Guitars in parallel - Musical Creativity 1

Mon, 07/16/2007 - 18:26 — Alan

Guitars in Parallel

Send a guitar through a parallel bus and put a noise gate followed by effects on the bus.

Why? If you set it up properly, you can have the sound change based on the input volume, e.g. pick the strings harder and it will bring in the effects, play quieter and leave the tone clean. Depending on how the noise gate is set, you can have this fading in and out or cutting in and out, almost stuttering. This is a more drastic change than what you'd get out of a valve amp set just on the edge.

Steps

Using a DI input, setup a guitar channel to record

Create a bus

Add a noisegate to the bus

Create a send on the input channel to the bus

Set the noise gate while playing the guitar, make sure that its threshold is activated when you play the guitar at middle-high volume when plucking or strumming and that the signal is off when plucking quietly

Add your chosen effect (e.g. a distortion)

Set the volume output of the bus so that the clean and distorted sounds have similar volumes

Play your guitar and record

Variations

Change the noisegate to be listening to a lower frequency

Change the effects

Use a compressor on the bus with sidechain to the clean signal

Use a sidechain on the noisegate keyed to a drum or bass track (can bring in the effect with the beat)
I've attached a sample and a screenshot of how it works in Logic Pro. I actually used a few more effects than just a distortion to make it work better for me.

Try it and let me know how you get on.

Part of a series by Award Sounds offering a selection of creative ideas to kick-start or rejuvenate a composition.

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Comments

Wed, 08/15/2007 - 15:03 — Alan

Less noise

By far the biggest variation for me has been the settings on the noisegate. Even just a 5 ms attack rate can make a difference. How much in sync does the heavy sound have to be with the increase in volume from the clean? I ended up wanting it as instantaneous as I could get, so 0 ms attack. More important has been the hold and release settings. 200ms for the release and you can begin to hear the heavier sound after the clean guitar has gone quiet. Listen to the attachment and you can hear it where the difference between loud and quiet is greatest.

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