This article is mainly for all of you who are in a band(s) or are attempting to be. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bunch of you misconstrue this article as a rant or a tool for me to vent about reactions to Periphery. To those of you who still believe that is my goal by the end of this, I would like to thank you. Although it is sad to see you miss the point entirely, perhaps you weren’t intended to understand this concept to begin with. And with this industry being about survival of the fittest, you are only going to make the lives of other professional musicians that much easier!

Let us start with a few things we know about the music industry:

1) It is hard to break into. Everyone wants to be in a band, and now that anyone can make music on a laptop, the industry is more saturated than ever. There are subgenres with absurd names popping up every day (for example the one that begins with the letters “Dj”). So as you start thinking about forming your first band and/or project, the odds are already highly stacked against you.

2) There are two main groups of factors that affect how successful a band is: factors you have control over like conducting good/smart business, and factors you don’t have control over such as being in the right place at the right time, and whether your music will be liked or not. This article is going to focus on one aspect that you DO have control over.

3) Everyone is on the Internet. People’s dogs have Facebook pages. And just because some people don’t post on forums or comment on blogs doesn’t mean they don’t read what is said. The grand majority of your favorite bands and musicians read a lot of the same sites you do, and lurk on a lot of the forums and blogs you frequent and perhaps post on as well.

4) At the end of the day, like it or not, this industry is a business. And the most successful bands usually get as far as they do by treating it like one. Sure you can have fun with it, but if you have ever wondered “Why did Band X make it and Band Y didn’t?” chances are Band X was better at the business side of things. That is the difference between making some noise for a few years and making a career.

With these four points in mind, perhaps you can see what I’m getting at.

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You asked and Misha answered. Today, the Periphery guitarist/mastermind and #20 on our list of the Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, tackles more MS reader-submitted questions about gear, guitars, and more. This week: Misha’s preferred method for recording guitars directly to a computer, the best way to record drums on a budget, and how Misha created the sexy synth/drum loops on the Periphery and Animals as Leaders albums.

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He’s baaaaaaack. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and staring down a long summer break from touring, Misha has returned to his duties as resident gear guru / nerd-face at the MS Mansion and is ready to answer the questions you asked him last time. After the jump, Bulb tells you how he tunes his 7 and 8 string guitars (and approaches writing with each), and what his favorite wireless system is. As always, feel free to ask Misha questions you’d like answered in future columns in the comments.

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As part of our sponsorship of The Legacy Tour, featuring Darkest Hour, Veil of Maya, Periphery and Revocation, one member from each band will be penning an exclusive blog entry for MetalSucks to run during the tour (get a full list of tour dates here). Our first entry featured Veil of Maya guitarist Marc Okubo taking us on a run-through of his entire live rig, and the second entry was an update from Revocation’s Dave Davidson. Here’s Periphery’s Misha Mansoor on his new live rig setup (the idea for which he first mentioned in a prior column) and how that’s working out for him:

So a little while back I posted a column about going direct with the guitars on a future tour, and that tour just so happens to be this tour we are on now with Revocation, Veil Of Maya and Darkest Hour. The idea behind going direct is that instead of having an amp/rig that goes through a cabinet then gets mic’ed up, you just take an audio signal direct to the board and skip the whole cab and mic. This allows for a simpler and cleaner signal chain, as removing the cab, mic and mic-placement variables makes the signal extremely consistent every night. Now we are going direct with our Fractal AxeFX Ultras which is an absolutely phenomenal unit for direct tones.

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Alight guys, sorry I haven’t posted an article in a while, but I’m here now with something I think is kinda cool and rarely gets talked about in the metal world: Groove.

Some of you guys may know just how much I love a rhythm that grooves, something that just makes you want to bob your head to it, and there’s more to it than just getting playful with the accents or syncopating a beat. There are the more subtle aspects, the kind that sometimes don’t translate so well to recordings. I mean, what is groove exactly and what gives it that “feel”? Who in the band really affects the level of groove — is it just the drummer, the drummer and the bassist, or the band as a whole?

