Lead Tone Vs Rhythm Tone

[Byrdman]

I'm pretty new to playing lead stuff and only in my home. A buddy that plays acoustic and I are going to start playing to see if we can put something together with a couple of other guys that supposedly sing and play drums.

I hear about making your lead tones "cut through" and I am familiar when it works and when it doesn't. I have seen a lot of bar bands play over the years and have heard when the lead tones gets covered up by bass and drums during the solo and fills usually when they sound too similar to the rhythm.

Can someone tell me generally how this works? What is the difference between your rhythm tone and lead tone, again in general or is it the same and just boosted? I play HB guitars, so no need to go into detail on what needs to be done on a Strat or other single coil.

 

[PLX]

It's best if other "competing" instruments are pulled down in the mix during a guitar solo section..

By "competing", I mean keys, vocals, accordions, other guitars.. anything that occupies the same frequency range as your guitar doing the solo.

 

[FuzzyAce]

There are no hard rules - other than you want to be heard during your solo. But it makes a difference if it's a 3 pc, 4 pc, etc. band. It also helps if the other players adjust dynamically to assist in the soloist shining through. Tone wise, using a mid boost of sorts helps cut through, or changing an amp channel that accentuates the gain and frequencies you want to hear during your solo. Or, only using your guitar's volume? Many different ways and it is song dependent too.

 

[Byrdman]

It's best if other "competing" instruments are pulled down in the mix during a guitar solo section..

By "competing", I mean keys, vocals, accordions, other guitars.. anything that occupies the same frequency range as your guitar doing the solo.

There are no hard rules - other than you want to be heard during your solo. But it makes a difference if it's a 3 pc, 4 pc, etc. band. It also helps if the other players adjust dynamically to assist in the soloist shining through. Tone wise, using a mid boost of sorts helps cut through, or changing an amp channel that accentuates the gain and frequencies you want to hear during your solo. Or, only using your guitar's volume? Many different ways and it is song dependent too.

Thanks, guys! That helps. I'll probably start out with volume adjustments and go from there. Also, do you prefer bridge or neck pickup on solos or does it just depend on the song?

 

[Blix]

A boost at 7-800 Hz puts the lead in a "vocal" range that cuts through nicely. Try it playing along with some YT backing tracks or something, it really works. :)

 

[Byrdman]

A boost at 7-800 Hz puts the lead in a "vocal" range that cuts through nicely. Try it playing along with some YT backing tracks or something, it really works. :)

Thanks! I will try it

 

[Alex Kenivel]

A lot of what makes a tone "cut" in a mix is accentuating (boosting) frequencies where humans are most sensitive, the upper midrange (1kHz-5kHz).

Alternatively, cutting the frequencies EXCEPT for those and adding an overall volume boost gets you to the same place.

It might not sound good in isolation, but that isn't the point when you're playing a phrase that needs to be heard over other instruments that seem to "fight" for space.

 

[woody]

Try stuff and find out what works!
Understand that it's a group effort, though. A bunch of inexperienced musicians all playing all of the frequencies all of the time will make all good efforts futile.
Good musicians usually make sure that the lead part gets heard, whoever may happen to play it.
So don't be too harsh on yourself, especially in the beginning.

Solo and rhythm sound don't have to be super different, though.
For me it's usually dialing back the volume pot a little for rhythm playing, and dialing it higher for solos.

Some years ago I saw an amateur bluesband. The guys and gals were well rehearsed and played decent covers of the usual suspects. Only the solo guitar just vanished, whenever the young hot shot player stepped on his pedal board took a solo.
After the show I took a peek at his effects, and lo and behold, he had an EQ pedal as solo boost, the sliders set like a flower pot. His guitar was completely inaudible during his solos. So, that's something not to try...

 

[Sascha Franck]

My recipe since around, uhm, at least 2 decades already, apparently working with every rhythm sound (clean stuff included):

- Pre-amp compressor adding some more "meat" while leaving the attack un-squashed (hence no really short attack time). This will give the guitar more "body" on the timeline. I also boost the signal a bit to get some more gain from overdriven baseline sounds.

- Post-amp EQ. Roughly along the lines @Blix already mentioned, I may add some low cut to avoid boominess. For rock stuff, the boosted mids can be a tad higher, for fusion and the likes, values trending towards 500Hz might add some nice vocal-ish fullness.

- Delay or reverb or a mixture of both to kind of "carry" the sound a bit more. Also resulting in nicely subtle modulations during bends and such.

I route all these to one switch for ease of use.
I'd say this is the approach I'm using 99% of all times.

 

[JCW308]

Mine is simple. Any lead tone gets a 5db boost, a mid bump and some delay at whatever tempo the tune is using. Not a huge amount of repeats in the delay though. Just one or two repeats. That's about it.