The studio is a very different playing field to the stage because everything is under the microscope. A simple home studio setup is a great way to spend your time practicing, listening back to yourself and correcting mistakes.
One of the major elements in the studio is getting good tone in context of the mix. This can take a bit of work.
One of the discoveries you will make when doing the above is the ability to find the “sweet spot” of an amplifier. This is the area where the amp is just about to break into distortion. A studio player will rarely use the clean channel on amplifier. This channel is great for digital multi-effects processors, but for anything else guitar related a dirty channel is mostly effective.
The gain channel should allow for hard picking to break into distortion. This will force you to pick softer in order to generate your clean sound, which will open up and work great in context of a mix. Setting the amplifier this way will also help prepare it to handle pedals effectively. This is the technique used for combining two distortions together, however you should technically be viewing your “dirty” sound as a clean channel. You can also turn down the volume on your guitar for a very clean sound.
So now you also know how to set up your multi-effects processors, but I will go more in depth here in an upcoming post.
This technique does not render a very clean channel completely useless. It can still be great for funk type parts that require heavy strumming.
