One of my major goals when mixing the guitars was to make sure that the lead and rhythm guitars were easy to distinguish between, the two guitars were somewhat the same tonally. The way that the lead guitar was tracked made it easier for me to add effects to separate parts of the song, as the lead was recorded once with the verse parts and then recorded the solos and chorus parts as they have a different tone and required different settings on the amp and pedals.
I started with the rhythm guitar as that is playing through the majority of the songs from start to finish. I ran the track through the Eleven-lite amp plug-in to give it more of a bite and a cleaner sound as I found that it helped to cut through the rest of the music and made it stand out against the lead. I avoided adding any reverb to the rhythm guitar as I had added reverb to the other guitars and didn’t want it to become cluttered and messy.
For the lead parts that weren’t solos or choruses, I left them alone mostly apart from some basic EQ to cut out some of the low-end and also add more clarity and brightness to the guitar sound. For the solos, I ran it through the same amp plug-in as I did with the rhythm guitar but instead made the high-end frequencies stand out more and cut out some of the low-end to give it clarity. I added some reverb to both of the lead tracks as I believe it added some presence to the mix and also cut out some of the harsher sounding parts.
I aimed to make the guitars sound like classic rock guitars, some of which were included in the inspirations playlist i mentioned near the start of the blog posts. I used these as inspiration as they have guitars that vary in frequency ranges, the leads tend to be rather high and the rhythm, mid to low range. They included songs such as:
The Darkness – I Believe In A Thing Called Love
Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child Of Mine
http://atoragon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/how-to-mix-guitar-solo-guide-for-dummies.html
http://www.guitarplayer.com/miscellaneous/1139/7-eq-tips-for-mixing-guitar/23122