“Most people are only going to listen to your song once – how can you stand out and stay there?” Sleep Token and Tesseract’s mixing engineers reveal how to improve your guitar recordings – and it starts with ditching your ego

Young man recording guitar tunes on a laptop in his DIY home studio.

Gone are the days of the inferior bedroom producer. As production gear and software becomes ever-more affordable, spare rooms become more viable alternatives to Abbey Road. Whether your homemade productions are for sharing with bandmates, seducing industry professionals or official releases, the tech is more accessible than ever – but making your music stand out in a saturated market isn’t.

With so many variables to self-recording and mixing guitars, as well as a raft of conflicting information online, Guitar World sat down with esteemed producers George Lever (Sleep Token, Loathe, Monuments) and Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Tesseract, Caligula’s Horse) to learn about what to do, and what not do, to make your productions pop.