Try using far less gain on your guitars when recording. Gain that sounds great in-room is too much for a record, generally. The great challenge of recording is

Try using far less gain on your guitars when recording. Gain that sounds great in-room is too much for a record, generally. The great challenge of recording is to capture the authority of a roaring guitar amp, the brashness of drums, the purity of a voice, and then squeeze it down into something that fits in an iPhone earbud and still has realistic proportions. That's why the idea of "accuracy" in recording is so ludicrous. A record is to a live performance as a HO train set is to a real train. It's a miniature, a model. To make it look "right", you have to exaggerate some details and lose others.