When one thinks 80s and rock music there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. The first may be the infamous gated snare drum with its huge reverb on it. But then it would definitely be the super wide, super thick guitar sounds, too! Those were generally achieved with a lot of a chorus effect applied to them, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do in this session. Our weapon of choice? The DDD – Dimension Chorus, of course!
Here’s our example track for today. There’s one clean and one lead guitar, each of which we will process individually:
Clean Thickness
We kick things off by inserting one instance of DDD on the clean guitar’s channel – or rather bus, since we’re actually working with two separate takes, panned hard left and right respectively. With its few controls the plugin is really plain simple from the outside. However, this also gives us instant gratification right in the moment we insert it. The question hence is not directly, which setting works, because pretty much every one will do. The question is which works best!
Let’s take care of the four modes first. Basically, the higher the number, the more intense the effect will be. For our clean guitars we choose the fourth one, not least because it is straight stereo. After that we turn down the GAIN-knob to about 10 o’clock. This knob controls the integrated compander – when turned up the signal will get just a little bit more grit. Although this effect is really subtle, we prefer to go with a smoother sound. After all, we’re still working on clean guitars here. Finally, we adjust the MIX-control so that some of the dry signal is blended in again. This will give us some of the clarity and punch of the original guitar sound.
The interface of this instance should now look something like this:
Lush Leader
Next up is the lead guitar. We place another DDD on this track, before choosing mode 2. This time we also drive the GAIN-knob a bit, and blend in less of the dry signal as before. Maybe one brief side note: you may have noticed the echo (or delay) effect on the lead guitar. We placed this after the DDD, since we want to affect only the processed sound – otherwise the overall sound would be kind of muddy.
The interface of the second instance should now look something like this:
The Result
And here’s our final track – be ready for some serious 80s vibe!
You can download both presets for DDD here: DDD 80s Guitars Presets