Substation Onyx

My most recent song, “Herald“, was released on all digital platforms this past Friday, and it goes without saying I’m very proud of it. This song marks the start of a solidified musical direction for me, as I chase a perfected sound that incorporates groovier elements of modern metal (djent, if you will), the percussive, tripping sound of cascading delays, and atmospheric textures as a whole. From a production standpoint, “Herald” is also a test run for several new techniques and toys I’ve been using to create my sound.

Epiphone SG Special

This heavily-modified SG is my first electric guitar; my parents bought it for me in a Music-Go-Round for about $60 in 2011. Over time it’s become a project guitar, with the only original parts being the body, neck, and tail piece. This guitar is snappy and bright with medium-output humbuckers, and it sounds exceptional through modelers. Except for rhythm guitars, all “Herald” guitars were recording with this SG.

PRS Mark Holcomb SVN

This 7-string guitar by PRS is an absolute workhorse; this guitar or its 6-string counterpart has worked their way into every release I’ve played on, to date. The Alpha/Omega humbucker set is wildly versatile and coil-taps exceedingly well. All rhythm guitars were recorded with this beast.

The Opaque Drive

My Opaque Drive is the only overdrive I find myself reaching for anymore… flexibility, punch, and tightness are the name of the game here. All rhythm and lead guitars went through this pedal. Rhythm guitars tend to use the Silver side for some front-end tone-shaping: cutting a little bass coming off the lower register of the 7-string SVN and adding a hair of saturation that’s meant not heard as much as it’s felt (the amplifier imparts the distorted tones you hear on the song). Lead guitars will use the Gold side or both sides in series for a healthy dallop of saturation and sustain before hitting an amplifier.

(Modified) 6505+112

I recently did a video and a post regarding modifications I made to my 60-Watt Peavey 6505+ combo amplifier. “Herald” is the first song I’ve recorded with this amplifier, post-modification. The rhythm guitars, which kick in a bit later in the song, are the PRS SVN through my Opaque Drive, into the lead channel of this amplifier.

Separate Speaker Cabinets

One of my favorite tricks in this song was using the same amplifier, but different speaker cabinets for the doubled rhythm guitar performances. Your right ear is hearing the Vintage 30 speaker in the 6505+ 1×12 combo, which is a UK-made speaker from the 90’s. Your left ear is hearing a very new Vintage 30 made in China within the past couple years, housed in my beloved Zilla 2×12 cabinet. The recording chain is otherwise completely the same, with the same microphone and preamp being used for both parts. The older V30 speaker is far smoother, requiring less high end filtering than the new, bright V30 in the Zilla. The 1×12 cabinet also had a far more focused resonance in the upper bass frequencies from 100-200 Hz. These disparities exaggerate the stereo image of the rhythm guitars.

Line 6 Helix

The clean and lead guitars of “Herald” are digital Helix tones. This is mostly done for ease of assembling complex effect chains with several parts that may need to be tempo-synced. Lead guitars were a high-gain amplifier and cabinet sim, boosted with an Opaque Drive, which is slaved to the Helix through one of the FX loops. The main elements of the clean tones include:

• Reverse delay: This is a great effect for creating “moments of interest” in ethereal textures when a sound seems to come into focus very briefly at the end of the reversed trail before vanishing from existence.
• Harmonic tremolo: I’ve been fooling with this effect more recently as a way to accomplish sequenced filter effects that I usually only hear coming from synthesizers. I like to run the tremolo on more aggressive settings using a tempo-synced square-wave modulation. To further lean into the synthesizer sound, try running an octaver in front of the tremolo.
• Selective cabinet simulation: You have to be careful with this, as it’s an easy way to create harsh sounds, but the modeler makes it very convenient (and safe!) to create record an amplifier without a cabinet simulation. Cabinet simulation exacts very complex filtering on sounds passing through it, which is usually desireable, but with clean guitars I find that a lot of extra high-end and snap can be had when a cabinet is bypassed. Roughly half of the clean guitars in “Herald” do not have a cabinet simulation. To compensate for the “pokey” pick attack that results from not having a cabinet, two compressors are used in tandem to even-out the recorded waveform.