The Use Your Tools Thread

[Dandolin]

OK. I wanna be startin' somethin'.

The idea comes from some musings in reponse to the very thought=provoking quote at the head of this other thread: viewtopic.php?f=149&t=17157

The idea is to create a thread where people can come to talk about problems/issues/solutions/a ha moments in using the tools they have on hand to make better music/make their music better heard. And to make lots of healthy juvenile references to metaphorical and/or biological tools.

Do we need a special thread for this? Maybe not--the subject comes up all the time with particular focus on a particular ILFer's particular tool kit. How do I keep the brootz from my Catastronomicon from washing out in the three baritone quicksand poured out by my Taranchula tribute band? How do I tame the fizziness of my Digisplooge Programmable Warp Funnel Harmonix Esploder from serrating the nipples off that cute bi-curious lesbian couple chatting up the deaf-in-one-ear soundbeard at the Riot Grrrrl Revival? Erm.

So. Talk about effect-ordering? Yep. Parallel FX mixing using that handy loop doo-hickie in the back of yer amp? Supposably kosher here. Knob tweaking? Definitely possible. Pedal mods? Not so much. Buying the new Disease Vector Haematophage Phuzz shown off at Winter SPAMM? Take it outside. This will be the place where it's considered a good thing that the Black and Decker index just went through the roof. Or it will die the ignominious death meted out to the useless and redundant.

But for now, welcome Power Tools!

TL;DR?

Come in here and talk about how you make it sound good without buying more isht. Until everybody gets bored and goes home.

[Dandolin]

OK, so--I'll go.

Suppose you're on your honeymoon feverishly adjusting the knobbies on your fave rave tool of all time--the Vermicious Todt Flinger by the estimable DJ Spuncktoanz. You Gnomeratron users are wit me here. This is one HELLA powerful tool. You can use it to adjust your digital broadcast antenna on MARS and wipe out the invasion troop muster at that perfectly nanocritical phase, thus saving the entire grateful tool userbase of this here Planet Fuzz. From your basement daybed.

But mebbe you're having a hard time consistently tweaking in the one true GRoooooARGrind when you want it? All manner of outrageous rail inverting banshee gnomeocalypse is the order of the day when you leave those side trims where they likely were when you liberated the VTF from its environmentally righteous packaging. I swear, a few times there early on I thought I had psyched the box into perpetual oscillation suicide. That kind'o'noize is easy to dial in when the four side gain trimmers are in the upper third of their range.

But here's what I've found--roll the middle two back closer to their mid-point--what Gnomerius Caesar describes as the Russian Zone; turn that top one full off and leave it there FOREVER if you value your sanity; and keep the bottom one for the Cleanish gain up high BUT, keep the Magic Switch off. Now. You can dial the mix in as you like, but just for starters, roll it back so you're hearing the gain texture clearly. Roll the Gain up to 1 or 2 o'clock. Octave off for now. Tone knob nooned with the vintage muffy filter. Diodes. Hmmmm. What diodes ya got? I'd turn the first set off (lift) and pick something in the higher headroom range for the second set--siliconish. Tweakalize'n'lissen. Rinse. Repeat. Now most likely ya gots your Muffly rawr. Roll the gain up a little for the "downshift braking on the turn at Talladega" rawr. And when you want the "Oh shi*, witnessing that accidental decapitation live with 60,000 other amateur auto-toxicologists was more than the price of admission promised" girly squeelz, you can roll up the Cleanish knob, engage the Magick, flip-flop the octave and left-side oscillation point joy-toggles (and devolt if ya got it for the truly blodless among yez)--well that there's enough daemon siren squall to convince yer landlady she really is being haunted by the horror King hisself just like she suspected when you moved in wearing those hipster horn rims. And I hope you left enough find-your-way-back breadcrumbs to survive the hungry squirrels orienteering their way towards the fuzz-tailed mating cry you just inadvertently VTFed. But if you rolled those side trims back a ways, you're most likely golden. Unless you gotst a thang for squirreltang.

[mutmoo]

Boner?

