August Burns Red’s Metal Guitar Editing: Track Slower, Edit Tighter

Ever found yourself battling to get those rhythm guitars perfectly tight in your metal mix? You chop, you nudge, you crossfade, and sometimes it still sounds a bit off, or worse, full of clicks and awkward gaps. Well, Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland, the masterminds behind August Burns Red’s massive sound, shared a killer tracking and editing technique that might just change how you approach recording metal guitars. We got the lowdown during their Nail The Mix session for “Coordinates,” and it’s a deceptively simple but powerful concept.

The core idea? Track your guitars slightly slower than the song’s actual tempo, then edit them to the grid at the correct speed. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive, right? Let’s dive into why this works so well. Check out the full Nail The Mix session here.

The “Track Slower, Edit Faster” Philosophy

When you’re aiming for machine-gun precision in modern metal, every transient matters. The traditional approach of tracking at tempo and then fixing mistakes can often lead to headaches, especially if a player rushes a section.

Why Track Slower? The Built-in Wiggle Room

Carson Slovak explained that tracking slightly under tempo gives you crucial “wiggle room.” If a riff is played at, say, 150 BPM and tracked at 150 BPM, but the guitarist rushes a hit, you’re forced to move that transient earlier onto the grid. This instantly creates a gap – a void of audio information. You can try to fill it with long crossfades or time-stretching tools like Pro Tools’ Elastic Audio, but these methods can introduce artifacts and unnatural sounds.

By tracking slower (e.g., tracking at 184 BPM for a song section that’s actually 190 BPM), you’re ensuring that when you move a transient forward to the grid, you’re essentially just trimming the end of the note, not creating an empty space. This leads to much more natural-sounding edits with fewer artifacts. You’re minimizing the need for destructive time compression or expansion on individual notes.

The Human Element: Rushing Under Pressure

It’s a common phenomenon: when a musician tracks solo to a click track, focusing intently on their performance, there’s a natural human inclination to speed up slightly. This happens with guitarists, drummers – pretty much everyone. Carson mentioned that often, after tracking a part “slower,” he’ll move it into place at the song’s actual tempo, and it lines up perfectly without much, or any, additional editing. It’s almost like a psychological trick to counteract that natural tendency to rush, ensuring the performance itself is solid and well-played, just at a more relaxed pace.

This approach also allows the player to focus on delivering a clean, competent take without the added pressure of nailing the tempo perfectly on every rep. As we’ll see, this comfort can lead to better raw performances.

The Nitty-Gritty: August Burns Red’s Editing Workflow

So, how do Carson and Grant actually implement this? It’s a systematic process that leverages the clarity of DI (Direct Input) guitar signals.

Visual Cues: The Power of DI Transients

Having a clean, clear DI track grouped with your amp track is crucial. The DI signal provides a sharp, easily identifiable visual reference for each pick attack. For the August Burns Red sessions, the DI wasn’t totally clean; it ran through an API preamp, adding a touch of gain and color, which can actually help make those transients even more visible. A good, strong DI signal makes it much easier to see exactly where each note begins, which is vital for precise editing. If you’re struggling to see transients, it might be down to the player’s picking style, but a well-recorded DI is your best friend here.

Aligning to the Grid in Pro Tools

Once the slightly slower take is recorded, the editing process begins. In Pro Tools, Carson would typically use Tab-to-Transient to quickly jump to the start of each note on the DI track. He’d then separate the clip (often using Command+E on a Mac or Control+E on Windows) and manually drag the beginning of that new clip to the correct grid line corresponding to the song’s actual tempo.

Imagine the song is 190 BPM, but the part was tracked at 184 BPM. He’d set his Pro Tools session tempo to 190 BPM and then align the transients from the 184 BPM recording to this new, faster grid.

The “Nudge Trick” to Restore Pick Attack: This is Key!

Here’s a super important detail: when you align the very beginning of a DI transient directly to the grid, you’ve often cut off the almost imperceptible sound of the pick hitting the string just before the main body of the note blooms through a distorted amp. This pick attack is vital for the aggression and clarity of metal guitars.

