Roll Your Own Software Guitar Effects

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Sawing at My Guitar

I’ve done something that I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Taking my Christmas gift certificate to Long and McQuade, I bought a violin bow to use on my guitar. Let me tell you, it is not easy to just pick up a bow and start playing. First thing I noticed was that the notes I was hearing were not the notes I was playing. That is to say that there must have been some weird harmonic thing going on because, depending on where I stroked the bow on the string, I could make a whole range of pitches occur. I finally found that it sounds best when I bow right over the bridge pickup. I’ll have to investigate this further, but if pressed for a reason, I’d say it was because the bow sets up a fixed node and I’m hearing artificial fundamentals whose pitch corresponds to where the bow is on the string and either the fretted note or the bridge. This explanation could be entirely bullshit, I don’t know. I did try bowing open strings over the 12th fret, which is a fixed node in the string’s vibration. The results of this were unsatisfactory.

It is a good thing I had strung my guitar with flatwounds some time back, as it is much kinder on the bow. Flat or roundwound, either way you end up with a lot of tacky rosin on your strings … and your guitar. Be sure to wipe up after you’re done.

As the fretboard on the guitar is not arched like stringed instruments that are meant to be played with the bow, single note lines are restricted to the E string (your choice of which). If you want to increase the availability of strings for playing single notes you’ll have to either get a modified bridge or a specially made guitar. The later you can get from TogaMan. Currently I’m liking the sounds of the low E and A string drawing out long growly power chords, I suppose I could open tune the guitar to make use of all the strings. I wonder what it would sound like if I did that and used my slide?

I also found I had to wear my guitar lower. This made the action of bowing easier to do. Holding the bow is a bit odd too. So far the best grip I found, that gives me the most control is to hold it like I’m holding a pencil with the frog (see here) underneath my thumb, and my middle finger pressing on the back of the hairs. Not having my right arm to push back against the body of the guitar, I find it taxing to keep the guitar from swinging when I move my fretting hand.

Some alternatives exist if you want a bowed sound without the bow. The Piranha Guitar Bow is a device that shrinks a bow into a hand-held package. If you want to get even further down the technology path you could always pick up an E-bow from here.

Learning to play with a bow is challenging but yields great rewards in the range of expression you can coax out of your strings. If you’re looking to tackle a new technique to add to your repetoire I would highly suggest picking up a bow from your local music shop and spend some time making beautiful music.

 

How to Start Your Own Boutique Pedal Business

Me wanty. dano at beavis audio research has released the Beavis Board. This makes prototyping guitar effects so much easier. I’ve played around with a couple of breadboards, building fuzz circuits here and there, but was always disappointed by having jacks, 9 volts, and switches hanging off umbilicals. It became too much of a bother to get set up, and was certainly something I’d want to be working with for any amount of time. Unless you want to commit to a protoboard, projects look like a handful of rainbow spaghetti. With the Beavis Board, I can see hours of endless fun tweaking pots, and swapping caps without worrying about constantly dislodging dangling devices.

There are so many DIY stompbox sites out there, I’m amazed that this hasn’t been done before. There is an opensource DSP effect prototyper called Coyote-1 which is offered by Howler Audio though I don’t see any actual pictures of the unit anywhere on the site. If anyone has bought one, let me know they exist.

The beavis board is designed to give you a platform for learning and building. If you can follow along with simple instructions, you can start building and modding a classic and new stompbox circuits.

Read more …

 

Improve Your Music Through Restraint

Some time ago I went plugin happy. Actually it was more plugin mad. I trolled through sites like VST Planet and Audio Mastermind searching for the elusive plugin that would make my recordings sparkle. Just the faint promise of breathing life into the guitars, or polishing the vocals was enough to sell me. Soon my plugin folder was awash with oddly named effects that rarely did anything discernible. Most I never use, but I was comforted by the thought that I could if I wanted to.

The tyranny of choice. That’s what it comes down to. I played around in a local music shop with a Line6 Pod and was struck by the number of combinations available. With 32 amps and 60+ effects that is over 1920 distinct combinations. It would take quite a while to plough through them all. Pretty soon you’re not playing, but rather playing around, trying to settle on the right sound.

