Tag: digital

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Digital Effects guitar

My New Live Looping Rig: Total “Faylor”

I haven’t posted any new video in months and months. It’s not just laziness or business, though I suffer from both. I’ve just been locked away in my studio, trying to create a new live looping system.

I still haven’t nailed it down, so I’m not going to get into a complete run-down yet. But here are the basic ideas.

• I’ve moved from a hardware looper to software looping. When I started this godforsaken looping project years ago, I’d just finished a lot of work on Apple’s then-new MainStage software. At the time, the program’s looper simply wasn’t reliable enough for live performance. Also, my intense signal processing was pushing my MacBook Pro to its limits. But since then, the program has gone through many upgrades. Meanwhile, after years of relative stagnation, Apple finally issued a major MacBook Pro upgrade in 2017. Between the more powerful computer and the refined software, I could finally shift looping and signal processing to the computer. Yeah, there are a couple of disadvantages. For one thing, MainStage’s looper lacks a “copy” function, something I’ve come to rely on a great deal in my arrangements. But it sure is nice not having to run the entire mix through the relatively cheap hardware looper convertors — just the snazzy ones in my Apollo interface. (Of course, now that I’ve transitioned, Electro-Harmonix has just announced a compelling-looking 6-track looper. I’ll have to check that out…)

• I’ve put aside for now the Fishman TriplePlay MIDI pickup. I have no complaints about TriplePlay, which is far and away the best MIDI pickup ever created, and a product I recommend without reservation. But I wanted to be free from the hardware setup. This way, I can plug in any guitar, any time. (I’ve been experimenting with acoustic looping — more on that soon.) I’m still using MIDI sounds, but again, it’s all in software via Jam Origin’s brilliant MIDI Guitar plugin. It works incredibly well without a MIDI pickup, but it’s not nearly as fast as TriplePlay. It’s fine for doubling, or for melodic and textural stuff, but it’s just not speedy enough to play MIDI drums at even moderate tempos. Which bring me to the other big departure …

• I confess: I’m playing to a drum machine. I’m triggering and changing patterns using a KMI !2 Step foot controller. I really wrestled with this decision. I loved the idea of using no machine tempos — it all came from the hands. But at some point I realized that the main reason I was committed to that approach was for bragging rights: “No prerecorded tracks, and no machine rhythms” I could boast. But who cares except geeks like me? Anyway, I still have misgivings about the change, but I’m going with it for now. I think that means, though, that I’ll create more arrangements without percussion, just so I’m not locked to the machine for an entire set.

Meanwhile working with a tempo clock lets me do fun stuff with synchronized effects. I’m especially besotted with Sugar Bytes’s Effectrix, a mind-bending multi-effector that lets you activate and edit effects on a note-by-note basis. You hear it a lot in the “solo” in this video.

I’ve played a few shows with the new setup. The first one was flawed but promising. The second was an unmitigated disaster. Then I doubled up on practicing and (not kidding) started meditating again, which helped a lot. Last time I tried this live, it went really well! We’ll see how it goes at my gig this week.

Anyway, it’s still a work in progress. I’ll keep the curious updated.

I played this cover tune with no irony whatsoever. I love the original.

Categories
Digital guitar Music Technique

Less-Boring Looping (“Pumped-Up Kicks” Cover)

For a while I’ve been playing this loop-based cover of Foster the People’s “Pumped-Up Kicks” at solo gigs and with my duo band, Mental 99. At risk of sounding like a pompous dick, I’ve annotated the performance, highlighting techniques I’ve found useful for making loop-based performances livelier and less predictable.

I’ve covered some of this ground before, particularly in this Premier Guitar looping-technique article. But here I call out the techniques mid-performance, and I’ve included a few new ones. I hope you find some of them useful.

