Effects Bay

The following post is a guest post by Michael S. If you are interested in guest posting, please contact me!

Digital multi-effects pedals. Plug-ins.

You probably just cringed. Most guitarists who consider themselves worth a lick (puns!) can’t stand the thought of running their ax through anything that boasts “modeling” as if it’s an adequate substitute. Because hey man, there’s nothing like the real thing, right?

There was an article in the November 2011 issue of Premier Guitar, “The Beauty of DI” by Paul Allen. It talks about how people typically trash talk digital effects and usually lack all the knowledge needed to make such statements. I’d like to add, as an aside, I think that people get a little pretentious about shit because they think that’s how gear heads are supposed to act. Been guilty of it myself at times. And with ads and reviews coming at us from everywhere, abusing and overusing words like “tone” and “boutique” until they’ve lost all meaning, who can blame us?

The article’s not bad. It’s the column Tone Tips From The Road. Cool insight from a working musician.

Later on in the issue, in an interview with the band, Mastodon, guitarist Bill Kelliher mentions that he recorded 20 seconds of a solo on the band’s recent album using AmpliTube, and the rest he did in studio, the traditional way. I’ve listened to the track’s solo and I’d like to be able to say “Oh man, I totally hear the difference! WHAT A TONE SUCKING DIFFERENCE!” But honestly, that’s just wishful thinking, and probably is related to the fact that I happen to “know” it’s digital modeling at play. Sounds just fine to me.

Finally, I want to talk from personal experience. I used to be the guitarist in an 80′s dance band that worked steadily. I’m no longer with them, but they’re still going strong, making tons of dough. Their music varied drastically in terms of sounds and effects. You had U2, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Prince, The Cult, Bon Jovi, Tears For Fears, Erasure…and I wanted to produce sounds as accurately to the record as possible.

Originally, I had a rig of about twelve pedals that gave me every sound I was looking for, but there was a huge problem, I had to change the settings drastically between songs, which amounts to wasted stage time. So I took a chance at the high school dance with a missy who was ready to play, and despite hating a Digitech RP50 I had owned years before, bought a Digitech RP1000.

In short, it rocked. It did the job well and it did it in a timely fashion. I won’t say “BEST THING EVER! TUBES ARE OBSOLETE! SUCK IT, TONE-WHORES!!!” but I will say that the Digitech RP1000, and other pedals like it, are exceptional tools that guitarists shouldn’t write-off.

Two videos to check. One is a video I made showcasing some of the 80′s sounds I created. I have speech bubble links up on the video so you can jump around easily to different sounds. If you like ‘em, or think you can make ‘em better. Email me at insightfool25yahoocom, and I’ll see what I can do to get you the X-edit file.

The second video is way better. Because the guitarist is better and has a better studio. It’s guitarist Llexi Leon recording the Eternal Descent album. He recorded the entire album using the Digitech RP1000 through the front of a Marshall and comes up with some amazing sounds. I owned the thing and I don’t know how he got sounds this effing good. Check it!

All I’m saying is, I know it’s tempting to write off digital multi-effects and plug-ins, but they can definitely be useful, and that ignoring the stigma around them might help you create, which is the important part of this whole musicians thing we do.

 Michael S. is currently the bass player of Sam Cooper & The Sleepwalkers. You can check them out at . Also, he does pedal demos, reviews, and other music-type things here at http://www.youtube.com/user/StatusMusicDesign.

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A while back, Ben Anderson of Perfect Square Electronics contacted me to see if we could do a demo of their new pedal, the Hyperslicer. Of course we were interested. The Hyperslicer is an interesting pedal that takes a ‘tremolo’ to a different place, by focusing on digitally slicing the signal path.

Analog tone digital control
After a year of research and development, we’re excited to bring you, a genre-bridging effect.  Like the future of music, it is a unique blend of the old and the new.  An analog signal path with a digital control, the HYPERSLICER has the best of both worlds.

You can control the slice speed via the tap tempo foot switch (80-480 BPM). There is a hyperspace frequency control which controls the the degree of ‘cut’. Setting it to ’1′ will provide 25% silence.. while max will give you 75% silence. The future time projection control adjusts the repeats of the slice. Setting this to 2, 4 or 8 and pushing the footswitch down will automatically give you that amount of slices at the time you have selected (tap temp and hyperspace frequency). Changing this value to infinite, you can hold the footswitch down for infinite slices. Both switches are momentary foot switches, so it is not true bypass pedal.