If I had to offer advice to those who are looking to jump into the effect market to tweak their music it would be this: Think of how you want to sound first, then limit your choices to put you in that direction. Good recording and good production may dupe people briefly into liking what is otherwise flat material. One can spend great amounts of time getting the right sound to liven up that which is flawed by bad playing, recording, composition, expression, or whatever. The audience is infinitely more forgiving of sonically imperfect experiences than we are apt to believe, provided the performer can entertain that is.

So forget the giant multi-effect boxes with their plethora of distraction. Instead polish what you have. Learn to compose a song that will stand on its own, without the aid of high production value. Learn how to perform in a way that is expressive without the use of an expression pedal. You will waste less time flipping through presets and twisting knobs, focusing so intently on the quality of your sound, and will spend more time focusing on the quality of your music.

 

A Distortion Pedal Recommendation

I was recently shopping around for an overdrive pedal at my local music shop. I tried out a T.C. Electronic Classic Booster + Distortion this pedal is nice. Really nice. I have an Epiphone SG running through a Traynor amp, so that’s the setup I had going on in the store just to make sure everything sounds good together.

While this thing costs more than my amplifier you get what you pay for. This was brought into sharp focus when I compared it with some Boss pedals. The Classic Booster + Distortion sound was like a fine cream while the others I tried were coffee whitener. The incorporated noise gate was really nice; it took out all my finger noise. There are enough settings to get a wide range of sounds making it a versatile pedal to have in the chain.

If you’re saving up your hard earned money to buy some distortion for your guitar, then I’d recommend you take this one out for a test drive. You may forgo the the cheaper pedals and save a little longer to get this. I know I’ll be socking away to have it.

Get Effects…

 

Did Somebody Say Moog?

So the Moog guitar is out. Just as I would expect from Moog there are more than enough jacks, dials, and switches. I’m curious to see who picks this up and what they do with it. The mute function on the strings is interesting and can certainly clean up your sound. But I find that sometimes when I’m playing, the sympathetic ringing of other strings adds harmonically to the music. Sometimes the unexpected striking of the high-E string by my pinky finger while crunching out power chords is a nice contrast to the quick and furious pounding. (That last bit didn’t sound right at all)

Surf on over and read all about it.

http://www.moogmusic.com/

http://www.moogmusic.com/moogguitar/?

Get Moog…

 

Wire me up!

I went to Seattle recently and while there I took in the Experience Music Project. One of the most interesting exhibits was the history of the guitar. But of particular interest to me was the display of early electric guitars.

Modern music has much to owe the electric guitar. Electric guitars brought with them the opportunity to modify a sound in ways previously unimaginable. Once the sound waves were converted to an electrical signal, that signal could be altered in a manner that would be impractical, or impossible if one were working on the sound waves alone.

If you would like to know more about the history of electric guitars then you can read about them on answers.com as they do a much better job of relating the history than I intend to go into here. My interest lies in how electrification changed the face of music.

Every instrument has an amplifier of sort. Some part of any instrument takes the vibration of the signal generator and amplifies the amount of air it moves so as to make those vibrations more audible. In many stringed instruments it happens to be a box with some sound holes cut into it. Even now, most electric guitars have a solid body and are very quiet when not plugged in as the guitar body make a lousy resonator.

The amplifying element of an instrument is often responsible for the timbre of that instrument. It’s what makes a French horn sound different from a trombone even though both cover roughly the same range of fundamental frequencies.

The configuration and material of the resonator emphasises or attenuates different harmonic frequencies so the final complex waveform produced is of a particular character, distinguishable from one instrument to the next.

Early guitar effects were the result of limitations in the amplifier to faithfully reproduce a sound wave. In the sixties some musicians began boosting the signal from the guitar to the limit of the amplifier. This was accomplished by using pre-amplifiers to overdrive the gain or by simply raising the volume on the amp until it started to distort.

High gain signals would saturate the valves causing the top and bottom of the signal wave to be clipped off. In other words the signal amplitude would actually go higher if it were allowed but limitations of the electronics, or even physical limitations of the speaker being extended or retracted completely, disallowed this. What would normally be a sine-wave ends up looking more like a square-wave (A simplification, I know. Look here and here for a more in depth treatment).