[bob the r0bot]

You want your microkorg to sound boss?
1. run patch cable between headphone jack and audio in
2. go to global and enable audio through
3. tweak filters and line in level to taste

[Dandolin]

@ bob: Schweet!

[Dandolin]

mutmoo said "Boner?"

Dandolin fountains Newbold IPA from left nostril,

[Astricii]

1. Use heavier strings. seriously. set your guitar up to run at least .11s welcome to thickness bitches

2. Learn to gain stage your pedals: it sounds silly that you'd want to do anything but crank every single pedal you have and run it into a 8x10 150w amp and pull a Michael J Fox from Back to the Future. But really getting your levels set properly (gain and volume) can make a world of difference. Try running a really hot fuzz into your black russian muff. what happens? does it get louder? kinda, but what it really does is get squishy mushy and hard to really tell what the hell is going on. try running a kinda velcro-ish gated fuzz after a mild overdrive set to run a little hotter than unity gain. What happens? thick velcro fuzz you can hold for a bar or more? Yummy. Two stacked overdrives both set to varying degrees of mild drive. stacked? Very nice distortion you can add or subtract gain from with a single stomp. Play with all of your pedals all of the time to really figure out which pedals like getting hit with hot signals and which like to be the ones dishing out the voltage. once you have that...

3. Play with your pedal placement. Long trailing delay run into a meaty fuzz? why not? Try this out: Analogue Delay (or decent modeler) --> Wah --> Overdrive. Set the delay to a short length just barely into decent oscillation. set your overdrive to a medium gain so that the attenuated sections don't really clip. If your amp has reverb dial in a little or a lot to taste. sweep the wah while messing with the feedback of the delay. notice how rolling off the highs OR letting the feedback chill out changes the gain characteristics of the single going through the overdrive? Makes for a nice backdrop if you have a two guitar band.

Best thing you can do to get better is use what you have constantly. I spent the last few years with a board I really couldn't tinker with. I had a band that was gigging regularly and I needed every sound to be just the way it was supposed to sound. I memorized all the knob positions, placement, remembered to change any batteries often. Consistency is great but the best thing you can do to learn how to make your gear sound good is play with it. Not in your band context. Go out and buy a little 40 dollar home pocket amp and some headphones and bring your board home with you. move pedals around. EXPERIMENT. Find a sound you like on a record that inspired you and dink with all your pedals in every configuration and setting until you get a feel for how that kind of effect is generated.

Don't stress technique so much. Not in the traditional sense anyway half of the coolest noises I've ever heard or made myself have been me hitting the right combination of stepped interval, off key bend and natural harmonics. through the right gear with the right timing sloppy playing can sound amazing.

One last fun tip. Stack delays. For realsies kids. 1/8th notes at 190bpm into a volume swell style delay (something like a DL4 is needed for those kind of effects) set to 1/2 notes with a medium decay and slow attack time... Trip the fuck out. or how about setting a flanger to a speed just 1-3 bpm faster than the tempo of your delay. if you're delay is 1/8ths at 190 set your modulation before it to 1/8ths at 194ish your ears will play a big part in this one. you should be able to get the modulation somewhere in the ball park with the delay off. then fine tune with the delay on. get them synched then PURPOSEFULLY nudge the modulation ever so slightly faster. What happens? a delay with repeats that slowly dissolve into little fizzes. Radddddddd

that's all of the stuff I'm gonna share for now. Maybe I'll get some of these sound tricks together with some knob pics and sound clips and compile em together. I love doing this kind of sound design shit.

[01010111]

A lot of my favorite sounds come from playing the combination of notes and knowing how to put notes together to get the emotion you want.

Before you buy anything new try to make your current gear do what the new gear would do. I've gassed so hard for a pedal, but when I get home I'm usually able to dial in the sound I was hearing from the new gear.

Pedalplacement is key as well, but more importantly if you have a pedal that has modulation-in or extra outputs/inputs go spend twenty bucks on cables and assorted adapters to mess things up. There are lots of great hidden sounds waiting for you to create feedback loops and parallel signal chains.