For the demo, I again enlisted the help of my good friend Jimmy Rolle. He’s playing his trusty Les Paul Custom Shop Elegant, but to change things up, he’s using a new amp, the Germino Lead 55 through a Marshall 4×12 cabinet. We used a Shure SM57 and a Fathead Ribbon mic for capturing the audio. Nothing in the signal chain between the guitar and the amp besides the Hyperslicer.

For this demo video we placed the Hyperslicer on the ground since it’s requires foot work to control the effect. It’s important to note that this demo illustrates the functionality of the slicing capability. There are a lot of creative possibilities with this pedal for sure.

You can listen to the high quality MP3 clip via SoundCloud

Please visit Perfect Square Electronics for more information about the Hyperslicer. Contact Ben for pricing and availability. I plan to include this pedal as an upcoming give away, so keep an eye out for it.

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I mentioned in the past that I picked up a baritone (and a Schecter Unltra VI). For the Ultra VI, I needed to boost signal so I’m using a MXR micro amp, but the baritone I need to make some adjustments to the EQ. Little too much bass, scoop the mids a bit and turn up the highs  a little. But I hate doing this to the amp. I know I’ll forget to switch it back when I switch to guitar. I figured a A/B switch with a EQ in line with the baritone might be the ticket.  So now, I’m on a ‘loose’ hunt for a footswitch EQ. Been looking at Boss GE-7 or the MXR 6 Band, but I saw a video yesterday that’s may have added another player to the group. That pedal is the Source Audio Programmable EQ.

I’ve dealt with Source Audio in the past. They’re great people, making great stuff, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them working on a programmable EQ (actually.. not surprised). With the EQ being digital, it means that it can now store presets. This is potentially great for me with the Ultra VI and Baritone, since they both need tweaking through my guitar amp. The EQ is a 8 band EQ (1 band for bass guitar frequency). You can store 4 preset including output level. To switch preset you can push a select button or ‘long press’ the footswitch to page through the presets.

Here is the official description of the Source Audio Programmable EQ:

A one-of-a-kind compact graphic EQ pedal that holds four savable presets, 18 dB of adjustable gain on 8 separate bands of EQ. Bonus functions include the tremolo-like Auto-Scroll and MIDI compatibility.

Here is a video by HarmonyCentral interviewing Source Audio at NAMM 2011 about the Programmable EQ:

If you’re interested in the Source Audio Programmable EQ, you can pick it up for $149.00 at Amazon.com

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The following is a guest post by Source Audio about their Soundblox Pro Classic Distortion. If you are interested in a guest post or review, please contact me!

The Ghosts in the Machine

Referred to as the “best distortion box ever” by both vintage tone champion Adrian Belew of King Crimson and neo-shredder Herman Li of DragonForce, the newly released Soundblox Classic Distortion by Source Audio is showing that analog soul can be captured on a digital chip.

A veritable Ghost Trap a la Ghostbusters, the Soundblox Classic Distortion houses eleven recaptured spirits of prevalent distortion sounds resulting from a five-year listening study of stomp boxes and tube amps. Sounds from the Big Muff Pi, Fulltone Distortion Pro, Tone Bender, Fuzz Face, ProCo Rat and Octavia can all be selected at the turn of a knob on the Soundblox Classic and then further tweaked by a graphic equalizer, two drive knobs, midrange knob and an output knob.

In addition, Source Audio has provided the option of tweaking the old sounds even further via an expression pedal morphing function, MIDI input connection and a jack for the Hot Hand motion-sensing controller.

Source Audio, now in it’s fifth year as a company, is a true nod to the marriage of music and technology. Having formed as a spin-off from the well-known semi-conductor company Analog Devices, they were able to request a customized state-of-the-art Digital Signal Processor, the SA601 chip, to pursue their music-centric interests. The two sets of ears in the listening study, VP of Engineering Jesse Remignanti (former audio systems and software engineer at Analog Devices) and Chief Scientist Bob Chidlaw (former senior engineer at Kurzweil Music) sat down to discuss the listening study, the process of creating the Soundblox Classic Distortion and a few other topics for the audiophile at home.

The need for a pedal that housed multiple quality distortion tones was clear to Jesse Remignanti, a veteran guitarist of the New England music scene. One of his challenges for the creation of the Soundblox Classic Distortion was to design an interface that could work seamlessly on-stage. He muses, “I’ve seen some guys who have anywhere from six to ten pedals on their board which are just distortion…jumping from one pedal to the other and doing a toe-tapping dance to get one sound to another sound.” He continues, “It’s easier to just have it called up on a preset or use the expression pedal. It’s useful for anyone from the pro musician to the guy who’s doing cover tunes and needs a different sound because they’re doing Metallica and then The Cars.”

