Scott Henderson Discussion

[guitmac]

Hi Scott,

I'm recording an album and the engineer is using a plugin to reduce the noise of the distorted guitars, but I think its taking away some of the juice of the tone, and makes it sound like too clean or laking something...

Do you use any noise reduction for your distorted tracks?
I have never heard a hum in your CDs.

Also, I read somewhere that you use Echoboy tape for solos.
Do you use it stereo (ping pong kind of effect), or mono?
What type of reverb do you combine with the delay for solos?

No live gig in Toronto any time soon?

Looking forward to see you play live again!

[Scott Henderson]

I've never used noise reduction in the past because in the old days there wasn't much of an RF problem, and for many years I've been using the Suhr noiseless system which totally eliminates hum without changing the tone.

On the new album I'm working on, I had to use noise reduction on two tunes where there are no drums. It wasn't because of hum, but because of hiss caused by a pedal. I used a Waves limiter and it worked fine - I can't hear any difference in the tone.

I use EchoBoy Studio Tape most of the time, both mono and stereo, depending on what else is going on and where the guitar is panned. There's a patch called Dancing Plexi's which is really fun if you have guitar in the center and not much else happening. I set one side to a quarter note and the other side to a dotted quarter - it can sound very cool if set to the right volume. If the guitar is panned to one side, I usually put a mono delay on the other side, either in tempo with the tune, or around 450 ms.

I always use the same reverb when recording - it's the Dark Hall from the Lexicon plug-ins. However when mixing, Alan Hertz never lets me use it for everything - he likes to put a different reverb on every guitar layer because he says they're clearer sounding and more separated that way. To be honest, most of the time I can't tell the difference but he's got much better ears than mine.

[guitmac]

Thanks a lot Scott!