Hello All, I recently got myself into Atmospheric Black Metal and some of the bands have this type of guitar tone with a shit ton of treble that sounds like a wall of noise. I'm really digging this type of sound and it works perfect for this kind of music imo.

So my question is, how can dial in this guitar sound?
I mostly use amp sims so if I can achieve that sound using only vsts it would be extra nice.

The best example of that guitar tone that I could find is on the album Muinainen by Kalmankantaja


Thank you in advance.

Most amp sims are gonna be for big tube heads like 5150s, dual rectifiers, the classic Marshall, etc. There are a billion Marshall JCM800 models out there floating around, some for free, so I'd start on that one since Marshalls tend to have a very strong mid to high range. A Peavey 5150 is what I use for one of my black metal projects in which Im looking for a more trebly kind of tone. I know Lepou have several free amp sims you can download and one is a JCM800 lookalike, but I don't know that they have a 5150. The one I use is from Kazrog and I had to pay for it. You're gonna want to run a lot of gain through whatever you use obviously. A tube screamer overdrive is the norm and there are a lot of freebies on the internet, but if you're looking for this lofi kind of sound then maybe get some kind of hard distortion pedal (different from an overdrive, can clarify if need be) since it has a different kind of sound that might suit what you want more.

Audioriy have a pretty cool free amp sim available that's modeled after a solid state Marshall amp. Has a built in cab sim and I think with a bit of boost on the gain it can sound very good for lofi black metal. Id for sure recommend trying that one.

The fastest way to a lofi tone like this is definitely a live recorded solid state amp with ridiculous blown out settings but since you're doing it digitally you'll probably need to rely on testing different amps/cabs/distortions/overdrives and then EQ it in a specific way. Nembrini have a lofi clipper that could be helpful, but it costs money albeit not a lot. It's literally intended for saturation and distortion to lightly clip the track or mix in a way that sounds lofi.

Bands LOVE talking about their gear/tone/processes. Try hitting up Kalmankantaja directly via their Bandcamp page and they may be willing to pass on their secrets.

Aside from that and the great advice from Gameofmetal, there's also YouTube:

Go with a real amp to record these sounds. People say "oh but check out Kemper and Bias FX etc," but I have yet to hear an amp sim that isn't full of synthetic digital fizz. Amp sims may be alright for thicker, chunkier, more dynamic playing, but with tremolo-picked/wall of noise type music i always find that the digital sound is really grating on me after a few minutes. On top of the white noise, there's all the little digital steps that make up the waveform which are pinging into my head in all the wrong ways. Then again, I can't stand ripping my CDs to my computer in anything lower than 320k because of the squid noises, so I guess it depends who you talk to.