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Effects Rack: Thickening Your Sound

Obviously in the ac space you know, double amps, you have double cabs, you can actually have quadruple cabs stereo to stereo ultras cabinet blocks which is pretty bad ass uh we talked about automated double tracking there a lot of ways to do it as I said before in the last section some of them are more subtle, some of them sound a little more natural some of them are a little less natural and it's actually really cool it's kind of we're going for I'm going to show you kind of do weasels apple of sound lead that is like a double tracked lead with a little bit of weird modification going on there was talk about multiple chains, multiple tones we're talking about like different presets that have different chains coming off where different subtle things happen to the tone a lot of that is called from watching a lot of like pros pro rig rundowns and stuff I've developed playing live where you just kind of uncertain a little bit of sparkle in a different chain and then you kind of content ch...

oose how much you want to bring in or out depending on how natural or straightforward you want the sound so let's hop into the editor let's uh grab the old ernie ball music man here and, uh all right so right now turn that down that's lousy hill um all right so what I'm going to talk about here I've got this basic cab set up god the sea a trip that classic and a trip picnics ultras I r and some nice studio river of here so it just sound that kind of sound I love that river but just going like what a sweet uh and now it's going to get even better extend switched over to high quality for those of you who don't know in the latest to firm wears thie expects is reverb algorithms have been completely rewritten from the ground up shot out the genius of mr cliff chase on that one I have heard it said by people who know far much far more about river rather than I do and I can certainly hear it the expects I think at this point is the premier reverb unit in the world with these new algorithms I know a lot of guys who have the expects just for the reverb in their studios they just got a huge president in this little switch right here any riverview havin presets if you can afford the cpu because it is a significant jump in cpu as you can see we went from thirty six to forty for any priest that you have reverb in switching to high quality if you can afford to it is bad ass on check out all these new river entices well so on what we're actually doing come I'm gonna talk about using one, uh one separate chain of an anthony cab and then adding another separate chain of an anthony cab. It has kind of a different sound, so it's one step further than when we were doing the ultra as I ours with the I r cap and we were making tones that had the same amp and two different calves. This is going to have completely separate chains on each side, so I'm going to d'oh is ah, let's see the by the way, if you guys haven't gone through all the answer, the axe effects it's a lot of fun to just play a couple notes on each one kind of see what they're all about the first hundred or so presets are really, really good way to do that. The one hundred first hundred or so are basically showcase presets and the preset tuners I've gone through and basically idealized what they think these am should sound like a really great setting, so, uh, see, I should check that out. All right, so way go. We got that kind of thing going on and I'm going to hardpan uh, these cabs. So I'm gonna pan this one all the way to the right, your left, rather and that's when all the way to the right and, uh again you see me doing this a lot changing this bypass boat from through to mute the reason behind that is that when you do this I want to just hear that without this raw and so if I set this toe through his really crappy sounding like gross sound and that's basically without a cab, which is something akin to what you hear if you're amp has like, a pre out and you can drop it off that kind of get that sound um kind of a gnarly sound in town, so I'm going tio pick another cab for the sky you know, this sounds change that back to mutants we don't always our minds all right? I like that very much oh yeah it's a lot better all right? So right off the bat what we've got is two very distinct sounds on one happening on each side of the others it's kind of like highway to hell any, uh very different sounds and they all are coming together in this really nice river. So what I've done is hardpan them now let's take a listen to what it would sound like and again guys, if you don't have headphones uh now's the time to put him on but I'm goingto bring them in a little bit what we were doing earlier here is a trick that capitalizes on the unavoidable leighton see in computer processing some of the hardpan knees and I'm gonna put a dr block in front of the sample fire but this drive isn't actually going to be doing much of anything to the tone but I wanted to do instead is deal with that just it and if you guys have headphones on you can tell or if you got a good stereo separated monitor system I have introduced late and see through this second line in this dr block and there's a little bit of delay now like a couple milliseconds that I've just essentially put an enhancer on er stereo enhancer rather on this signal change so that's not gonna work basically it's got like this double track he sounds so go ahead and do this it appears you guys are welcome to come over here and hear it if you want it's just a little bit wider so that's ah