The exact double guitar track is a great trick to use when you need to make one guitar sound really big. This consists of playing the exact same guitar part twice in order to get a wide stereo image. Although today it’s not enough to just play the exact same guitar part twice. I often find myself using a time align tool to ensure the guitar parts are exactly in sync between the two guitar parts. I then take the two guitar parts and hard pan them left and right to make a wide stereo image. The difference in phase between the two guitar parts is what creates a wide stereo image.

Although you can do this trick with any kind of guitar I typically find I do this with overdrive guitars or heavily distorted guitars. Since I often have my lead guitar parts straight up the center in my mix, this trick is almost always used exclusively on rhythm guitar tracks. It is a great trick to make one guitar part sound really big in the stereo image.

There are, however, some things you need to be careful with when creating the exact double guitar track. Phase is your biggest concern. Phasing issues happen when you have two signals that are either canceling each other out, or are amplifying each other. When you are listening in stereo, you may hear a build up of certain frequencies (often your low end), or when listening in mono you may lose certain frequencies (often your high end). If you don’t have an optimal listening condition, or if your are not sure what to listen for, you can use a spectrograph to visually show you when frequencies are canceling or building up.

If you find that you are having phasing issues, you are going to need to change something. To escape phasing issues you will need to make sure you have different harmonics between the two parts. Harmonics are the overtone series that is created from any instrument. While being conscious of maintaining the same tone, you can change your harmonic structure by; changing pickups, use a different guitar, change your microphone on the guitar cab, or change your microphone preamp. As I mentioned before, you want to make sure you are maintaining the same guitar tone (this is an exact double guitar), but you will need to make sure the harmonic structure of the two parts are slightly different.

After you have recorded your two guitar tracks you can then hard pan the tracks left and right and record them into one stereo track or just leave them as two mono tracks. Having your doubled guitars in a stereo track may make production easier as you move along to other parts of the song. Even if you have a stereo recording of each guitar part, you can still bounce each guitar into a stereo track. Just make sure to pay attention to where you are panning each guitar part and microphone. Make sure to watch your phase! This will give you an easy to work with and very big stereo guitar sound:)

Check back next week for how to make two similar guitar tracks.