On April 30, 2010 02:18:02 am you wrote:
Tim E. Real wrote:
Just a follow-up about plugins:
Wow, man! I just spent an hour playing with
Guitarix Distortion (ladspa plugin) +
caps C* Amp VTS (ladspa amp sim plugin)
in MusE's plugin rack.
Gotta tell ya, by the end of the session I had the
sweetest, most pleasant sounding, longest
yet cleanest sustain, from just two ladspa plugins.
Strumming, appegios, pick sweeps, chunka chunka power chords,
long sustain, esp with hammer-ons...
I don't know what it was about the combination
but I can't wait to try tomorrow (it's late).
Am I correct in what I thought I heard?
2nd order harmonic 'style' all the way through the chain?
I know C* amp is tube and I think Guitarix is as well, am I correct?
It seemed to help with the picking.
I saw some other quite capable looking tube preamp ladspa plugins
as well, can't wait to try them with the C* amp series, which I never
realized was so good !
I suppose I've always been looking for a monolithic solution.
Been disappointed by one single plugin. Sort of give up looking, you
know? But two really is better than one.
I learned that from studying pedal schematics, I had built simple
two-diode fuzz boxes and began to wonder how they get that 'metal' or
'crunch' sound. So I knew that more than one 'diode stage' was
required,
but never tried it with ladspa plugins till now. I had also learned a
key difference between fuzz and other types - asymmetrical clipping.
Rakarrack made it easy to experiment, with its two independent drive
stages. Once I tried Rakarrack, I was finally able to retire my analog FX
box (Boss SE70) from its send-and-return (insert) loop in MusE.
Ramble ramble...
Cheers. Tim.
Hi Tim :)
so you do play guitars directly to the mixing console too?!
Yes, I have a real
Marshall JCM800 but only use it for gigs.
When I'm at home I prefer my stereo.
Hence the generous use of plugins for simulation.
I don't even use the Marshall for recording, which I know is
probably a bit strange, but with the vast array of plugins
available it's more fun to play with them.
Let's face it, these days real 'single sound' amps are a bit old fashioned
and simulation is all the rage with, for example, Line6 etc...
As the decades progress, the sheer quantity of music styles
requires being able to simulate lots of genres, particularly when viewed
from a 'cover band' approach.
I record direct, and then I can fool around with the amp sounds later.
I use a Radial Engineering JDI direct box (made in Canada, eh!)
into my MAudio Delta 1010 sound card. It's a passive non-powered
box but it's one of the best.
Until now I have mostly been using SimulAnalog's famous JCM900 VST
dll plugin under dssi-vst. (I do wish they would open-source those plugs!)
I had the most satisfying result when I used a Hughes & Kettner 19"
tube-device, borrowed from a friend.
When I need sustain for clean sounds, e.g. for bottleneck, I still use a
Boss CS-3 Compression Sustainer.
In my case, when I say long sustain, I mean
maximally distorted
long sustain for that metal/rock sound, great for soloing.
It was very nice to hear it without any 'buzzy' 'raspy' sounds
common when experimenting with plugins.
It occurred to me last night that many distortion/overdrive plugins
are modelled on semiconductor diode based pedals, not tubes.
Maybe that's why C* Amp and Guitarix sounded good together.
Did you get deep basses for the guitar's sound by using guitarix? I
guess this is the biggest problem, so when playing directly to the
mixing console I often use a drop D, unfortunately this leads to
Badmotorfinger like compositions.
Mm, I think the bass response was mostly provided
by the
C* Amp simulator, but yeah guitarix probably helped.
I did not go too crazy with either one's tone controls, I more or less
left them in the middle.
But I do agree that some Linux (to be fair and Windows) plugins do
produce good sounds and even if playing without a real stack has some
disadvantages, I like to have the option to listen to distortion and amp
simulation, while I just record the clean guitar signal, so I'm able to
change the kind of distortion and amp simulation later.
Exactly. Record clean
while listening with whatever amp sound suits you,
and then fool around with the recorded sound later on playback.
In the past, using a dedicated HW FX box and a crappy consumer sound card
meant that my recorded guitar track was 'written in stone' and the sound
could not be changed very much after the fact.
Thankfully we have Linux, Jack, and pro sound cards, eh?
Btw. instead of
an amp simulation I sometimes use early reflection reverb, for this I
prefer hardware effects from the 80ies, because of their limited
frequency response and OTOH better early reflection simulations they're
a kind of amp simulation.
I don't know, seems to me that some of the IR or
convolver based
amp sim plugins sound an awful lot like just EQs with very annoying peaks.
I don't know how C* Amp does it, but it sounded pretty good.
Rakarrack is very good, excepted of the deepness for the bass sound of
the guitar. I guess playing Rakarrack to a stack would enable to abandon
all other effect devices, as long as somebody e.g. won't simulate the
original sound of Jimi Hendrix, e.g. like Randy Hansen does. Some
effects can't be replaced.
Yeah, once you introduce a real guitar amplifier at
the end, you really have to
turn off all amp sim plugins to avoid them fighting with the amp's natural
sound.
Funny, I read the other day, some years ago Rush's Geddy Lee stopped
using bass amps on stage and went direct into the sound system.
So without any bass amps on stage, for a touch of humour,
he put washing machines in their place ! LOL.
Tim.
Compiling Rakarrack for outdated distros sometimes doesn't work :(, but
an outdated distro might be a stable recording system ;).
Cheers!
Ralf