a little trick you can use to kind of open stuff of the other way to do it is with the stereo enhancer and in a couple from where's ago it was a while ago at this point um they introduced a new kind of enhancer which you can either select modern or classic so let's listen what the modern answer does to the tones so here it is without on here it is with all this turn all well opens the stereo field really wide up so let's let's like super overdo it again headphones being the key thing here is there just a couple examples of how to just widen things out the other way? You can do it and this is a trick that everybody knows uh john petrucci is kind of famous for doing but you can introduce a little bit of delay into this situation and what I'm gonna do is put this mix it one hundred percent wet and lower the delay down to like ten millis you guys see what that's done here it is without if we increase the delay by something larger created this wide expansive thing because we're really messing with our ears so we go in and we actually don't hardpan this let's just say like, go halfway we're going to get these weird like easiness that actually is kind of a desired so it's opening the sound up a lot and this is the kind of you could make it a settlers pronounces you want to so like if you put it on five milliseconds it's going to be a little bit of serious if you crank it up to like seventeen which I believe is uh that sounds sweet and basically all we're doing there is making the signal delayed literally because one hundred percent wet uh so it's just you're hearing this seventy milliseconds after you hear this on with the pandits creating an illusion that there is a stereo separation between the two amplifiers in your head a lot of different ways tio achieve that theo enhancer actually does in one block what this is doing almost exactly and in fact if you said it right, it will do the exact same thing uh I'm gonna put this dr block back in here because I want to have this so anything rock faces with, uh, making that making the angry face but I just think this is a slamming tone I'm gonna keep that river probably way not the most quote natural sounding thing it does sound heavily affected because we're introducing late and see and delay and then we're panning his calves and again you can pan these to taste I'm actually probably bring them down to minus thirty five uh and seventy five but uh again, this is just a way of making your sound a little bit bigger. A lot of guys you know want to get that recorded cd sound, which you can't get by double tracking because you can't play two guitars at once at least I can't I don't know maybe so there you go I'm going to save that double cabs and you guys have fun with that one because I just kind of want to pull that one up and rock out for all this, so we're going to move on to talking about how we can double track and it's double track with you because not because I can't spell but because that's the limit of them from out of blocks I could put it so all right we talked about m below modifiers earlier in this section on the in this class what I'm going to do now is use a delay block in a lot the same way as we did but I'm gonna have and envelope modified a delay time so what we're going to be doing is changing how much delay time there is which is going to create a really odd effect this sounds to me a little something to weasel zappa does he kind of has thes cynthy sounding backgrounds to his leads that are a little pit shifted and I don't know exactly how how he does it but this I think is a pretty cool a pretty cool way of simulating on a double tracked guitar part especially on a lead this does not sound as great on a rhythm and again this is a perfect example of the kind of effect where you can really just make it go totally wild if you want tio I mean you can you can dial in and so it sounds pretty natural but you can also just make it sound insane and spacey and we'll check out we'll check out both of those well right now I'm going to do is just run these like this and basically why copy paste of these? These are the exact same there's nothing going on and I'm gonna lower these both tio minus fifteen and then I'm gonna set these two mute and again just to reiterate I'm on ly meeting these bypass so that we can hear each one individually um all right so I'm gonna go into the doorway here and uh what did I I had the delay okay, right cool. All right, I'm gonna go into the time here and I want to show you what happens when you start modulating delay time it's ah very very weird. So if we for example attach the envelope to have a minimum of one millisecond and a maximum of say something aggressive like five hundred it's gonna happen when I play it's not going to sound pretty is what's gonna happen really also all right obviously not what we want to have happening so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this town too say sixty, sixty four that's good enough. So what is this what's going to happen is as I play as I play harder the double tracking changes to be farther away from me and then it sinks up so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually dampen excuse me I'm gonna dampen this modifier a little bit and I'm gonna go in here and just the envelope as well so let's uh pick out what we got as far as envelope goes all right so let's have a little drive to that all right that's more kind of what I'm looking for so you can hear the kind of phasing that's the envelope closing back down and lowering the delay time so basically what you've got here is a second lead line