The Battle of teh Muddyness!

[MF_Kitten]

has anyone here experienced problems with muddyness? (i know you have!) tell your epic tale of how you got rid of the mud... changing volume/tone pots? new pickups? EQ pedals, amp settings...

reason i´m asking is both to learn, and for others to learn... i´ve been nagging for help choosing pickups earlier, because i´m tuning my 7-string to Drop G, and i´m really scared of mud...

so, tell your stories, tell what to do, what NOT to do, reccomend gear... help the fresh (and maybe even the experienced) rid their sound of mud!

(i love sounding all storyteller-ish)

[waylay00]

After I changed my old tubes and changed the stock pickups of my PRS to DiMarzios, the mud vanished.

[Shredder87]

Drop G??? Bloody hell. I must be old fashioned... (forgive me, I'm a die-hard standard-tuner, heh heh!)

Through personal experience, a sludgey sound is usually caused by 1. Amp EQ settings (excess bass and middle); 2. Excess gain (some pickups don't like too much front-end gain); 3. Pedals settings (again, an EQ issue).

Of course, an easy way to add more balls to your basic sound is change your volume and tone pots on the guitar to higher value pots... 1 Meg can really add balls, but beware it can get too sharp. You might want to look at that.

What 7-String do you have? And what pickups? If they are pretty sludgey you might want to change the pots to 1 Meg pots (standard Ibanez are 500K I think...).

[ibanezcollector]

how to cure drop g tuning muddiness is easy.. Buy a Bass

Who the hell plays drop G thats insane im with Shredder87 Im old fashioned too E, Eb, and the occasional Drop D

[AARRGGHHH]

One way I found to work if your amp isn't quite tight enough, put an eq as a boost in front. Boost some of the mid and high frequencies and overall volume a little on each and then reduce the gain on the amp. Tends to clean things up and give a more imediate response to playing. It's good to try before spending on changing parts on your guitar.

[Shredder87]

Keeping fresh strings on also helps. If you're tuning down that much you might want to up your string gauges, especially on the bass strings.

I was watching the Van Halen Live Without A Net DVD at the weekend. I noticed that EVH tuned down to drop C for the song "5150". I admit it did sound cool.

Kind of fancy a 7-string myself, although if I do ever get one it's STRICTLY going to be left in standard.

ibanezcollector: Yep. Standard tuning all the way. No fancy-schmancy tunings for me! Want low tunings? get a 7-string or take up bass! Heh heh!

[Demiurge]

For extended-range, low-tuning instruments, you have to start with neck and body materials that allow a decent treble-response, and pickups to complement them.

One of my sevens is maple-boarded, alder-bodied, and had a stop-tailpiece setup, 25.5" scale. The alder is pretty even-keeled in frequency response in standard ranges, but needs a little help with clarity on the low B. Scale length didn't help. I had a Duncan Invader-7 in there but it was too muddy, so I swapped it for an Evo-7 (which has all the tasty upper-midrange that was sorely lacking) and now it sounds incredibly.

My other 7 is rosewood-boarded, mahogany-bodied, 25.5" scale, and has a trem. Blazes seem to work very well and oddly enough, I think it's thanks to the trem and it's "thinning," low-end-attenuating properties.

After the guitar, your signal chain is important- but as they say, you can't poop into a Mr. Coffee and get Taster's Choice- your amp/effects/etc. is at the total mercy of what the guitar is feeding into your rig.

[MF_Kitten]

Originally Posted by Shredder87

Drop G??? Bloody hell. I must be old fashioned... (forgive me, I'm a die-hard standard-tuner, heh heh!)

Through personal experience, a sludgey sound is usually caused by 1. Amp EQ settings (excess bass and middle); 2. Excess gain (some pickups don't like too much front-end gain); 3. Pedals settings (again, an EQ issue).

Of course, an easy way to add more balls to your basic sound is change your volume and tone pots on the guitar to higher value pots... 1 Meg can really add balls, but beware it can get too sharp. You might want to look at that.

What 7-String do you have? And what pickups? If they are pretty sludgey you might want to change the pots to 1 Meg pots (standard Ibanez are 500K I think...).

it´s a Schecter Omen 7 Extreme...

it´s a basswood bodied bolt-on maple rosewood fretboard neck, with string through body TOM bridge, and H-H pickups (stock schecters)... i´m going for dimarzios, but i´m thinking i want some clear articulate ones, that can handle the low tuning without mudding on me, and without being scooped out of this world... meshuggah´s sound, for example, is too scooped for me, and too bright... i need more mids so it sounds hot and warm...

yet i fear the mud...

never really thought about trying new volume pots to clear up the sound, i gotta try that if new pickups don´t pull it off good enough...

how would a Blaze Custom do with a 1 Meg pot, anyone? and switching to a 1 meg pot, what frequency area is gunna get a boost, how much, and what happens to the lows?

and how is it for tightness?

[MF_Kitten]

as for the Drop G tuning...
i like korn, but the A tuning is so used nowadays, and i was really blown away by Meshuggah´s deepness...
but it would be too deep for my taste, so i found a nice middle-path...
higher than meshuggah, but lower than korn...
my playing style doesen´t sound like korn or meshuggah though...

*pimping the ´´...´´i know, bad habit.*

i´m just so sick of the ordinary tunings, and i want to do something different, and i tried it out with my bass, tuning the D string down to G, and played some stuff, and it sounded awesome... so my mind is set

[brothersnowgone]

Originally Posted by MF_Kitten

as for the Drop G tuning...
i like korn, but the A tuning is so used nowadays, and i was really blown away by Meshuggah´s deepness...
but it would be too deep for my taste, so i found a nice middle-path...
higher than meshuggah, but lower than korn...
my playing style doesen´t sound like korn or meshuggah though...

*pimping the ´´...´´i know, bad habit.*

i´m just so sick of the ordinary tunings, and i want to do something different, and i tried it out with my bass, tuning the D string down to G, and played some stuff, and it sounded awesome... so my mind is set

I know where your coming from. At one point I was tuning down to G, but my only seven was stolen quite a while ago and I really haven't been tuned lower than D since. Still I'd love to tune down there again, it sounds so heavy!

[MF_Kitten]

Originally Posted by brothersnowgone

I know where your coming from. At one point I was tuning down to G, but my only seven was stolen quite a while ago and I really haven't been tuned lower than D since. Still I'd love to tune down there again, it sounds so heavy!

YES, thank you! :P

btw, could you tell me what kinda sound you played with? like what kinda distortion, what kinda music?

and how did it sound? muddy, articulate..

more importantly, what guitar, which pickups? :P

[Jemwielder]

Damn kids and their low tunings.... Grumble.... Grumble...

[guitarkatana]

If your guitar is a standard scale length, you're gonna have problems with tuning that low. Personally, I'm with the dude who said "buy a bass". You can get a guitar to sound decent with that tuning, but you'll have to work at it.

I was into using low tunings for a while, since I love heavy, evil sounding music. But I got sick of sounding so crappy if I tried to play anything other than single note riffs and 5 chords. I also realized that there are black metal bands that sound heavier than any other band I've listened to, and they only tune to standard or drop D.

Of all the bands that tune really low, the only one I like is Meshuggah, because they customized and worked with their equipment and song writing enough to actually make it sound good.

[7Plagues]

i used to play a schecter 7 string to drop G as well. I started using .70s and .56s standard pack. i used this setup for awhile. before i sold the guitar, i dropped to .60s and a .49 pack

[MF_Kitten]

so, pickups? :P anyone?