Guitars in parallel - Musical Creativity 1

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 [0] 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 [0] by Award Sounds [1] offering a selection of creative ideas to kick-start or rejuvenate a composition.