[Dandolin]

Pitch Pirate. From the online demos you'd think it was all atonal cyclical pitch shift drunkenness, but there is a world of relatively subtle VB-2 style pitch vibrato goodness in the travel between 7 and 8 o'clock on the depth dial. And that's with the mix on full. Roll the mix back to noon (or earlier in the morning) and you've got sweet chorus shimmer. Also--tune the pitch when you are at the square wave end of the dial and you've got tonal cyclical pitch shift rhythm sequency wonderland. I've been in bands that have written songs around between song Pitch Pirate tweaks. Pitch Pirate--definitely a bloodthirsty brigand in its heart but with a little thoughtful tweaking cleans up good to Pitch Truant or Pitch Candy Filcher status.

[Dandolin]

Astricii and wfs1234--that's what I'm talking 'bout--you just validated this thread beyond anything I imagined at first.

I'd sticky Astricii's post alone if I could, and that is no slight to wsf's cogency. But, wsf1234,

cables and assorted adapters to mess things up. There are lots of great hidden sounds waiting for you to create feedback loops and parallel signal chains.

?

Do tell more--inquiring minds want to know.

[01010111]

For example: a feedback loop
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7muf-v1mKI4[/youtube]

I'll post clip later of a sound I've been trying to find. I'll be running one output of the ring thing into a wolf computer, the other output into a yr 4545, then recombining the signal into an ex-7 and into a dsd-3; the dsd-3 will be modulated by my ipod via the trigger-in and I might use the ipod on the ring thing as well via the modulation-in. The result, I'm hoping I haven't tried it yet, will be nothing short of sounding of dirty oscillators being sampled, triggered, and delayed randomly. I might take the second output from the ex-7 and run it back into the ring-thing to see what happens. But really there are so many things that can happen if you have pedals with stereo or other jacks on them.

[Dandolin]

That is full of win. Can't wait to hear the next stage you've described. Would also be interesting to mix this in with a "clean" guitar signal with a parallel loop--if one had such a tool. that is.

[tim]

Great idea for a thread!

You'd be surprised how good a cheap guitar and crappy little solid state amp can sound when you can play guitar well. Owning boutique gear doesn't necessarily mean you'll play or sound any better. Like they say on TGP, "The tone is in the fingers." (I think a little piece of me just died from typing that sentence.)

[DarkAxel]

Pitch Pirate. From the online demos you'd think it was all atonal cyclical pitch shift drunkenness, but there is a world of relatively subtle VB-2 style pitch vibrato goodness in the travel between 7 and 8 o'clock on the depth dial. And that's with the mix on full. Roll the mix back to noon (or earlier in the morning) and you've got sweet chorus shimmer. Also--tune the pitch when you are at the square wave end of the dial and you've got tonal cyclical pitch shift rhythm sequency wonderland. I've been in bands that have written songs around between song Pitch Pirate tweaks. Pitch Pirate--definitely a bloodthirsty brigand in its heart but with a little thoughtful tweaking cleans up good to Pitch Truant or Pitch Candy Filcher status.

that post made me happy i've always regarded PP as something crazy and unusable for me - i guess i might have been wrong

[dubkitty]

get your repeats and modulations in some rhythmic relationship with each other. e.g. i like to use a RV-3 for echo, a tremolo, and some kind of modulation from a TC SCF chorus/flanger/"pitch modulator" (this last function combines vibrato and chorus) with the order being TC->trem->RV-3. i'll set the RV-3 for a particular rhythm; for this example let's be simple and say half notes over a 4/4 rhythm. if i then set the tremolo to a quarter-note triplet or a straight quarter-note rhythm over the half-note repeat and sync them up it reinforces the repeat, strengthens the part, and also broadens it by introducing any minor variations in the notes from iteration to iteration as they're dubbed over themselves. a subtle tremolo can create the illusion of a second delay unit/time; an on/off square wave "helicopter chop" can create the illusion of a synth sequencer. adding a subtle vibrato can introduce a third level of rhythmic complexity when synched to the other rhythms; a broader and/or slower synched vibrato will land you right in Loveless territory. faster rhythms synched together can make for wild guitar textures or boggling synth textures, especially whjen combined with stepped and/or swept filters.