To bring this back, Carson uses a clever “nudge” trick:

1. Set Nudge Value: He sets his nudge value in Pro Tools to around 600 milliseconds (though he mentions this can vary, likely meaning samples or a similar small unit, as 600ms is very large. The video context implies a very small nudge to reveal pre-transient info, perhaps he meant 600 samples or a similar small time unit like 6ms or even 0.6ms. For precise pick attack, you’d typically experiment with values between 1-10 milliseconds.
2. Nudge Audio Earlier: With all the edited clips selected, he uses a Pro Tools shortcut (Control + Minus on the numeric keypad for Mac, likely Alt + Minus for Windows, or using the main keyboard with different modifiers depending on setup) to nudge the audio content within each clip backward by that set value. The clip boundaries stay on the grid, but the audio inside shifts earlier.
3. Nudge Clips Back: Then, without the Control/Alt modifier, he nudges the entire selection of clips (the clip boundaries themselves) forward by the same nudge value, putting them back perfectly on the grid.

The net effect? The start of each clip is still perfectly on the grid, but the audio within each clip now starts slightly before the main transient you initially aligned, reintroducing that crucial pick attack. This batch process is a massive time-saver and ensures consistency.

Batch Fades for Smoothness

Once all the edits are in place and the pick attack is restored, the final step in this stage is to apply batch fades. Carson typically uses a 5-millisecond fade at the beginning and end of each clip. This helps to prevent any potential clicks or pops at the edit points, ensuring super smooth transitions between notes.

Considerations and Applications

This technique is incredibly powerful, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

When Does This Work Best?

This method shines for tight, precise rhythm guitars in metal, just like those found in August Burns Red’s music. It’s where that machine-like consistency is paramount. The more staccato and percussive the riff, the better this tends to work because you’re less worried about the natural decay of one note bleeding into the next in a specific way.

When to Be Cautious

• Expressive Leads & Solos: For more expressive lead guitar parts or solos that rely heavily on a specific feel, legato, or nuanced dynamics, this surgical editing might not be the best fit. For those, the August Burns Red team would often resort to traditional methods: recording multiple takes on playlists and comping together the best moments.
• Clean Guitars: This technique generally doesn’t work as well for clean guitars, especially if there are notes ringing out and sustaining over each other. Moving a note can drastically alter how its decay interacts with subsequent notes, making edits sound obvious and jarring. Preserving that natural sustain and interplay is key with cleans, which might require more traditional editing or focusing on EQ strategies to maintain clarity rather than aggressive chopping.
• Drums (with caveats): Grant McFarland mentioned this “track slower” approach can also be fantastic for drums. It can make a great drummer sound even tighter, or help fix a poorer performance. However, you have to be more careful with drums than with distorted guitars. Tracking drums too much slower can lead to issues with cymbal decay. If you move a drum hit significantly, you might cut off a larger chunk of the preceding cymbal’s ring-out, making the cymbals sound choked or unnatural. For the August Burns Red record, they tracked drums only very slightly slower for this reason.

Beyond the Edit: Performer Comfort & Practice Tips

An often-overlooked benefit of this technique is performer comfort. Asking a guitarist to play a blistering riff slightly slower can reduce their stress and allow them to focus on execution and tone, rather than just struggling to keep up. This often results in cleaner, more consistent takes from the get-go. If the performance itself feels better and sounds more solid, even if a bit slow, you have a much better foundation to work with.

Eyal Levi also chimed in with a great tip for bands: if a song is at the very edge of your comfortable playing ability, try practicing it 5 or 10 BPM slower. It’s still close enough to the original feel, but relaxed enough to help you lock in and improve your tightness – the same principle that makes this recording technique so effective!

Nail Your Own Tight Metal Guitar Edits

This “track slower, edit faster” method, complete with the DI visualization and the pick-attack nudge trick, is a powerful tool for achieving incredibly tight and natural-sounding metal guitars. It’s a testament to how August Burns Red’s producers meticulously craft their sound, balancing technical precision with musicality.

Want to see exactly how pros like Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland pull off techniques like this and then mix an entire August Burns Red track from scratch? That’s what Nail The Mix is all about. You get the raw multitracks and watch the original producer mix the song, explaining every plugin, every fader move, and every decision. Dive deeper into the August Burns Red “Coordinates” session to see this technique in action.

And if you’re looking to build a solid foundation in mixing modern metal, from pristine DIs to powerful final masters, check out our comprehensive course, “Unlock Your Sound: Mixing Modern Metal Beyond Presets”. Learn how to make your edits seamless and then apply things like metal compression secrets to make those tight guitars punch through the mix.