New Effectology Video- Percussion and horns on a guitar!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVEc43Jo5Ns

Horns and percussion:

Below are the pedal settings I used for the video “Fanfare for the Uncommon Pedal.“

I have always been moved by the music of Aaron Copland. “Fanfare for the Common Man” is a favorite of mine. I thought it would be great to be able to play some these sounds on my guitar.

Timpani Drums:
To capture this sound I used a Ring Thing as a pitch shifter, a Big Muff for a slight distortion and filtering followed by a Cathedral reverb for a big ambient reverb.

To start, I slightly muted the lower stings on the guitar using my left hand index finger at the first fret.

Lightly touching the string without pressing down on the fret produced a soft high harmonic when the strings were stuck hard with my thumb. I lowered the pitch of this harmonic down one octave with the Ring Thing. This produced the timpani drum note or pitch.

The Big Muff added harmonics to the note. I used its tone control to remove some of the very high frequencies.

For reverb I used the Cathedral Pedal in the Accu Spring mode. This produced a very smooth, long reverb.

I used a small amount of pre-delay. Pre-delay helps a percussive attack stand out in the mix as it separates the start of the sound from the reverb. In other words, it delays the reverb from being heard till after the initial attack.

Below are the timpani settings:

Horns:
The sound I chose for the horns is a combination of a trumpet and a French horn.  For this sound I used a HOG for filtering, a Riddle for a brass envelope and a Cathedral for a concert hall reverb.

A POG2 pedal can be used in place of the HOG.

The sound of the horns can be changed by altering the start and stop controls of the Riddle pedal. Brighter will produce a trumpet sound and darker will sound more like a French horn or trombone.

Last in line was a Cathedral pedal using the hall setting.

Below are the settings I used for the horn sound:

Optional

Thanks for watching,
Bill Ruppert

I have come to the conclusion that you are either, completly raving mad or a genius.  The sounds you can coax out of just a few pedals are magnificent.  So heres a tip of the hat to you sir, keep up the craziness you’ve already persuaded me to get a smmwh and a hog i’ll be ordering them in june.  Pursuaded purely off the back of the sounds you have created i think ya should get a fat cheque from ehx ciao

(edited for spelling)

Nice job once again.  I’ve really been enjoying going through the Effectology series.  I especially like the atmospheric effects you’ve put together.

I have a couple of questions, and please forgive me if you’ve already covered them.  First, how do you get such a clean signal with some of the longer signal chains you put together?  I have been using a chain of a volume pedal, a HOG, and a Stereo Memory Man through a rackmounted stereo preamp/power amp.  Recently, I added a Cathedral pedal and, occasionally, I will use some kind of modulation.  It seems that no matter what amp I use there is an horrendous amount of hiss.

Also, I was wondering what you use for going direct.  Do you use any kind of speaker simulator?

Thanks for sharing all the brilliant sounds.  I look forward to more installments.

i use many peals at once, all ways at least 12, and i never get a hiss (except when i use my double muff after my black finger compressor, they don’t like that) my guess would be your rack mount unit, try bypassing that right into your amp. usually its 2 objects that don’t work well together or in a specific order like i mentioned above.

very cool, i think it was a bit short though.

next suggestion is Effectology 16: Full Orchestra Band with Brass Section

Thanks for watching.
Some will be short and some longer.
There was not much else to say on this one.
A full orchestra with brass and voices would be cool!

temporary - 27 April 2010 02:50 PM

very cool, i think it was a bit short though.

next suggestion is Effectology 16: Full Orchestra Band with Brass Section

Thaks Narada.
What I do to keep things quiet is to run part of the chain before the preamp and the second half of the chain after the preamp and before the power amp.
Pedals like compression, distortion POG and HOG most often go in front of the preamp.
The volume pedal will be the LAST thing in that chain as it can silence any sound right before the pre amp.
Ambient effects like the Stereo Memory Man and Cathedral go in between the preamp and power amp.
This lets you distort the preamp if needed and still have a undistorted reverb.
That said you can change the entire chain up for certain effects, but this is what i start out with.

I do record direct.
For the entire Effectology series I have used a very clean fender Twin simulation and the amp.
Sort of a neutral sound.
You can hear what the amp sim sounds like by itself in the reverb show I did.
Its the first clip heard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAiUMx1Dsm4
.32 seconds in.
I like the Roland or Boss Fender amp sim.
Almost any unit out there has a Clean amp simulator.
Its just a very clean sound with nothing going on.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for watching!
Bill

narada - 26 April 2010 11:16 PM

Nice job once again.  I’ve really been enjoying going through the Effectology series.  I especially like the atmospheric effects you’ve put together.

I have a couple of questions, and please forgive me if you’ve already covered them.  First, how do you get such a clean signal with some of the longer signal chains you put together?  I have been using a chain of a volume pedal, a HOG, and a Stereo Memory Man through a rackmounted stereo preamp/power amp.  Recently, I added a Cathedral pedal and, occasionally, I will use some kind of modulation.  It seems that no matter what amp I use there is an horrendous amount of hiss.

Also, I was wondering what you use for going direct.  Do you use any kind of speaker simulator?

Thanks for sharing all the brilliant sounds.  I look forward to more installments.

Thanks, Bill.  I’ll try to reconfigure things a bit.

Also, I agree with “temporary”, more orchestral mimicry would be cool.  I liked the quasi-Adagio for Strings you did in one of your previous episodes.

Bill! Great video as always. Thank you so much for these. I learn a lot about the effects. Sometimes I find these videos better than the conventional demos.

What are the effects used from 0.35 - 0.56 in the video? Is this just the Cathedral Reverb Infinite mode?

Thank you. 

Thanks Starglass7
I am really glad you dig the series and even happier you are learning a few tricks.

The effect at the front is a HOG holding in freeze a few notes.
Its going into a Stereo Memory Man/Hazarai in the modulated delay setting.
Hands down my favorite delay setting.
I was always was sad that mode only went to 300 milliseconds, until I figured out if you use the tap tempo it goes out to over 700 milliseconds or more!!!
I LOVE that pedal.
Thanks again.
Bill

Starglass7 - 27 April 2010 07:18 PM

Bill! Great video as always. Thank you so much for these. I learn a lot about the effects. Sometimes I find these videos better than the conventional demos.

What are the effects used from 0.35 - 0.56 in the video? Is this just the Cathedral Reverb Infinite mode?

Thank you. 

Thanks again Bill! Much appreciated.

Yeah I love the SMMW/H in Mod Delay setting too. Definitely one of my favourite pedals.  Looks like I’ll have to buy a HOG though. Been wanting one of those for a while now. Look forward to the next awesome Effectology video.
Cheers!

very nice!  Bill you always put up great stuff, thanks for the inspiration!