Another way musicians would change the sound coming from the amplifier would be to tear, cut, or punch holes in, the paper cone of the speaker. This would give the guitar a fuzzy quality, a sound that was later packaged up in a stomp box saving countless speakers from such unspeakable horrors.

With the advent of the transistor and its subsequent use in pre-amps and amps, a harder clipping quality was brought to overdrive distortion as the transistor had different saturation characteristics than vacuum tubes. The sharp edge of its clipping meant that the resulting signal contained more of the higher level harmonics than tubes which then translates to a ‘colder’, sound.

In any other application all this would be considered a bad thing. For some reason having an amplifier that doesn’t accurately reproduce the signal it is being fed became a desirable thing. The coloration and tone that was introduced into the signal by the way in which amplifiers distorted the signal represented a shift in what an amplifier’s purpose was to the electric guitar. In effect, the amplifier became part of the instrument in a way that transcended mere soundboard status. Given the nature of the guitar/amplifier relationship you could now change the timbre of the instrument at will just by choosing another amplifier or by turning a dial. This ability was of monumental importance in the history of music. Never before was there such ease and flexibility in choosing the tone of an instrument.

To be sure, distortion in amplifiers was an issue long before it was put to musical use. Seeing as guitars were first electrified in the 30’s and distortion effects were being used in music during the 60’s one may postulate that it was the change in musical styles that informed the listeners as how they should perceive this distortion. Rock-and-Roll emerged in the 50’s at a time when the electric guitar was first mass marketed. Being the musical style that began to capitalise on these effects in the 60’s it only seems fair to place blame on the miscreant youth. The combination of rebellious music, and now a viable instrument that can be made really loud, were the perfect conditions for distortion to be used productively. Rock and electric guitars go hand-in-hand and in part this match is enabled by the effects pedal. Nothing says “I’m rebelling” quite like the harsh tones of an amp that is being used the “wrong” way. It’s certainly nothing that Benny Goodman would approve of.

It seems to me as though the quest for novelty exploded in the 60’s and to stand out above those who employed guitar effects you had to do ever increasingly bizarre things to your sound. It was a blessing that the guitar was electrified as you could now interject devices into the signal flow that could modify the sound in wild ways. The sound of the guitar did not resemble what it was and it was never going back.

New genres of music would rise up as musicians incorporate new effects into their playing. The effect helps define these genres as playing style adapts to maximise or revolutionise the effect and the effect itself becomes part of the signature of that music. Consider the Wah-Wah and its distinctive use by Jimi Hendrix and later adoption by funk and soul musicians, psychedelic rock and funk wouldn’t be the same without it. The variety of musical genres that have emerged out of, and since, Rock-and-Roll are nearly always inextricably tied to the sound the guitarist was trying to produce.

Another form of distortion normally considered detrimental in sound reinforcement has become a staple of Rock musicians. Controlled feedback became a tool in the musician’s repertoire also during the 60’s by such notable bands as: The Beatles, The Monks, The Who, The Kinks, and of course Jimi Hendrix. With feedback another means of playing the guitar was born, one that would have been unobtainable without electric guitars.

There are so many effects nowdays packaged into stompboxes that rarely do we see professional guitarist without them. The cat is out of the bag and you would be hard pressed to put it back in. Once guitarists are given the choice of tweaking their sound they often will not do without. For all the benefits to sculpting your sound there is a downside too: reliance on effects can mask bad playing, preventing you from developing as a player. To that end I wouldn’t recommend starting a kid off with an electric guitar and a pedalboard full of stompboxes. They may not progress past making cool noises.

The next step in sound processing was to take the signal which was modified by electrical components and turn it to digital information. Now sound is unharnessed from the hardware and exists purely as a mathematical construct. As such, the wave may be changed through operations in any way that you could mathematically describe. With the cost of microprocessors having dramatically fallen and a significant history of Digital Signal Processing under our belt, nearly any sort of wave shaping you could possibly want is available. There are limits based on digital to analog conversion hardware, processor speed, and what you can mathematically define, but the plethora of digital effects out today, and those that are possible but as of yet unrealised, we will have no shortage of novel timbres to influence our playing.