Getting that upfront, dry guitar sound from bands like Vulfpeck, The Fearless Flyers or even Prince is now super easy thanks to Sonimus plugins. Most of these funky guitar sounds come straight from a DI signal into an SSL console, which makes Satson CS the perfect tool to pull out some presence and bite from these types of guitars.

Let’s plug the guitar straight into our interface and set up our plugin.

First: Compression

The first step to get that classic guitar tone is compressing the signal to tighten the performance. In Satson CS we can place the compressor as our first module. Set the ratio to 4:1, set the attack time to 3 milliseconds and the release time to 0.6 seconds. Then, just increase the amount until we get between 3 and 5 dB of gain reduction. This is a great starting point to get a more consistent sound without choking the guitar, but feel free to experiment until you get the control you want out of your sound.

Now bring the mix knob down to 50% — by doing this we keep part of the natural sound of the original performance, whilst enhancing it with the compressed sound.

Plug it to the Console

The next module in our chain is Satson Channel. This module will give us the characteristic tone and drive from a solid state console, on top of its gain staging capabilities.

Roll off some of the low end using the high pass filter between 90 and 120 Hz. This will remove any rumble and focus the tone of the guitar. Using the Gain Compensation switch we can drive the console a bit harder to saturate the signal and get more presence out of the instrument. Then, add the EQ module right after the channel to help sculpt the sound of our guitar.

No Amp: No worries

One of the benefits of using a physical guitar amp is that it naturally rolls off a bit of the high end of the instrument, so it sounds less buzzy and leaves space for other elements in the mix. Since we are working with a DI signal, we want to tame the high frequencies from our guitar to help it sit better in the mix. To mimic what the amp is doing, we want to dip a little bit around 4 kHz and bring down anything above 8 kHz using the high-mid and high bands.

If we need more body for our tone, we can boost the low band around 200 Hz or go back to our Channel module and engage the FAT mode of our console. Alternatively if you need a bit of room in your tone, apply your favourite reverb FX and dial the amount as desired.

Funky Guitar – Dry

Funky Guitar – Satson CS

How do you process your dry guitar signal? Do you use Satson CS to process your guitars? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to learn more tricks and tips about using Sonimus plugins.