I'm curious about how to track certain types of songs. The example I want to use is "Classic 50-1" which can be found in my signature. There are 2 guitar parts. 1 clean and 1 dirty. Should each only be tracked once, or double tracked (recorded twice, not copied)? Should one be panned left and one right? When I add a solo, where should it sit in the mix? left, right, center, or copied and placed left and right?

I'm going to be redoing this song and a few others that I've already done is why I ask.

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The fun thing about recording/mixing is that there are no rules, do whatever sounds good to you.

The best thing to do in your case is to listen to a couple of cds that you like, and listen to how things are done on those.

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As SPL said "there are no rules". Some of the things you could try with that track are
Copy both tracks and delay the copies by 20 - 30 milliseconds. now experiment with panning the 4 tracks - try hard left and right on the distorted guitar and a closer split on the clean. or pan one left with the copy hard right at a lower level and the opposite with the other track. The great thing about home recording is you dont have to watch the clock so you have plenty of time to experiment.

I'll probalby record 2 track of the dirty guitar, because that just sounds much thicker and more real. I'll probalby just make a copy of the clean track and adjust the eq slightly and give it a slight delay. I wish there was a varying delay setting so you could say set the time to vary anywhere between say 0ms to 30 ms. I think that would give a pretty good double tracked effect.

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I think that would probably give you quite a phaser-ish sound.

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Double tracking is normally used to thicken up a guitar sound.
If you are happy with the way it sounds Id not bother.

Spatial separation can be used to several ends. I usually use it to stop tracks that have a similar frequency distribution from fighting with one another. This is why people often pan one guitar hard left and one hard right and then only adjust the EQ a little bit as opposed to having them on top of one another and having to EQ them to bits.

Their is a ADT (automatic double tracking) function which will look at the tempo of the song to determines the delay added to the second (copied) track. This avoids a phaser-ish sound and can work well.

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is the ADT a plug-in that can be downloaded, or something that comes with a certain program?

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