How to get that guitar sound:

the riff starts at 1:47

What I have: OTS Strawberry library

Which plug-ins and thier chains should I use to get a warm distorted guitar sound?
All my attempts to soften the guitar sound failed...
I used all the Strawberry controls:
cabinets, amps, EQ, distortion, tried all the presets built-in and so on,
only poisonus, annoying sound appeared in result...

What thoughts, folks?

 

they use many stuff to make it sound like that , its not that easy

 

These were really good times. All I know is that his agents used a whole bunch of most talented musicians all over the albums. Even like questionable ones, but the final act was always, always perfect. Fitting a riff into your own production on your own might be more than tricky. Please respect MJ as the king of pop

 

Maybe you can try Guitar Rig and search for a preset. Should named as the title, Black or White.
Or Amplitude.

 

The soft sound that you describe I attribute to the non-figure 8 Beyer M160 hypercardoid ribbon mic that Bill Bottrell chose to use, as well as the of course the combination of Kramer guitar and Mesa amp Bottrell well played that created the sound burned into our collective consciousness.

From an interview with Bill Bottrell in Sound On Sound Magazine, August of 2004...

"As soon as we got to Westlake, the first thing that Michael hummed to me was 'Black Or White'," he recalls. "He sang me the main riff without specifying what instrument it would be played on. I just hooked up a Kramer American guitar to a Mesa Boogie amp, miked it with a Beyer M160, and got that gritty sound as I played to his singing. He also sang me the rhythm and I put down a simple drum-machine pattern coming out of an Emulator, and he then left so that I could spend a couple of days working alone on the track. It was Michael who actually drew me out as a musician — on the Bad sessions he would hum me things and go away, and I'd be there alone for two weeks, working on a track. I was used to sampling, but he needed music; guitars, keyboards, you name it. That's what he expected of me. He assumed I could do it, and since I had been a musician before going into engineering I just followed his lead.

"For 'Black Or White' I laid down a more precise guitar part, and I also had this very dorky EIII drum machine playing a one-bar loop. Back then I would use a Hybrid Arts sequencer that I loved dearly — it ran on the Atari platform and was kind of sophisticated for its time, and I would use that for all my MIDI storage. I could run anything through it, so I set about adding loads of percussion, including cowbells and shakers, trying to get a swingy sort of groove. You see, the guitar swung a lot, as defined by the original hook that Michael had sung to me, and the percussion devices were pretty straightforward, but the groove itself was heavily tweaked in the sequencer in order to be complex and non-linear. This basically amounted to shifting things and manipulating the data.

"As soon as I sorted out the guitar and drum machine parts on day one, Michael performed a scratch vocal as well as some BVs. I miked him with a [Neumann] U47, which was my choice, and I'd take out most of the bottom end and compress the rest with my Sontec limiter. The guy's an absolute natural — I mean, we're talking about Michael Jackson — and for me the best thing about 'Black Or White' was that his scratch vocal remained untouched throughout the next year [of work on Dangerous] and ended up being used on the finished song. He had some lyrical ideas when he first entered the studio, and he filled them out as he went along."

Good luck trying to re-create the tone without at least some of the original ingredients.

 

Just extract and sample it =)

 

yeah, sample it with bias amp !

 

I don't think there is anything special in that sound. You can get very similar sound with great variety of guitar gear.

It's mostly about how and where (on the guitar neck) the simple riff is played. I would suspect the problem is the sound source itself.

 

Thanks to everybody for advices,
just some updates: the riff from MJ song I used as example, because I like the song and its riff,
but I'm not trying to make exactly same sound, just to make it more warm,

just an example of the bad guitar sound that I hate despite it's my track:



and this one sounds a bit better, still, I don't like it:



PS. Found about the feature "matching" that some EQs have on a board,
will try it

 

You need better/different microphones and preamps, at least the mics as your capture of sound sounds dreadful aweful on both recordings. No amount of processing can fix that. Sorry, honesty is the best policy. What are you using now and what kind of room you are recording in?

 

Did this rather quickly, some mastering magic would have to happen to make it perfect, but the stem is in the pocket. I used Overloud's Th-U as the guitar sim with the added effect of a stereo digital chorus. An important key to set the right tone is using a single coil pickup. The song was panned to the right speaker, my guitar in the left. I can upload all the settings at a later time if you want them, gotta get ready for work....https://thedavisproject.org/track/2918628/black-n-white-guitar-sample

 

You're smashing the whole track too much with the mastering compressor.
To bring your stems alive, get your hands on the Kush Audio's plugins available on the sister site, go to their website on how to use them, you;ll be pleasantly suprised how much better and more organic your stems will be. Good Luck!