Producer/Engineer Joe Barresi On Mixing Distorted Guitars

When it comes to hard rock guitar recording and mixing, producer/engineer Joe Barresi is considered the king. He’s worked with Soundgarden, Tool, Queens Of The Stone Age, Slipknot, among many others, and his work is widely admired by both artists and other top-of-the-line engineers. In this video he shows how he treats distorted rhythm and lead guitars to make them fit into a mix.

Joe covers a lot of ground here, including his general approach, compressing rhythm guitars, parallel distortion, panning outside the speakers, and making solo guitars stand out. As you’ll see, he also leans heavily on some Waves plugins, which you can see here along with some other videos by Joe.

As you probably know if you’ve been mixing for a while, clean tracks are somewhat easy to mix, but everything gets more complicated when distortion is involved, especially multiple distorted guitars, which is why this video is so useful if you work in that area.