Likewise, I’ve already written about my live looping rig, but it’s changed a bit since then, and I’ve recently integrated a Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface (plus the stellar plug-ins it allows me to run). An updated overview:

Pedalboard-Diagram

The arrangement perform nicely, and I dig the individual components. But I dislike the system’s Rube Goldberg complexity—it’s a royal pain to set up and schlep. I’m always looking for ways to simply. (Other than, you know, just plugging the guitar into a frickin’ amp.) I’m open to suggestions for streamlining!

Black Mac
I love Apple products, but I hate having Macs onstage (mainly ’cause they’re so much better looking than me). Covering it in black wrap makes it less obtrusive. The Marshall logo is from one of those “toy” stacks (which, of course, can be far more than toys in the studio).
Categories
Digital Recording

My New Fave Mobile Interface

Apollo-Twin_WEB-Award

Premier Guitar has posted my review of Universal Audio’s Apollo Twin interface. Short version: I love the thing.

A rackmount Apollo interface has been the core of my studio for two years, replacing both a Pro Tools HD rig and a complicated Apogee setup. I adore Apollo’s great-sounding preamps, lucid interface, and innovative software, which, among other things, lets you track through simulated preamps on your way into your DAW. Also, UA’s analog modeling is second to none. (You hear their reverbs and tape simulations on most of the stuff I’ve recorded for this site.)

The intensity of my Apollo love is rivaled only by my scorn for the crappy mobile interfaces I’ve previously used with my live laptop rig. The problem isn’t audio quality — even the cheapest ones can sound surprisingly decent — so much as lousy ergonomics and flimsy construction. I’ve burned through half a dozen interfaces in the last few years. They just aren’t built to last onstage. Or anywhere else.

That’s why I’m so stoked to have the small-format Apollo on my digital pedalboard. It’s built well. The UI is brilliant. There are no horrid breakout cable octopi. It has the same preamps and processors as the rackmount Apollo. And I have access to my favorite UA plug-ins, including the juicy EMT plate reverb simulations, the stellar tape echo models, and a suite of low-latency virtual preamps. It’s pricy for a mobile interface: $700 for the single-processor model and $900 for the dual-processor model. But I’d spent far more than that on self-destructing junk that I wound up giving away or recycling.

Anyone else tried Apollo in its various formats? Or any other cool converters? Your observations, please?

Categories
Recording

Are Tubes for Rubes?

I had a lot of fun putting together an article for Premier Guitar on using non-tube distortion. It features a smorgasbord of digital tones guaranteed to horrify tube purists. (It’s certainly horrifying a few commentators on PG‘s Facebook page.)

iZotope's Trash 2 — like version 1, only trashier!
iZotope’s Trash 2 — like version 1, only trashier!

It was also a chance for me to explore iZotope’s Trash 2, on the recombination of my ol’ pal Jeff Cross, who is one of the most super-genius of the super-genius audio guys I’ve worked with at Apple. I was a fan of the first version of Trash, though I didn’t have the opportunity to use it a lot. This generation is even cooler, and seems to focus less energy on conventional amp modeling than on being a wild and open-ended distortion-designing tool. I’ll definitely be spending some more time with this! I also enjoyed playing with FXpansion’s Maul, which covers much similar territory.

Have any of you guys played with some of these digital distortion-designer tools? Any observations?  

Categories
Digital guitar Technique

Cue the Drummer Jokes!
Playing Drums with MIDI Guitar

strung_out_121213_small

I’m thrilled to bits about a show I’m playing Thursday eve in San Francisco featuring two guitarists of impeccable skill and taste, plus me.

Teja Gerken and I are co-hosting a monthly solo guitar night at El Rio, my groovy neighborhood dive.Our guest is the amazing Eric Skye who, among other things, plays gorgeous solo guitar versions of classic Miles Davis tunes. If you happen to be in cold, cold San Francisco this week, stop by and say hi!