For Chidlaw, a collector of tube amps, the challenge was to create digital sounds from scratch that matched his standards for analog sounds, which were quite high at the beginning of the project. “When I started at Source Audio, I was a real tube amp snob” states Chidlaw matter-of-factly. “The only distortion I would use was real distortion from a tube amp. I would sometimes modify amps to get more gain. Turning up the gain on a Marshall JCM-800 was one of my little moves.”

To truly capture some of the most notable distortion sounds in the fuzz pantheon, Bob and Jesse would have to explore the world of stomp boxes and as they dug deeper, Chidlaw’s tastes began to open up. “I had built solid-state distortion devices before. I really had just rejected them all by this point 5 years ago.” He reflects, “But then we bought a distortion pedal, the Fulltone Distortion Pro and I thought, ‘wow, this actually does sound quite nice.’ Then when we really started getting into the Classic Distortion we started acquiring a lot more pedals. I personally bought far too many for my growing collection. I really came to see the charm in solid-state distortions. It really gives you something that a vaccum tube can’t. You can’t get that sound from a vacuum tube amplifier. It can’t be done.”

In mapping the digital sounds to be placed in the Soundblox Classic Distortion, Chidlaw had to create each algorithm from the ground up, attempting to capture the essence of each distortion tone. “An algorithm is a recipe of how the sound is processed…There’s a lot of trial and error; a lot of tweaking… I just have to use my ears to try to compare what the digital system is doing with what the real analog pedal is doing.”

He continues, “You can’t really point to a sound as it goes by. Try to hear just what it is that makes a particular fuzz have it’s own sound. What is in the sound? All you can say is ‘doesn’t that sound kind of harsh in the high end?’ and maybe it does or maybe it doesn’t strike you that way… If you’re making something analog, you can say ‘I’ll use some of these transistors that were very cheap back in the day when this thing was built’ but what is the digital signal processing equivalent of a cheap transistor? Not at all obvious…”

The timing of the release for the Soundblox Classic Distortion is fairly fortuitous, coming at a time of heightened expectations for musicians. As modern music fans gain more access to more music across a longer timeline, they seem to gravitate toward either the eccentric or the tried and true. A look at the Billboard Top Ten shows a reissue of Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones alongside the likes of Lady Gaga and LCD Soundsystem.

The aim of the Soundblox Classic Distortion is a near precise match for the needs of the modern performer in that it can call up the guitar tone from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ in one moment and then in the next, it can create a never-before-heard sound.

Earl Slick Plays ‘Satisfaction’:

“It gives you some really interesting effects” explains Remignanti, “because you could get an in-between sound from two completely different pedals. You could switch from the Rat Tone to the Tube Drive or something just by rocking the expression pedal.”

Chidlaw adds, “You can get some more bizarre things happening in the middle of those morphs. You could say there is only twelve selector positions on the Classic Distortion, but if you use the morph control, you’ve really got hundreds of more possible selector positions by just, sort of, freezing the morph. Sixty percent of the way between this and this and you’ve got this new sound that’s in there.”

The versatility of the Classic Distortion can be traced back to that signature chip, the SA601 Digital Signal Processor. The power of the chip allowed the Source Audio engineers to push the pedal into new territories for a distortion stompbox. When asked about the graphic equalizer, another of the pedals unique features, Remignanti says simply “We had enough room in the processing and in the interface to add a seven-band EQ and it’s programmable for each preset. You could have the same distortion effect with three different EQ settings and get totally different sounds out of it. So, it’s a very nice, flexible feature…[It’s] not something commonly seen on distortion pedals.”

Matching the considerable uniqueness of the sounds, the aesthetic and layout of the Soundblox Classic Distortion have a simple and modern feel. Remignanti explains, “Our goal with the overall design was to make them simple in terms of the interface and the overall appearance but also modern looking. We tried not buy into the whole retro thing in our main design philosophy for the housings and the look of the pedals. [As for] the interface, we tried to keep it to as low a number of knobs and controls as possible, but still allow the user to get a lot of features and a lot of different sounds.”

For more information on the Soundblox Classic Distortion, please visit: http://www.sourceaudio.net

Tech Talk Video 2:

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