As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing…I figured now that I knew how to create setups, I’d come up with an alternate setup for two songs where I felt the guitar sound I was getting from the computer wasn’t working right. Just to recap, the Sonar setup has the bottom three strings going through AmpliTube 2’s octave dividers, and the top four strings summed to an output bus with compression and chorus. The DigiTech GNX3000 takes the Digital Les Paul’s “classic” output and gives a more conventional “lead guitar” sound.
However, these two problem songs have more dynamics, so I’d drop out the GNX3000 (I’m soooo grateful for volume pedals!) and just have the computer-based sound from the Digital Les Paul. But the top four strings going through the computer seemed weak; there was just way too much contrast when the GNX3000 kicked in. I wanted something that had more of a synth guitar sound.
I tried adding distortion to the bus with the four strings, but then it sounded like a sort of bad version of the GNX3000. No good.
Next, I used Sonar’s amp plug-in on the top four strings, figuring that the CPU drain wouldn’t be too bad and I could get away with having a sim on each string. I was hoping to get a sound like that of the old Roland GR-300 (still one of my favorite guitar synths, despite being discontinued last century!), where each string was distorted – a hex fuzz effect. But the distortion effect was too mild, and I didn’t like it.
So I tried Sonar’s tape distortion simulator. I’ve actually found this to be very useful, and the quality of the distortion was pretty good, but it was quite hissy and that wouldn’t work in the long run.
Then I tried the Fuzz Plus 2, a free plug-in from Audio Damage. Bingo! The CPU drain went from about 48% to 53%; while that violated my “don’t go over 50% CPU use for live” rule, the sound was so fetchingly wonderful I figured it was still okay.
At this point the top four strings had a rich, powerful sound that lay somewhere between where they had been, and the full-out sound of the GNX3000 set to “stun.” :) Only trouble was now the bass strings seemed a tiny bit anemic. So I went into AmpliTube 2 for each string, upped the presence control in the amp section, and added some two octave below sound to the fourth and fifth strings (with just a tiny bit added to the six string – it’s not like many systems are going to handle 20Hz notes all that well, although the Bose L1 I’m using made a surprisingly good effort). That balanced things out perfectly: The bass had gone up a notch, the top four “rhythm guitar” strings had a smooth, yet forceful sound, and overall, the guitar ended up having a slightly different, more synth-like personality.
I won’t be doing much for the next couple weeks as the AES convention is coming up, and after that, I’ll need to crank on doing videos of the AES coverage. Brian and I will still be rehearsing as much as we can, but I don’t expect to come up with any new breakthrough things…although you never know.