I’ve been doing the digital looping thing with Mental 99 for a few years now, and man, trying to work out solo arrangements with live-looped MIDI drums has been seriously humbling. You know all those jokes we love about how drummers speed up, slow down, drool, and generally disappoint? I can do all those things and everything else a drummer does, except occasionally play a competent groove. Some of the problems have to do with MIDI tracking in general, and some are simply general suckage. Man, it sure makes me appreciate my brilliant musical partner Dawn Richardson, who never speeds up and drools only rarely.

animal_drums

But those who can’t, teach. So I whipped up a little tutorial on playing drums with MIDI guitar. The first half covers the moves, and the second half features a live improv based on my fave afrobeat pattern. (Tony Allen is my rhythm god.) It also includes some of the hybird synth/guitar sounds I’ve been exploring, like double single-not lines an octave lower, mixing trashy guitar and trashy organ, and of course, space pigeons. (I stole the organ line from my pal Robin Balliger.)

In other news: I’ve been speaking to the ultra-knowledgable Rob Hull from Tube Depot about creating a minimalist DIY amp kit inspired by our conversations here. Lots more details to come. Tube Depot has a track record of making real nice amp kits, and Rob’s documentation/build instruction are the best in the biz. I reviewed their cool tweed Champ clone kit here.

Oh — anyone score any good holiday presents yet?

Categories
Digital Effects guitar Technique

MIDI Guitar Meltdown

Okay, I promise: tonefiend is not going to become an all-digital blog. I’ve got two new DIY analog pedal projects in the pipe, plus a piece on that delightfully retro technology, the book.

But while there’s more to life than MIDI, for the last few months my particular life has been all MIDI, all the time. I worked on the documentation for the Fishman TriplePlay MIDI guitar system, then demoed the product at MacWorld and Musikmesse. And now that the smoke has cleared and I’m off the Fishman clock, I’m still obsessed with the musical possibilities here. In fact, I’m just getting to the fun part: bending the technology to taste and making weird-ass music for weird-ass people compelling new sounds.

I’m posting two new pieces spun off from my Musikmesse demos. Technical and musical comments after the videos.

In my first TriplePlay demo, I used simple, recognizable acoustic instrument samples. For the second one, I focused on aggressive/distorted sounds. But now I’m getting into what really interests me: solo guitar arrangements featuring hybrid colors, deployed so that it’s often difficult to tell the guitar sounds from the synths and samples.

Continue reading “MIDI Guitar Meltdown”
Categories
Digital guitar

A Good Direction for Digital Guitar?

Is this what your studio will look like in 2023?
Is this what your studio will look like in 2023?

The recent post on Auto-Tune for Guitar generated much interesting discussion, plus a few good Auto-Tune jokes. Thanks, guys!  :beer:

The comments from smgear particularly impressed me, because he managed to assemble a wish list for a future digital guitar with more detail and clarity than I could have managed.

It’s always a good idea for smart, articulate musicians to sound off about the musical tools they desire. But that’s especially true now, as manufacturers grapple with technological change with varying degrees of success. People really are listening!

Anyway, smgear wrote:

Basically, the problem is that the majority of the manufacturers seem locked into old paradigms. The bulk of their new designs are intended to mimic something else (Line 6), combine/integrate technologies (Roland) or make the ‘art’ less rigorous (Antares). Those are all fine pursuits and have resulted in some great tech, but they’re basically locking everyone into a pre-1980 palette of sounds, functions, and expression. Quite honestly, after my momentary enthusiasm has passed, I just pick up one of my no-name beater acoustics or electrics and dig in because every day I find a new sound, attack, approach, or whatever that allows me to express something in a new way. It’s true that I could do that playing through those tools, but I don’t need them and they are specifically designed to conform my sound to specific realms rather than to let me explore new spaces.

So with regards to this batch of hex-based modeling tech, my general requirements are fairly simple. I want clean and discrete signals from each string (check), I want a serious multi-core processor AND a couple programmable on-board control knobs/switches (semi-check), and I want an easily accessible and intuitive interface that gives me full control over how each particular string or any group of strings is processed/routed (no check).

