kayDUB wrote
I think one of the best kept secrets for new guitarist's is MIDS MIDS MIDS. For some reason I just dropped all the mids from my sound in the beginning, but boosting the mids really improved my tone (at least I like to think so!)
The guitar lives in the mids and our hearing is keyed to the midrange (between 1K and 5KHz) because the human voice is all mids too. The reason you dropped all the mids from your sound is because you were playing at lower volumes at first and the human ear is more sensitive to midrange at lower volumes than it is to treble and bass frequencies. So at low volumes, you hear the midrange as if it were heavily boosted. This is also why a hifi loudness control boosts the treble and bass - to get a more balanced EQ at low volumes.
For more, read up on the work of those two wonderful blokes, Fletcher and Munson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher-Munson
Interestingly this all goes to explain many things in the guitar world: why the tone of a Fender guitar and amp fits "around" the vocals so well (natural midrange scoop, leaving space for the vocals in the mix), why the Tube Screamer became so popular as a lead boost pedal for Fender players (midrange hump, making the guitar jump out of the mix), why when "lead" guitar became popular Gibson Les Pauls were saved from obscurity and Marshall amps became popular (both mid heavy), why "bedroom metalheads" (?) usually have a hugely mid scooped sound, etc., etc., etc..
