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“How do you get that guitar tone?” is a question I get asked pretty often. So I thought it would be fun to do a quick walkthrough of my recording setup and the way I build guitar parts. We’ll be dealing entirely with high-gain metal-guitar distortion here, but a lot of the principles I use work equally well with other tones.

First, the gear: I use a Fractal Audio Systems Axe-FX ultra, a super-fancy amp modeling guitar preamp. In the past I used a Line 6 POD, and got great results with that as well (every guitarist should own a POD, they’re the single best piece of gear you can buy for under $1000, no exaggeration).

The Axe-FX is hooked up to a PreSonus Firebox preamp/recording interface, which plugs into my computer. I record everything in Apple’s Logic Pro, but there are plenty of other good options for digital audio recording, like Garageband or Cubase or Ableton Live or ProTools.

As for guitars, I own way too many. For this exercise, we’ll be using my Gibson Les Paul standard. If you’re looking to get a good metal tone, humbucking pickups are absolutely required, so the Les Paul is a good choice.

You’ll notice I mentioned nothing about amplifiers or mics. That’s because I get exactly the sound I want, entirely digitally. Living in the future is great.

Anyway, that’s the basic setup. On to the tone tweaking!

The first step is finding a couple guitar tones you like. Now, there’s all sorts of different opinions on how to get A Good Guitar Tone, and everybody’s ears are different, so it’s a very subjective thing. Personally, I like to crank up the gain, turn the mids down (but not completely off!) and turn up the bass and treble.

On the Axe-FX, I generally use the “Das Metal” amp model with a 4x12 V30 speaker cabinet and the R121 mic model (protip: put a TS808 drive pedal before the amp in the signal chain and mess around with its settings.) Back when I used a Line 6 POD, I really liked the JCM800 and “Line 6 Insane” models.

I use two different guitar tones when I’m building a distorted sound. I find that using mixing different sounds gives you a fuller, richer final result. You can also use less gain on each sound, which will make the final mix sound clearer and tighter (I don’t ever actually use less gain, though).

The first sound has more bass and midrange, and lower highs:

Tone 1

The second sound has less midrange, and more top-end:

Tone 2

I use at least three different tracks for my basic rhythm tone- one panned left, one panned right, and one in the center. The center track is “Tone 1” and the left and right tracks are both “Tone 2.” Multitracking like this gives you a nice, full sound. Like this:

Left, Right, Center

You can add more guitar tracks if you want, as long as it doesn’t start to sound muddy. Sometimes I’ll add another track on the left and right to fill things out even more. I’ve also added drums to give you some idea of the final sound:

2x Left, 2x Right, 1x Center, drumz

Sounds pretty good! But I’m not done yet. Through years of fucking around with effects, first in GarageBand and now in Logic, I’ve found that adding some global compression to the final mix really pumps everything up and makes it sound huge. This might be recording-professional heresy or whatever, but it sounds good to me. I use the “Multipressor” effect in Logic to boost the bass and high frequencies and cut the mids a little bit more. The final result is a typical Deathmøle kind of sound:

Final Mix

So that’s the basics of how I do distorted guitars! From here, the sky’s the limit- I often have three to six more guitar tracks playing different things on top of the rhythm stuff. Hopefully this little guide has provided you with some inspiration for recording your own stuff!