Bands like Cannibal Corpse play with tons of gain...but how come on their records you can't hear any hiss? Like, when I plug in a Digitech death metal pedal there's a deafening hiss when I play loud. Is there some magic secret to get this out of your recordings?

Gonna take a guess at this:

they probably use a noise gate when they aren't playing so its quiet
and in recordings (and maybe live if they got the money) have a low pass to just get rid of the high hissing frequencies

It would probably help if you weren't using a Digitech Death Metal pedal. Those things are stupidly noisy.

I use a digitech death metal pedal too, and I love the distortion it produces. It helped for me to turn the guitar volume to around 60% and the overdrive on my amp to 50%.

Indeed. I have it too, it's the most noisy pedal EVER. Anyway, it's easy to get rid of noise in the studio, you just use Noise Removal or Gate, basically the same effect with different names depending on the program I think. It's a really easy affair, you can even do it with Audacity.

Noisegating certainly seems like a solution, although I don't like how you can hear the noise blast through your speakers as soon as you pick a note. To me it seems more distracting than just having that same noise at a constant level.

Oh well, there's probably some way around it. I'll mess with my settings.



Is that...er...a good thing?

^ Well, it helped me get rid of the noise without compromising on the sound to a large extent.
Considering the pedals distortion abilities, I figured I could do without much of the amps overdrive.

Throw away that Digitech, its a piece of shit.

First of all, noise is caused mainly by electrical interference and gain. To reduce this, clean up your power source with power filters, ground fixing, etc... This is a fairly difficult thing to do without hiring an electrician.

Other than that, you can arrange your power cables to run perpindicular to your instrument cables, run the shortest cable lengths possible, use balanced cabling when possible, using low noise tubes, using less gain than you think you need, and noise gating. There is always a small amount of noise in any guitar tone, and a good noise gate set well will cancel the silence while allowing the guitar tone to come through.

The ISP Decimator is probably the best hardware guitar noise gate.

For setting gain, chug palm mutes on the low strings and adjust the gain so that it gets the tone you want. The back off until you can hear a big difference between palm muting lightly and palm muting really hard. That's about where you want your gain to be for recording. Any more and you get a shitload of noise and you lose all dynamics, as well as note definition.

Similar advice to mattp (he gives good advice!)

My brother provided me with the following solutions which work very well for any audio equipment:
-Ground loop isolators on the power supply of each piece of equipment (amp, pedals, rack equipment).
-For mains hum (power lines), 1/3 octave notch filters at 60hz and 120hz.
-Cable shielding terminated only at the amp end, as well proper shielding on the cables linking other pieces of gear (pedals etc).

A pro musician explained his noise reduction setup to me:
-A front-end noise reduction unit such as an ISP Decimator Pro Rack G for rack mounted gear, a stereo unit which can handle two heads/signals at once - ISP Decimator pedal for simpler setups (a Boss NS-2 also works for a pedal).
-Effects loop noise reduction from a unit such as a Rocktron Hush Super C to deal with any interference in your effects loop.

For a simple setup such as an amp and a pedal or two, go for a Boss NS-2 or ISP Decimator pedal.
On the most basic level, make sure your guitar's electronics cavity is shielded and properly grounded, check the components to see if they are noisy, and of course, use a good pickup (stock HO pickups and no-name pickups are often noisy) - pretty much any offering from DiMarzio, Duncan, EMG, et al will be good when properly installed.