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If any of you guys know me, you know that I have a permanent hard-on for my Fractal AxeFx Ultra, and although some of you may hate my tone, you would be silly to think that you couldn’t dial in a tone that your weird ears like, and then some. This one is for the gear nerds out there.

This is more than a Fractal plug, I swear. Let’s call this more of an open test/experiment in progress because I am in the midst of quite an awesome dilemma at the moment. I am stuck between deciding on how best to use my AxeFx in a live situation, because both options it affords are amazing.

We just did a little tour in Australia with Dillinger and Maylene, and on that tour we were getting amps from backline companies (read: different amps every day). So we figured the best way to get some consistency would be to plug our AxeFxs into the effects loop return of the amps and use them for their tube power sections. This worked out pretty damn well for the most part; you could hear how each different poweramp had its own distinct sound, but when it was awesome, it was AWESOME. Only at one show did I actually get the amp I had asked for, and that was an Engl Invader (150 to be more precise) and that EL34 poweramp sounded so godly that I thought perhaps that was the way to go. Or at least something similar: a good tube poweramp (may make more sense for a rack unit ala Fryette 2/50/2 or Mesa 2:90) through a 4×12 cabinet. Good old Preamp->Tube Poweramp->Cab->Mic->PA in a live context, which is what 99% of bands do nowadays. And with this setup you get that amazing feel of a tube amp and that response they are known for.

However there is another option with the AxeFx, and that is going direct.

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MOAR IST ALWAYS BETTER!!!!

Ok guys, so since we started off with some live tone tips last time, I figured for this column we’d talk a bit about my experience in the studio. I say “my experience” because unfortunately there are few absolute truths when it comes to anything having to do with art, as it is all painfully subjective blahblahblah… so please feel free to take all this info with a grain of salt. This is just some info that I really wish I had known about when I was just starting to record; instead I had to figure it out the hard way, so maybe this can save some time and trouble for a few of you guys!

I’m sure some of you guys already know the stuff I am about to cover in the next few paragraphs, but a select few will bother reading the whole damn thing anyway and then complain that you know it all already and that it was a waste of time reading, etc. If I am describing someone that sounds scarily similar to you, I recommend not reading this column. Just stop right here and you’ll save that many minutes of your life! You’re welcome!

The first thing I want to talk about is quad (or more) tracking and some of the misconceptions that surround it. A lot of people ask me if I quad track and if it is indeed the key to getting a “big” sound when recording guitars. The answer is tricky, as I wouldn’t say it makes recordings sound big in the traditional sense. Two important side effects (sometimes desirable, sometimes not) are 1) for lack of a better word “squishier” sounding guitars, and 2) an almost chorus-like effect on the guitar. The reasons for this are pretty simple: when you have 4 or more guitars playing the same part, because of the nature of trying to do exactly the same thing but not quite achieving it because you are a human being, the attack of the transients doesn’t always line up. This is the case with 2 guitars, but it’s exponentially harder to achieve with 4. Your attack ends up getting sort of “averaged out” between the 4 note attacks, and it makes the result not hit quite as hard. Because of the minute differences in the 4 takes, those differences really add up. Especially if you tend to pick hard, the guitars will chorus against each other because of the minute pitch differences at every spot.

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I know all of you guise have been in the situation where you are at a show trying to enjoy a band, but all you hear out of the guitars is just “pshshhrhhhshrhhshhsh” or something similar to distorted white noise and that flubby low-end fart sound that we all know and love dearly. Fingers be a movin’ but the sound remains pretty much constant.

Now there are several potential reasons for this: some are out of your control like a shitty sound guy, system or room, and those things can make even a great sound engineer have an even worse time than when you French fry when you were supposed to Pizza. But there are aspects within your control which can facilitate or sometimes even remedy those issues to a degree. And that’s what I want to talk about. For those of us who play shows regularly and/or tour we can bitch all day about the things out of our control that make our lives miserable, but sadly those things aren’t likely to change any time soon. But I feel like I see a lot of people who could make their live tone that much better before it’s even miked up, as it’s near impossible to polish a turd, especially not with a line check that’s less than five minutes.

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