Continue reading “A Good Direction for Digital Guitar?”
Categories
Digital guitar Music

NAMM 2013: Digital Discoveries

This first installment of my 2013 NAMM report focuses on products for the digital guitarist. In the coming days I’ll be doing posts on analog amps, guitar, stompboxes, and accessories. (But maybe not as quickly as I’d like, because I’ve also got to cover MacWorld in San Francisco this weekend.) This is cross-posted from Create Digital Music, one of the few music sites I visit every frickin’ day. 

Source Audio's Hot Hand USB wireless controller.
Source Audio’s Hot Hand USB wireless controller.

We guitarists tend to be a technologically conservative bunch, yet there was no shortage of forward-looking products at NAMM 2013.

Not that everyone was looking in the same direction. Guitar processors are getting smarter, but they’re doing so in different ways. Are we entering an era when every guitar, amp, and pedal in our effect chain will boast powerful processors and a dedicated editing environment? Or will we just simply centralize everything in some future i-device? (I suspect that latter, and tend to think that smart pedals and smart amps represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac. But that cul-de-sac might be a real nice place to hang out for a couple of years.)

Eventide's H9 can play all the sounds from the company's software-intensive stompboxes, and you can edit and control them wirelessly.
Eventide’s H9 can play all the sounds from the company’s software-intensive stompboxes, and you can edit and control them wirelessly.

One release I found particularly telling was Eventide’s H9, the latest addition to the company’s software-intensive stompbox line. The H9 has few new sounds, but can run all the DSP algorithms from Eventide’s other guitar stompboxes. The $499 box will ship late this quarter, preloaded with 9 of Eventide’s 43 current algorithms. Players hungry for more will be able to purchase them а la carte from an online store. (Eventide hasn’t yet finalized the add-on pricing.) The H9 also includes a handsome and full-featured iOS app for editing and managing patches via Bluetooth. There are no current plans to release an editor for OSX or Windows.

Continue reading “NAMM 2013: Digital Discoveries”
Categories
Effects guitar

Ring Modulation: The Effect from HELL!

effect_from_hell
Only very bad dogs like ring modulation!

No disrespect to Chuck Berry, but I seriously doubt Johnny B. Goode played guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell unless he was using a ring modulator. That’s the only effect that can give you the complex, clangorous harmonics of a bell or a cymbal. Or make you sound like a ravenous horde of mutant robot ants.

Theoretically, Johnny could have used one. By 1958, when Berry documented the guitarist in song, the effect was already being exploited extensively by avant-garde classical composers, notably the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, who used it to terrifying effect in his Gesang Der Jünglinge [1956].

This post drips with perverse ring-mod love, including a demo of a rare vintage Electro-Harmonix Frequency Analyzer, and another featuring Roswell Ringer, a wicked ring mod plug-in.

Continue reading “Ring Modulation: The Effect from HELL!”
Categories
guitar Music

my band (hearts) u

Season's Greeting from Mental 99

UPDATE: Here’s a direct link via SoundCloud. The file is downloadable for free. Sheesh — never occurred to me that folks might, like, actually download it and overwhelm my feeble little DropBox account!

While most people are baking cookies or lining up at the grocery store for 45 minutes to buy those frickin’ chives they forgot the other day, Dawn Richardson and I just put the finishing touches on Mental 99’s chaotic cover version of the Doors’ “Hello, I Love You.” (Mental 99 is our digital guitar/analog drums duo band.)

Have a free copy on us! Grab it here. (Download available.)

Why? Because we love you, man!

Seasons best from Mental 99!

(Nerd details: all guitar tracks played on my James Trussart Steelcaster though Apple’s MainStage software. Drums tracked at Fantasy Studio A, Berkeley, California, by Jason Carmer and Alberto Hernandez.)