it isn't metal. Godflesh from the early 1990s is so much more devastating than anything nowadays.
RAT is one of my favorite distortion pedals, but I think my favorite distorted tone might be the fuzz, like the FZ-2 Monolord/Electric Wizard tone. Something about it is just so kickass
I began using a Rat back in 1986. I was playing the Sunset Strip hair metal/shred guitar scene, and I was tired of the dominant guitar tone of that era, which was too polished, and too tight. I wanted a tone that hearkened back to the classic rock era of the 70s, that was a bit more unruly and soulful. The Rat was the magic ingredient. It worked for me through a number of amps from Marshalls to Fenders to Peaveys and Laneys. It's almost, but not quite, an amp in the box pedal. It changes the tone and feel of your amp drastically. Regarding the subject of this video, of how tight guitars have affected modern rock and metal, I'd say yes, they had a deleterious effect on these genres. But pedals like the Rat help correct things and bright the guitar back to life. I found there were too many players in that 80s scene obsessed with "perfect" guitar playing. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, but the enemy of the great, because the truth is perfection is relative. It also changes with time. What I may have considered perfect a decade ago now sounds very flawed to me. What sounded flawed a decade ago now sounds great to me. There is a whole tradition in the world of gear that goes back to the 80s that chases perfection, and it's pointless. Perfection is a very bad thing for new players to focus on. They will never really appreciate the joy of growing with the instrument.
The 86 RAT is my fav era.
Please do a video on Jim Martin's tone from faith no more. Specifically the song caffeine
Great idea
We used the ProCo Dual Rat R2DU (rackmount) on the last album our punk band recorded. A mate of mine left it in my studio when he moved away, years ago. He got it back when we re-formed, all good. (Fun fact: used originally by Pat Davern, who should never have sold it.)
Tidy EQ is a mix-down technique, and should be applied there to "carve holes" for instruments to sit in.
Raw tone? There's a reason it's called that, and I say Let It Bleed.
Homogenized rock and metal guitar sounds? Too horrible to contemplate.
With all the reamping going on instead of people learning how to get their tone before they record everything is sounding too sterile.
Yep. My playing changes for each amp. I dig in etc. That's why I never reamp. You can have happy accidents I suppose.
I really have no idea how anyone, especially new players, expects to get a truly good guitar tone strictly by using plug-ins and headphones and studio monitors and all that. You can hear the "fakeness" a mile away. May as well just play a synthesizer or something.
@@dystopiagear6999 My experience is the exact opposite. I hated playing through my real amp because it only has the one sound. With plugins I can dial in tones much closer to the bands I listen to. I've been playing more guitar than ever. (I also love my synth guitar.)
Yeah agreed, reamping with a RAT wouldn't work as the dynamic response is way different than say a 5150 so you have to play differently. I don't play through a real cab because I am in an apartment and damn it makes playing harder and changes how I play unfortunately, I use real amps and decent IRs but the lack of direct response does change how it sounds and how I play.
I’ve never reamped & never will. Talk about killing all the spontaneity & happy accidents. Take chances. Do shit the “wrong way” on purpose. You might just uncover the thing that makes you unique.
Dude, this will be my first time catching one of your vids. What caught my attention was the tight, cleanliness of yur chigs & yur chugs. I had just come from a video where that dude's playing was decent but his recording was loose and muffled & it sounded like a trashy flamming shit.
Yours just goes to prove that even a simple riff, that anybody can play, can sound badass if it's all done right.
I just wish, unless I missed it, you'd've listed your signal path.
What is it? Gibson - Ratt - Plexi - V30 - SM57... were all that I caught... & I'm not sure if you said the Ratt was up front or in z Loop?
Anyhow-ways, you got yourself a new subscriber today! Keep it up bro!
It's a Gibson Les Paul Special Tribute DC, Rat, Jcm800 and V 30 glad you liked it man
Bro this was hilarious and entertaining. I am subbed. I love the guitar sound of the blue album, I agree that some modern mixing sounds like tooooo perfect
Glad you like it!
I’m subbing for the t shirt alone......... and the great video about an often looked down upon classic pedal.
I don't know about these days but back in the day the Berzerker used a rat through a jcm and it sounded fucking sick, especially tuned down to A.
Killer band. He really pushed those guitarists. Great doc on that floating around on youtube.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE There's the long one about the first album, that ones is great I do love the way it was chaos from the get go.
There's also the shorter one from the second album and you get to see the absolute machine he got to play drums.
I think he photographs soft porn now. Haha
@@CIRCLEOFTONE It was either the drummer or guitarist but either it's kinda funny.
I have been wondering if you have any experience with the Little Bear R.Attack or any of the rat clone line?
it's interesting. I'm 45 years old and I've been chasing a "tight" sound since 1990, though I never called it "tight". I always called it "hyper-bass" because that's what I perceived it as. Basically I've been chasing Gary Holt's sound for as long as I can remember, but I think the old school metalheads have a slightly different definition of "tight" than what modern metal guitarists do, though I do like both.
Yep I did something similar. Ended up chasing tone instead of writing and playing out. I am interested in production though so I suppose it's working out. You may like this vid I did on the Holt sound th-cam.com/video/IsT8TINZ3u0/w-d-xo.html
@@CIRCLEOFTONE yes, I know, I've been a sub for years now. It does sound good, but doesn't sound that much like FD to me. But that's ok, it's better than my sound and I'd be happy to have that kind of sound. I really enjoyed all the backstory in this video, very engaging.
