Recording metal rhythm guitars in Logic Pro 9 with Guitar Rig 4

First, I'll apologize in advance if this comes up a lot. I've searched around the forums, and the internet in general, and have decided that getting specific opinions from real people about my questions will be more useful than trying to piece together information from a bunch of search results.

This is liable to be a long post. I'm going to try to provide as much detail as I possibly can about my situation so you can give me the best answers possible.

I've been writing music for a while, and I've finally gotten my hands on some recording equipment. The time has come to actually record and tinker with all the ideas I've been keeping in my head. I want to do this as right as possible. Basically, I want the ultimate product to be of a quality that I'm proud of, both in terms of musicianship and production. This post is really addressing the latter.

I'm a keyboard player first and a guitar player second, so the keyboard parts tend to take priority in everything I write... which makes mixing a bit easier, what with guitars and keyboards often occupying annoyingly similar frequency ranges. But, this is a metal project, so guitars are quite present still... though mostly rhythm, with the occasional lead.

As I've found in the past, guitars are exponentially more difficult to record than keyboards. I've tried to make that process as easy as possible by using Guitar Rig 4. I sort of stumbled into it, honestly. I bought the Native Instruments Komplete 7 bundle (along with a copy of Logic Studio and some monitors) mainly for the soft synths and samples (which are awesome, by the way!). Lo and behold, it also included a decent drum sampler (Battery 3), and an amp modeller I'd never heard of, but apparently some of my favourite artists have been using to record (Guitar Rig 4). I'm fairly convinced that I can get a good tone out of Guitar Rig 4. A simple combination of the so-called "Hot Plex" driven by a "Cat" have produced a tone I'm pretty happy with. In stand-alone mode, I've had a hoot with it. Recording has been a different story... for the guitars at least. The keyboards have been an absolute breeze. I've truly fallen in love with Absynth and Massive.

I've been getting to know Logic, and I seem to have the basics covered. I know my way around the interface, and I've familiarized myself with more or less everything I need. Using that knowledge to create something that sounds good, of course, is a different story.

Anyway, as I understand it, the way to get a decent, full-bodied rhythm tone in a mix is to record four tracks of it. And not just the same track copied a few times. So, I gave that a shot. At first, I thought I was all clever. "What's this auxiliary bus thing? I'll just stick one instance of Guitar Rig in there, and run all four guitars through that! Brilliant!" But, I found that doing that pretty much negated having four guitar tracks, and muddied everything up. It didn't sound like four separate guitar tracks. It sounded like one muddy guitar track. So, to correct that, I put an instance of Guitar Rig on each channel instead. Things sounded a lot better. Barring some fine-tuned equalizing and compression, it has the potential to find itself a decent sonic spot among my several keyboard tracks. But, of course, my eyes shifted focus to the little cpu meter in the transport bar. It wasn't too pleased with me. And, I could hear my computer's frustration soon after as things started dropping out and clipping. I tried re-creating the four separate amp thing within Guitar Rig itself, but was only able to get two. And, even then, those two amps would be amplifying one identical guitar track. Insufficient!

That brings me to my question. How do I handle this? My keyboard tracks are all soft synths and samples triggered by MIDI tracks, save for my lead tone, for which I use my Juno-G's sound engine. My drums are also programmed in MIDI, triggering Battery 3. So, at the moment, that amounts to a good dozen tracks of soft synths and samplers, each running its own instance. Those tracks sound amazing on their own. Keyboards are so easy to record! But, throwing in an extra four tracks of guitar, each running Guitar Rig, seems to send things over the edge. And I will eventually want to add one or two lead guitar tracks on top of that. And I haven't even looked at recording bass or vocals yet. AND that doesn't include the additional Kontakt track(s) I'll be using later in the song.

Not being a primary guitar player, I don't have a guitar amp... at all. I have an ESP LTD MH-400 as my main guitar. Until recently, for practicing and writing, I've just been plugging it into a Metal Zone, routed that through my Juno-G's effects processor for some compression, delay, chorus, reverb, and eq, and that was it. It sounded alright, but it's not a tone I'd want to record. Should the Guitar Rig thing just not work out, I could potentially re-amp with a friend's dual rectifier. But, honestly, I'd rather stick to the software route. It has the potential to be so much more flexible, in that I can keep tweaking my guitar tone through the entire recording, mixing, and mastering process without having to re-record if I want to mess with amp settings and the like.

But... how do I manage this? Yes, I could just bounce a few of those tracks "when I'm happy with them", but I'd be losing all that flexibility in doing that. And, realistically, I probably won't be happy with them until the song is done. So, any suggestions would be much appreciated. And any semi-related advice on recording and mixing guitars in general would be very much appreciated.

I'll just add a little appendix to this post with all the gear I'm using, since I'm sure some of it is relevant:

Computer: 2008 Apple aluminum unibody Macbook. 2.0ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb DDR3 RAM, 7200rpm 500gb HDD. Nothing of any significance running in the background, or hogging valuable cpu time or RAM.
Audio interface: M-Audio Fast Track Ultra, over USB 2.0.
(NOTE: As more money rolls in, I will be upgrading these. Eventually, a 15" Macbook Pro, and a MOTU Firewire audio interface).

Monitors: 2x Mackie MR5 MKII, Sennheiser HD202 (headphones)
Guitar: ESP LTD MH-400 (EMG 81 and 85... will receive a fancy new setup in a week, some new strings, a new battery, and sock in the tremolo cavity, at which point I'll re-record all the guitar tracks I've already recorded).
Keyboard: Roland Juno-G (mostly just used as a MIDI controller for recording, but I'm also recording a few of its sounds... after all, I have spent years making and fine-tuning them).
Recording software: Logic Pro 9 (I'm recording audio at a sample rate of 88.2khz)
Software plugins (that I'm using so far): Native Instruments Kontakt 4, Reaktor 5, Massive, FM8, Absynth 5, Guitar Rig 4, Battery 3.

 

That was a long post ;-)

Three suggestions:

1. I don't know Logic Pro, but maybe there is a function like in Cubase, where you can 'freeze' tracks to save CPU power.

I found this info regarding this topic:

http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials...p-your-cpu-with-logics-freeze-track-function/

2.
- bounce the recorded tracks
- don't delete the original (clean) tracks but disable GR4 on those tracks
- when the whole song is done and you want to change the guitar sound, delete the bounced tracks, increase the buffer size of your audio interface to lower ASIO/CPU usage (e.g. to 2048 samples), enable GR4 on the original tracks and start mixing

3. If not already done, uncheck the "HI" button on the upper right in the GR4 window next to the CPU-usage info while recording/arranging and change to HI-quality-mode again after increasing the buffer size during mixdown.

 

ok this is for the initial person who posted this. are you still there, given this was 4 years ago. I am sort of where you are now, but have enough processing power to be able to have many guitar rigs running. however I would like to know the best way to record guitars. I am using logic pro X on a new iMac with SSD, monitors, audio interface, lots of guitars including an acoustic mic'd up and komplete 10, which includes guitar rig 5 (which I think is awesome). any advice is very appreciated!