Hey,
So I’ve been working on recording a song and I am trying to get a solo tone similar to the kind of long, sustained, gain-y yet clean sound that The War on Drugs tends to use.
Any suggestions? I’m mostly recording direct input through my pedal board into a tascam sound card. I’ve fiddled around with my overdrive pedal (Soul Food) but the tone gets too distorted and muddy to give that clean sustain.
Is it time to get a sustain pedal? Apologies in advance if what I’m asking about gear doesn’t make much sense…
I’m not familiar with the exact tone OP wants but a compressor is a safe place to start if they want sustain without additional coloring.
What DAW are you using OP? The stock comp plugin should be totally serviceable.
I’m using Ableton, so there should definitely be options to play around with compression. I hadn’t thought of using compression to achieve that kind of tone but now that you mention it, it seems reasonable haha. I’ll give it a shot!
Good luck! I personally started to use compression in my chain much more once I started thinking of it as a waveform shaping tool.