Good Metal Effects Settings

[Arseth Ivarsson]

So I have downloaded Cakewalk by Bandlab, and I am a bit of a noob when it comes to guitar equipment. I have been looking to find if someone has posted a list of metal guitar amp/pedals/settings that have been used in TH3 (just in TH3, without anything external) to produce certain sounds and have thus far failed.

If anyone here has any advice, or knowledge of such a list, that would be greatly appreciated.

[Byron Dickens]

Use your ears.

Considerably less gain than you might think.

Considerably more midrange than you might think.

WAY less effects than you might think.

[Glenn Stanton]

thanks! reminded me that i have the "emissary" bundle and a ton of IRs. such a wonderful combination.

[mettelus]

Unfortunately, Overloud removed the free TH3 packs from there website (though THU has more free than TH3 ever had). You may try contacting Overloud and see if you can get the old TH3 ones (their support has always been good for me). This site has a TH3 archive, BUT it looks like most are custom presets... take those guys with a massive grain of salt, since they tend to be inundated with FX. A Google for TH3 preset sites may help, but if custom so much depends on who made them. However...

If new, Byron's advice is spot on... more is often destructive. In any FX chain you want to KNOW what the signal is out of one FX/component that is feeding the next, and internal to a VSTi this may not always be obvious. Time-based FX (chorus, delays, reverbs) should almost always be at the end of the chain (simple reason is you do not want to apply FX to the tail, but a tail to the output). A basic approach is clean up signal, compress if needed, amplify and FX chain. Also, a great learning tool is to take a pre-made chain, then do extremes on controls (minimum/maximum) one at a time to see how they affect the sound. Some of the presets that came with TH3 are fine to start with, and is easy to swap out components to see the changes that result. Be judicious with use and know what each component is doing (to the next one)... simple chains are best to start with.

Amp sims also have a tendency to create unrealistic harmonics, so a LPF on the signal set to 8KHz (+/-) before it goes into anything (the clean up the signal step) will keep you from passing that into the final output.