Yes it is. Any electric instrument is bound to keep you spending money. If not for electricity then new strings and if when things go wrong with it. Amp, and pedals, tuner... If you ever want to record you need even more.

If you are content strumming an accoustic on after work at your house thats fine, but if you plan on taking it anywhere you will need more. Can definitly be done cheaply though. I have a 300 dollar guitar and 300$ amp with about 150 in pedals. Thats much less than many spend on an electric alone.

That's actually the amount I'm hoping to get when I finally put my LTD up for sale hahaha (it just collects dust for the most part now).

Sounds ****ed up but I keep my tube amp for 2 reasons.

1. Its ****ing awesome.

2. If I ever cant pay my rent I can sell it and have time to find another job.

Didn't check this for while.

Honestly, the mix as a whole is pretty poor there. There's no definition to anything and your lowered guitar thing is indistinguishable from what happens when you just mix a regular guitar with the bass whacked all the way up. Its muddy all over.

On top of that, your kick drum is actually so quiet in the mix that its barely audible even during the lower break.

And I'm not saying this just because I don't like using lowered bass tones from guitars. I'm saying this because that genuinely IS a pretty poor overall mix, and a big part of that is that your kick drum is too quiet (and too soft sounding, there's no impact to it, it soudns too much like WHUF and not enough like THUD and you've got way too much bass in the mix on everything, which is robbing everything of attack and definition. If you compare what you've done there, with something like, say, this:


10. Pet - A Perfect Circle - YouTube

You can hear that despite the mix being just as, if not more, bass heavy, than what you've made there, nothing is stepping on anything else. You can clearly seperate the bass from the guitars, and the guitars are doing their job in holding down the MIDRANGE of the mix, where they SHOULD be.

Because of that, the mix has been handled properly. You'll find very swiftly if you hang around with anyone who mixes properly, that one of the basics of mixing guitars and bass together is actually to run a High Pass filter on the guitars at about 100Hz, to remove the low end flub inherent in the instrument when playing powerchords.

Why only powerchords? Easy. There's a shared harmonic between a note and its 5th. When playing the two together, a beat frequency is created with a frequency exactly half of the root funadmental. That means when you play powerchords you can actually hear a tone an octave below what you're playing.

That ruins mixes very quickly, because the guitar starts to step on frequency ranges the bass should be covering with its own timbre. The bass of the whole mix becomes very undefined and in some cases even starts to show signs of chorusing as the instrument that SHOULD be handling the low end, fights for it with the instrument whose actual fundamentals should be in the midrange.

And thats why getting a proper bass is way better than using mock bass tones.

Umm, ok. You can blame orDrumbox for the kick drum. It took me all of about 10 minutes to DL it, and set up a drumtrack. All my tunes are created in Audacity, which is likely way below standards for professional recording such as the PC you posted. I put up my tune as an EXAMPLE but if you want to pick it apart, thats your perogi.

Dude, I'm just a hack with a guitar.

Phhhhhhht... I'll whittle me a plank and tie a piece of string to it.

Cost = $0.00

You put up your tune as an example of getting a good sound without a bass.

I pointed out it isn't a good sound.

Now you're trying to back out of the discussion as if I'm being an ******* for standing by what I've said since the start?

Yeah, my apologies. I does suck. Back to the drawing board for me. It's a shame I don't have someone like you to do all the sound engineering when inspiration strikes, and I'm being serious.

Just for clarity. I offered the tune in question up for some other guitarists to hear and here's a couple responses:

But the "Guitar as Bass" wasn't in question, so... I really don't know what that hell I'm trying to say. I'll just stop now before I dig myself any deeper.

I got positive responses to a lot of stuff years ago I'd be ashamed to show people today. People tend to be nice for the sake of it. It takes someone informed to make a constructive criticism.

I'm not going to change my mind. I listened, I analysed, and I posted why I think that mix is bad, and I also posted a number of things you could do to fix it, first among which is to high pass the guitars and get a proper bass sound, just like the vast majority of rock production you will ever hear. They're not doing it because they can do without it, they're doing it because its better. A *lot* better.