RECREATING THE LEGENDARY | Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana
During this series, I am going to share my attempts to recreate the guitar sound from legendary recordings on a budget, mostly using plugins. Here you’ll see the detailed construction of the sound, my thinking process while creating it and the result.
All the schemes are self-created. Please contact me if you want to use any of the materials in your videos, presentations, etc.
Today, I am going to try to recreate the iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit guitar sound. Kurt Cobain used loads of different gear so I won’t try to find plugins replicating the pedals and amps he used. I’ll just stick to the sound.
There are 4 main sounds in this recording: Intro, Chorus, Verse and Solo.
Intro sound
The song starts with a single guitar strumming the main riff through a clean unsaturated amp. Generally, we should look for a clean US Amp, meaning something based on a 6L6 power amp tubes. The sound on the recording is as neutral as it can get. So what you should do is set everything to ‘5’ (or “noon”) and do some minor tweaks to fit the sound. I increased gain and master settings to ‘7’ to get the sound to break-up and also tweaked bass and middle controls to ‘6’ to compensate for the initial sound of my guitar.
Set the pickup selector switch on your guitar to the ‘bridge’ position.
Note: if your guitar has a bridge single-coil or a bright-sounding humbucker you might need to roll off the presence control to make the guitar sound “duller”, more neutral.
Chorus sound
After a couple of intro bars, the drums come in and guitar, joined by bass, turns on the distortion and keeps on rocking the main riff. Here it becomes tricky. Kurt used a Mesa/Boogie Studio 22 preamp plugged into the Crown Power Base 2 Amp, possibly, with a Boss DS-1 in front of the house. At first, I thought I could model the same setup and get the sound. Then I decided to look through the preset models. And, interestingly, the preset modeled after Peavey 5150 II Rhythm channel worked just fine for the sound. The reference part for the Chorus sound was the ending of the song when the F power chord is left ringing. If you want your guitar to fit right in the mix, you need to roll off the ‘bass’, ‘treble’ and ‘presence’ controls to give some room for bass, drums and vocals. And, yeah, crank the mids to the max, because that’s what Kurt did.
So here are the settings:
Gain — 6
Bass — 3.5
Middle — 10
Treble — 2
Presence — 2
Master — 8
The resulting sound is a subtle, yet punchy rhythm guitar tone.
Note: if your guitar has a bridge single-coil pickup, you might need to max out the gain setting and roll off the presence and treble setting.
Verse sound
And now to the beloved verse sound. Here you can return to the Intro preset and use it as a base for this one. That’s what I did.
Now, what do we need first? Of course, modulation — a chorus pedal. Cobain used Electro-Harmonix Small Clone Analog Chorus, and its plugin replica worked for me very well. The trick here is to put the chorus after the preamp section, in the FX loop, so it can saturate the sound more. Switch the ‘depth’ control to the ‘low’ setting and the ‘rate’ knob to about “3 o’clock”.
After I put the chorus I realized that some frequencies are being pumped and, in some cases, they tend to clash with vocals. So I rolled off the ‘treble’ and ‘presence’ controls of the amp to about ‘2.7’, and then turned the ‘master’ knob to ‘7.5’ just to compensate and give a little push.
Sadly, the sound wouldn’t sit well in the mix. The chorus warped the sound too much with its “rotary”, “leslie” character. Thus, I decided to spread the waves with a spring reverb. I’ve put it after the chorus pedal in the FX loop and set the ‘mix’ control to about ‘2 o’clock’, ‘tone’ control to ‘1 o’clock’ and the ‘dwell’ control to ’10 o’clock’. And it worked!
Note: If it sounds too “round” or “fat” try to pick the strings closer to bridge saddles, before you tweak anything on the amp or pedals.
Solo sound
Similarly, for this part, we will use the Chorus sound as a base. Put a Small Clone chorus with the same settings in the FX loop. Then bring the ‘bass’, ‘treble’ and ‘presence’ up — solo sound needs the ‘body’ to sound fat and smooth in the mix.
Settings:
Gain — 7
Bass — 6
Middle — 9
Treble — 4
Presence — 4
Master — 8
Note: if your guitar has a bridge single-coil or other type of low-output pickups, you might need to put a clean boost pedal in front of the amp with the controls set to boost the volume level.
Conclusion
This was a fun setup to create. The process was quite challenging, but the result is very interesting and fulfilling. I’m genuinely inspired and I’m looking forward to recreating lots of iconic guitar sounds that we all enjoy and love.
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Contact me on tryanglesquare@gmail.com, if you want me to send you the presets for Positive Grid BIAS FX software. Write “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous” in the topic field.
