What is a good guitar guitar for heavy and grindy metal sounds?
Alex S asked:
I want to find a cheaper guitar, (under $1000) that provides for a heavy and intense sound. I’m looking for a sound in the vein of As I Lay Dying, The Devil Wears Prada, Underoath, Pantera, Avenged Sevenfold (older sound), confide, our last night, Alesana, ect. Overall, just a Numeatal or metal core sounding guitar.
I want to find a cheaper guitar, (under $1000) that provides for a heavy and intense sound. I’m looking for a sound in the vein of As I Lay Dying, The Devil Wears Prada, Underoath, Pantera, Avenged Sevenfold (older sound), confide, our last night, Alesana, ect. Overall, just a Numeatal or metal core sounding guitar.
Oh just about any Ibenez or Jackson guitar, I have an LTDDJ600 which is dan jacobs guitar from Atreyu but overall if your looking for certain sounds you need effects peddles.. and Marshall half stacks so you can play that ish LOUD!!
Get one with EMGs. Umm, the guitar is only about half of that sound though. Get a good pedal or amp. But to stick to the guitar, get a Jackson. They make good guitars for the price. Don’t get a Rhoads model, the necks are bad on them.
I would get this –EMGs-520314-i1445596.gc
for a really heavy grinding tone i suggest Dean Guitars, there’s a reason Dime used em’. Out side of that? the guitar won’t matter a whole lot. you want a heavy body (think mahogany or basswood) like a Dean V, or razor back, or dime signature or what ever, Ceramic pickups give you a heavier tone while ASctives will give youa louder, higher output signal. I’d also suggest using heavy gauge Steel strings, those will produce a thicker, heavier sound than lighter gague strings.
as far as a guitar taht’s ready to roll goes, i’d look into a Schecter C1 Hellraiser, or a Dean mustaine signature variation (cheaper one). my current metal guitar is my Dean VX (the shitty low end 200$ Flying V knockoff) with 10-43 nickel wound strings, thicker than i’m used to (which is kind of sad), but tuned to a low tuning with the pickups it has? it’s a great dirty thick sound.
Best of luck, if you need any other advice feel free to shoot me an email too.
Dean Razorback(Dimebag Darrel Pantera)
Gibson Wylde ed.(Zakk Wylde Ozzy Blk Lbl)
ESP with EMG busrtbuckers
Ibanez Kirk Hammet ed.(Metallica)
Parker guitars are great too but look dumb as hell
But if you want a kick ass step pedal try the Boss ME50 run through a marshall you can get any sound you want out of it
My personal favorite and i own the Fender American Deluxe Strat it soundz great with any type of music
If you want a heavy sound, you need two things - high output pickups and a nice amp. Of the two, the amp is the most important. Without a good amp, you cannot get a great tone.
But you asked about guitars. Two directions present themselves to me… one is to go with a (heavier) mahogany guitar, the other is to go with a (lighter) basswood body.
Mahogany is darker sounding, and is a classic tone wood, made famous by Les Paul, etc. A good place to start would be Epiphone - the guitars are made well, and the quality and tone are good.
Basswood is lighter in weight, and has a brighter, more “present” sound. Not as much bass as mahogany, with more upper mids and treble. A lot of the lower priced guitars are made from basswood, so there are a wide variety of guitars to choose from here. Almost the entire Ibanez line is made from basswood, so its not like basswood doesn’t rock or doesn’t work for the heavy stuff.
I bought a couple of cheapo LTD guitars, an EC-50 and an EC-100QM, and have spent some time and money upgrading them. As with most guitars, getting new strings, a proper setup and intonation, and new electronics and pickups really bring out the guitars’ best…. in this case some active pickups from Dragonfire (link below) in the EC-50 and an Alnico II Pro and Alternative 8 from Seymour Duncan in the EC-100QM.
I love that pickup combination - they’re both Alnico pups, so they both have a nice warm tone and bit of chime on the top end. The A2P has a very “Slash” tone when soloing, and the Alt 8 has a tone similar to the JB (so very versatile, lots of mids to saturate your distortion) but with a bit more clarity and a tighter low end, good for rhythm and chunky power chords, etc.
The Dragonfire pups are so-so. The cleans are kinda neutral and almost sterile, but they distort wonderfully - the EC-50 is my “metal” guitar now. =)
I put onboard preamps or active pickups into all of my guitars to boost the tone. The site below has a few onboard fx you could drop in the guitar.
If you haven’t picked up on it yet, the key to getting a good distortion sound is to blast the crap out of your distortion, whether pedal or amp. EQ pedals, high output pickups, booster/overdrive pedals, distortion pedals with the gain turned way down and the level turned up, even wah pedals (I use my Dunlop 535Q, because I can tune the range to be nice and wide so it doesn’t color my tone *as* much as it could, it boosts my tone in the upper mid/treble frequencies, and this gives me a great crunchy tone when I put it in front of my Boss Metalcore).
Asides from the pups I just mentioned, any of the “D” pickups from DiMarzio would be great choices… they work well with dropped tunings… by these I mean the D Activator, D Sonic, etc. Of course, i would still put in an onboard preamp.
For a neck pickup, I think the Seymour Duncan A2P (as mentioned earlier) and DiMarzio PAF Joe are great pickups - nice round tones, warm and good for leads.
EDIT: I highly disagree with the comment about Dean guitars. The Dean company was under different management when Dimebag was around - they’ve since changed management and are owned by different people - the guitars aren’t the same quality.
Not saying they’re horrible guitars, I suppose. Probably better than BC Rich (crappy agathis? ick!).
Thicker strings = better. I’m using 11’s, tuned drop d down 1/2 step (you could call it Drop C#). It’s right about what I like, although I may be ready to go up to 12’s. Unfortunately, Elixir doesn’t carry 12’s I think. =(
The ME50 isn’t all that… but as I’ve already said, if you have a good amp you can make up for the lack of tone in other parts of your signal chain.
Don’t discount how important upgrading your speakers or speaker cab is…. probably one of the best ways to get a better tone out of your rig right away.
Saul
Im going to have to agree with Saul, Amps make a huge difference. I was testing out the Line 6 Spider valve amp, which is a cheaper amp and I was like wow ” this amp has some insane metal tones”. You could uprade the pickups on your guitar and save the left over money for an amp. There is a lot of amps out there that would work, the two I tried personally that have some heavy/intense tones are the Mesa Rectifiers and The line 6 spider valve II or III (the one that says bogner on it). I can make my strat play metal on these amps! go check them out
umm I just want to make this simple a Les Paul is good for heavy metal sound because of its bright and deep tone but there are other great guitar brands made special for metal and it is (ibanez, ESP, Dean and Schecter) popular brands in metal and heavy and intense sound
Honestly, I’m not much of a heavy metal guitarist, but I bought a guitar a few years back for about $400 from guitar center called a Fender Toronado. It has decent action and because of the double humbuckers you can get some serious metal and loud sounds. This has been my favourite guitar for ages because of how well it was designed. I would suggest you check it out, but Fender no longer makes them, but it plays amazingly, try using ebay if you wanna find one.
Get something with active pickups EMG is pretty good. all the bands you listed have or at one time have used schecter esp gibson and more.
Search for them on the internet and you can find out too confide is using first acts now so that just goes to tell you its not one particular brand. do some research at guitar center or something though and see what you like best. Last thing is look into getting a high gain tube amp if you dont have one it’ll change your tone a million.