Substation Onyx

About this time last year, I released my debut solo album of instrumental guitar-centric music and was quickly overwhelmed from the response that I got from family, friends, and even strangers. The album was entirely self-produced, self-mixed, self-mastered, and the music was composed almost entirely on my own (the only external input was for some of the drum arrangements on “The Inevitable Decay”). With a year gone by, I’ve turned a lot of my production on its head, but the sound of AILI was a great starting point for me, so I thought it would be fun to review its most crucial components.

Line 6 Helix

The Line 6 Helix was installed into my studio desk just in time to begin recording this album, and it did a majority of the heavy lifting for guitar and bass tones. Rhythm guitars were recorded as quads for all songs: two pairs of performances, with one pair panned far left and right, and another pair panned slightly inwards. The outer pair of guitars were processed via a simple Helix patch consisting of the Precision Drive block, boosting a Revv Generator Red (with the exception of “Maximilian Andersocks, which was the Friedman BE), and a mixture of cabinets.

The bass guitar patch was highly intricate: multiple instantiations of overdrives, before and after an Ampeg SVT-4 Pro block, which were further sandwiched by different stages of EQs and compressors, and finally followed by a blend of speaker cabinets. I didn’t write this patch myself; it was a tweaked version of a patch I found online. I look back on this wishing I had sought out a simpler tone solution for bass, since the album tone is unintuitive and difficult to reproduce.

Lead and clean guitar tones were built up around songs, and were often not saved as presets, however, the PRS Archon was the core of most of them.

Peavey 6505+112

With the Helix handling the outer pair of quads, the inner pair was recorded through a stock 6505+ combo amplifier with a 1×12 speaker cabinet. Using a real amplifier with a real speaker was done to add “dimensionality” to the base rhythm guitar sound. This was before Line 6’s major cabinet modeling overhaul, and I felt like the Helix speaker cabinets sounded good but lacked depth. The amp was on the lead channel (of course), and a Focusrite CM25 Mk II wide-diaphragm microphone was used to capture the stock Sheffield 1200 speaker. A classic NS-2 noise supressor sat in front boost-configured overdrive of choice, the…

Reaper Pedals Pandemonium V3

This overdrive was my favorite overdrive for a long, long time. I’ve had a very hard time finding another pedal like it. It’s essentially an OCD, but with a unique clipping section, a popular Tube Screamer mod to increase bass, and a pre/post boost circuit implemented in the feedback loop of both op-amp stages. Most folks love the OCD for its high-gain qualities, but I love its bite as a light overdrive for hitting high-gain amps, and in comparison the Pandemonium has a much smoother flavor of distortion. The utility I’ve gotten out of this overdrive is crazy; it has lived in front of my high-gain amps as a metal boost, on my pedalboard at church to add a bit of dirt to a Vox or Fender, and in the loop of my Helix or POD… all at the exact same settings. I’m a huge fan of “set-and-forget” pedals, and when I set out to build my own overdrive, the Opaque Drive, I pulled a lot of inspiration from the Pandemonium.

PRS Mark Holcomb SE

A majority of the album was tracked on a Mark Holcomb signature SE, whether it be the original 6-string or the 7-string “SVN” edition. These guitars strike a very precise balance in their voicing, allowing them to nail metal tones and also operate very comfortably in a lot of other genres. The pickups really shine here. The bridge pickup is a hot, mid-heavy metal machine, but the neck pickup is not some warm, buttery pickup that you flick on just for liquid solos. It sounds like another bridge pickup, but far less aggressive, and a tad glassy. This pickup set, the Seymour Duncan Alpha/Omega, also coil-splits very well. There is not a single useless sound in these perfect workhorses.

GetGood Drums P IV

I don’t play drums, but I’m a stickler for how they sound. Getting a realistic drum tone for AILI was crucial. A lot of magic happens in the mix, but having a foundation of core samples is very important for me. The GetGood Drums P IV kit was something that had been kicking around on my desk for about a year before recording, so it only made since to trust this with my drum sound. Most songs used the default configuration, but the snare got changed up per song. High tuning was used for “Bury Your Dead” and “The Inevitable Decay”, while “Padding For Time” and “Maximilian Andersocks” stuck to the lower-tuned snare. All other songs used the medium-tuned VK sample, which alone is worth the cost of this sample library.

Brainworx bx_console SSL 4000 E

In mixing, a lot of plug-ins were needed to handle a variety of tasks, but almost every track that wasn’t a bus had one thing in common: the SSL 4000 E emulation from Brainworx. My rule was, if the track would have been recorded with a microphone in a traditional studio production, it got an instance of this plug-in. The goal was to get a studio sound out of this album that I had never heard in DIY home productions. Sometimes this plugin wasn’t even really doing anything other than imparting subtle distortion on the material flowing through it. I found the compressor could usually accomplish what I wanted on the bass and drums tracks, and I remember loving destroying room mics with it on high ratios. The low-order filters were incredible for taming the unnatural high-end that digital cabinet emulations tend to give off. The EQ is very mid-forward, and since this EQ was the primary (if not the only) tone-shaping mechanism on every source sound, this plug-in was just as important of a piece of AILI as everything that ran through it.

Honorable Mentions

• Gibson M-III: This 30-year-old exotic red guitar was the sole guitar on “Moment of Understanding” and on “Best Friends Brigade”. This thing has some of the most aggressive mids of any guitar I own, thanks to its 500T bridge humbucker. Really wish they made a 7-string version of this pickup.
• Ibanez RG7620: Despite being nearly 25 years old at the time of recording, this 7-string guitar held up enough to record all the electric guitars on “Rough Landing”. At the time, it still even had the stock Dimarzio “New” pickups, which are supposedly similar to their shreddy “Blaze” offering.
• Line 6 POD HD500X: Two modelers on the same album? Why? Well, the reason was that I was still porting over all my tones to the freshly-installed Helix when I began recording the album. This unit was considered for the inner quad guitars, but I decided to go with the 6505 instead. This thing can still be heard providing synth tones in multiple songs, and all clean guitars in “Discrete Time”.
• Brainworx bx_oberhausen: I was just beginning to dip my toes into synthesizers and electronic music textures when I started to record AILI, but if you hear a synth in this album, chances are it’s this emulation of the Oberheim SEM. Multiple instances of this plug-in are also heard in the passages at the end of “Moment of Understanding” and “Rough Landing”.

“Art Imitates Life Imitates” can be heard on all streaming platforms!