This sounds so similar to arise era Amebix guitar tone
I don't have anything particularly insghtful to add here, but find it refreshing to see that I'm not alone in feeling that modern "perfect" guitar tones have a tendency to... well... suck. Obviously people have different taste in tones - I do get that - but it's defintely a major reason behind why I'm struggling to get into most of the (non retro) metal relased today. And it's not just the guitars either. A lot of the time, every instrument is eq'd with laser precision and the overall mix just feels WAY too nice to my ears. Perfect but lifeless and lacking any sort of tension between the instruments, since the're so separated and never fight for space in the mix. [/old man rant]
I think it's because a lot of it is copy-pasted too even on the final mix.
I think the rat is way overrated, but I respect what you’re trying to say. Metal has definitely gotten almost sterile
I was never that crazy about the Rat pedal, but you make it sound pretty good
Rock and metal production peaked in the 70s as far as I’m concerned. Listening to a Sabbath record with a good pair of headphones feels like you are there with the band.
Totally agree with you. All this formulaic crap they tell you to follow just kills the music and creativity. I have seen many modern recording and guitar gear, but I keep coming back to BOSS and MXR the same way. The imperfections are what really made a lot of classic recordings anyway.
I think a lot of it has to do with the inability to mute strings properly. So afraid of noise and feedback that they choke the sound, when all you need to know is how to keep the strings you don't want ringing out, quiet.
I had the Turbo Rat back in 1992 but not for long. Is there a difference between the two?
There is, but it is very minimal. I picked up a Turbo when my old black face got stolen and was able to get my sound.
Wow, I just saw this pedal and thought I'd look up a review, and what can I say: Your shirt won me over lol...COYS!!!
Should be an interesting season if Kane stays and we get a good CB.
Admittedly I still have a bit of a tin ear when it comes to mixing. Can anyone provide any more specific examples of these modern bands/guitarists that are boosting the mids through a v30 and an SM57? People say that's what everybody does now and that there isn't any originally in guitar tone anymore but I don't think I'm hearing all of this samey tone. Maybe I'm just not up to date with the right music.
James hey field stated the rat was the pedal they used in ride the lightning during the newest metallica album behind the scenes.
Hetfield damn auto fill
Thanks man. I did a vid on RTL a while back th-cam.com/video/Swu8MT2Bpzg/w-d-xo.html
I don't really listen to a lot of metal nor do I produce it, but most of what you're saying can be applied to a lot of genres. Especially the internet forum bubbles that forces you to behave a certain way to get an "acceptable" sound. You've inspired me to disregard the rules more when I make music now
ohhh thats begging for some old morbid tunes
Aw man I've been thirsting for a RAT for ages, and now you drop this. I'm legit gonna go rewatch the vid with my big speakers
Just pick up a current production Rat 2. There is no difference that is remotely discernible to pretty much everyone, other than bragging rights.
@@riffsnoleads Thanks for the recommend...I will pick one up eventually, just watching what I spend "in these unprecedented times"
@@riffsnoleads Dude...are you called riffsnoleads because you prefer riffs to lead guitar parts? 😅
@@geartweaker8518 Riffs are the key.
@@riffsnoleads Ha! Totally agree. Could tell you a million riffs I can't get enough of. Solos...not so much
Did your Rat pedal come with an adapter, I don’t have one, and have to use a battery. It won’t work on my new Pangoa powered board even with an adapter.
You can get a 9 volt clip to simulate a battery and attach that to a power supply. The way the battery cover attaches to the RAT means you can just tighten the screw and it holds the lead in place without pulling on the internal clip.
Love that tone brother. Killer playing too. Appreciate ya.
I had a Rat in the early 80’s. I used it into the 90’s. Wish I still had it.
Tight as in nasal in the mix or tight as in no hard clip on the gain?
Good for gain stacking or coloring in the dirty channel
Put one of these through a Fender Bassman reissue today. It sounded amazing
Nice combo
Those Gibsons sound great, I got one with a single p-90 and it sounds great.
Man that tone was huge. I want that. Excellent.
I am thinking I will order a JHS Fuzzbender, the Tonebender clone. Have you tried it, or would you recommend something else? I really dig the sound on the last Darkthrone album (Old Star).
Funnily enough I bought one when it came out, played it once then sold it yesterday. I was underwhelmed.
@@CIRCLEOFTONE What made it underwhelming to you? I am having a difficult time finding the right alternative to a RAT or some ridiculous boutique Tonebender. Many of the fuzz pedals out there have fuzz that's too dense or American for my taste, although Lone Wolf has/had the Bulldozer.
@@moribnd It sounded like a silicon based pedal. Like a really good VST. Passable but does not have that sag
@@CIRCLEOFTONE Have you a better Tonebender-like pedal yourself, or are you just sticking with the RAT for the moment?
I'll just give you links to my fav fuzzes I own. th-cam.com/video/3_ut4HGPros/w-d-xo.html
Cool video. Head over to Tayda electronics if you want to get that Marshall knob your missing, just make sure to get the one with a set screw.
Thanks man
This is why COT is my favorite guitar channel. The Rat is by far my favorite distortion pedals, when I need it slightly tighter I have a tube screamer before it but I make sure it's the dominate tone. I feel like there isn't a genre of music that can't benefit from using a Rat.
I run a pretty simple setup... tuner -> gate -> high gain mesa with the mid pretty much off.
Thank you bro! This is why I love the tone on mastodons leviathan and most all high on fire albums. Tone sounds organic
I hate metalcore (and most -core suffixed music) but I could never place why. Only that it sounded "fake" to me. Thank you for articulating it.
Now I love the convenience of my plugins for writing as much as the next dude but there’s a reason I keep my dank ass homemade 4x12, Line 6 and Boss metal pedals, and an almost dead Marshall 8100 - coz it still kicks my ass when I plug them all in! And nothing sounds like that anymore.
'Thunk!'
That's the only comment I can come up with about the intro jam tone 😁👍🤘
Never disappoint, my friend. Excellent tip