Hey! I was trying to record some atmospheric, post-rockish tremolo-picked guitar parts and realized that, while I'm pretty confident in my guitar skills otherwise, this has always been a weak spot for me.

The issue is: I can't ever find a good tonal balance. It's either too low-gain (so it sounds weak and uneven) or too high-gain (so the pick attacks get too noisy and produce lots of harsh harmonics). It doesn't really matter if I'm using single coils or humbuckers, nor the amp or cabinet or pedal sim, nor the kind of pick.

Usually I can circumvent the problem one way or another. In this case I've tamed most of the transients with splitEQ, drenched the sound in reverb and overdubbed a cleaner, non-tremolo part to get some clarity and definition - but I was wondering if you knew any real way to get nice, even tremolo parts that aren't filled with pick noises and harmonics.

I'm pretty sure there's an easy way to do it (maybe it has something to do with the mics on the cabinet? maybe some compression technique?) and I'm just making things more difficult to myself.

Thanks

 

Just a thought. How about recording an octave below and slower, then doubling the playback speed. Like Hendrix did at the end of Purple Haze. This way you can be more toneful with your pick attack and still achieve a similar result.

Do you find that this harshness or quietness is specific to the notes you're trying to play? For instance are you playing a note/notes higher on the neck? If that's the case you could try recording lower (an octave lower, say, where you get better results in the tone and pick attack...you may get better results from the wound strings?) then alter that to play an octave higher. In REAPER you can change the properties of that "chunk" to playback at +12 tones and it plays an octave higher. This is similar to the first recommendation but not exactly the same.