that's changing as you play how far away from you it's playing so it's like having a second guitarists onstage was kind of drunk it's the best way I could explain it the guy had a couple too many shots there's a cute chicks buying them drinks and he got out for the second set and he went to play the sinking sink top line with you and instead of sounding like john petrucci was doubling it you can watch the envelope happened as I play and if we mess with the damping here I mean obviously if you crank the damping way up you know what happens but I wanted a little bit lower than that but I think this is a really cool effect and once you get past that initial kind of ramping up um which you could even a just a little bit um I think this is actually a fairly convincing uh fairly convincing double tracked lead um that sounds a lot like somebody's playing just maybe not doing the best job but again you can adjust that to bring it a little more in line with plain national lead lines so there you go, that's one way of creating a kind of double track lead I actually really like that and again with a little more finessing you could make it sound a little more natural than it than it does now but there's something kind of cool and almost sounds cynthy aboutthe um just one way to do double tracking and you can do the same thing with a chorus pedal it's going to be a little different effects and you're gonna have to change a couple things but, um let's talk about a much more natural way to get to different sounds and this is kind of the jimmy page school of thought most led zeppelin songs have got a really dirty amp and really clean and or even an acoustic guitar playing the same parts of the same time, so what I'm going to do is going here we've got the brits silver and it's just cooking really cranked up I'm going to bypass all the scraps of it here what is doing a little bit more let's go in and put the complete opposite kind saudi and so this is a marshall and it's cranked it's based on a marshall and it's correct let's get an amp it's based on a fender or even more extreme let's ah let's get like a hot rod and fender like the uh I want to go with the u s a clean which is based on a basically had believe mark to our mark for um and what I'm going to do is bypass the sample fire and let's dial ascend to be super super sparkly and super clean and in fact I'm actually gonna jump ahead one uh section and throw a compressor on here because I want this to be really jangly we're going to use this to bring definition to taste to this tone which is really over driven kind of smoky sounds like it's been in the barbecue or for a long time like the ants about to catch on fire which I love and on top of that I'm going to add this uh we actually we just side chained in that compressor there which is why it started so weird but a yeah let's try that again all right? So let's shut that off and let's dial in this clean and and again we're just going for a super sparkly I'm gonna take the drive way down wei should probably turn that cavallo no that's key come on this is why I always look at what block you're adjusting for you do it and I'm going to get two compressors in a minute here for now just take it on faith that these compressor settings or cool and uh we'll see if they actually are all right cool and again here I was hello going for like a sparkly sparkle so what we're gonna dio is bring this super defined amp into this kind of sponge your sound we've got this over driven pallet on top ofwhich replacing the same playing s o it's like you've basically gotten all the transients and all the strings and just pop them all up from outside out of the mix so they're all kind of like pop poking her head out of this mix that's kind of not money but started with less definition because distortion by by definition lacks definition because you're distorting it on this has almost too much clarity like almost sounds like an acoustic piece of pickup I'm also using the absolutely gorgeous coil tab setting on this guitar so it helps because it sounds like on the bridge um but so just appreciate for a minute the effect of combining these very, very disparate amplifiers that air accomplishing uh vastly different things so I call this accompli ants because these are complimentary amplifiers they're both working toward the common goal of giving you something that sounds aggressive but also has a lot of definition clarity we could actually even bring the based on the sample fired down a bit and I would actually I just haven't messed with this cab yet but we could of course due to cabs um I'm gonna use one cab though I'm going going ultra is here let's, just go through a couple calves and see which one really makes a sneaky suspicion. And something based on the thirties cab is gonna be really nice. Wear peking the hell out of it right now. Always watch your levels, guys. You don't want to peak. He expects too hard. Although when the red light lights, I believe you still have something like three left. But you can hear it getting angry. U n in twenty again. This is just kind of a finesse game. This is just a taste like, are you pretty happy with that? I'm going to throw this verb back on here and see what we got. Rock. And this is another one. The new reverb types recording studio c. It is sick. All right? I'm thrilled with that. It's gotto reminds me a lot of a part of song. Can't planning more of it. But any dream theater fans get on board the bridge of erotomania? Uh, all right. So that's commentary ants. And I hope that kind of illustrates how you can put two things together.