Lessons

Lesson Info

Cross Matching Acoustics

And now we're gonna move on to one of my favorite little tricks um which is very similar to this and I'm actually gonna just set this to mutant well no it's gonna mess up the preset for people what I'm actually gonna do is I'm going to save this preset to anu preset number and now I'm gonna knock out all this now a lot of guys use acoustic guitars live um because they don't have an axe effects to uh to make their electric and acoustic guitar no but I use an acoustic a lot live but what I found is that I really love the tone of my acoustic um but I don't really like the tone of the pickup in it and it has a pickup in and it also has a microphone in it but using the microphone on a loud stage is not really the most practical thing you know over the last ten or fifteen years you know what the advent of in your monitors and everything people have really gotten into a very, very quiet stage which made it a little easier tohave a miked acoustic guitar with an actual mike um but you're never ...

really going to get the tone of an acoustic where you've put up you know three four sometimes like eight microphones on an acoustic it's hard to get that really gorgeous studio tone out of it all right hold on I need to unplug it quick we have that boosted way up from uh when it was simulating that so we're actually just let's just bypass elise but um basically what I'm gonna do is show you how I turn my acoustic that has just the pick up on uh into a guitar that sounds a little bit more like I've miked it up in a studio so the sound that you get out of a pickup is arguably um pretty sterile and so what I like to do is play it into the axe effects with just the pickup on uh and not the internal mike because obviously the mike is gonna pick up you know, loud drums or feedback from your monitors or whatnot um and then I like to tone match it to an acoustic recording what it does is it just kind of fills it out this actually is not my guitars and I have not yet played it through this so I don't actually know what it sounds like but let's find out what bypass this time match block and that's on mute so we need to do that uh I'm gonna turn this filter block on and just set it to know so what I'm doing is just boosting the volume a little bit so that I can hear this direct single intothe in here through that real quick ah ah ah the bane of every guitarist having two tunes so it's actually a really nice sounding acoustic tone already but it's a little flat it's not exactly what you would hear if I'd might it up, you know, with a nice big ribbon mic or ah, you know, you eighty seven some really gorgeous mike that would really capture all of the sonic character of this guitar. So what I'm gonna d'oh is get a recording of a really beautifully captured, gets hard uh and take a listen to that and I'm gonna tone match it and see what that does to the signal. So let's uh, let's, try this one out. Music that's not a copyright problem for me, but if you have your favorite, uh, music that you'd like to use two tone match to you can certainly do that. Um, some very notable fractal artists on also, a lot of foreign members have found great success with the introduction teo she talks to angels by the black crows really nice acoustic tone. Um also tommy emmanuel songs. I think there was a really great foreign poster where they used blue moon uh, too quite impressive success. Um and then also the other one that I like to use is the introduction to the count of tuscany off of black clouds and silver linings by dream theory they released all the stem tracks legally for those if you bought the producers pack there's a really really nice acoustic tones on that and also the best of times off that same album really good tracks for matching is what we're gonna do we're just gonna go into this tone match block and it's already set the way we wanted it from the last preset some record a little bit of this uh this reference tone into the tone matchbox again this is the pick up of the acoustic guitar you lower that level a little bit because it's clipping let's try that again off right last try to get uh all right, that's one of you can see the we see the front screen you can kind of see the way that it acquires this tone so I'm gonna, um, play here make sure you got right here. It's ah, yeah all right, now, when I had start, you'll able to actually see it learning so I'm an idiot hit reference for some reason so when you hit the right button it actually does what it's supposed to dio um so it just learned this curve of this guitar here so I'm going to do the same thing with the reference toe play on all right and I'm gonna match him and that's created this lovely little curve here we have on the editor if we switched back to that and it's kind of made a little fuller sound now the problem here is that we're hearing the accused to guitar in the room which obviously sounds really good because that's the sound we're trying to capture but we're hearing that in the room we're also hearing it through these speakers so what I would want to do um is either boost it a little louder here it or the other option is we're just going to make a track here in the dog and we'll just record a little bit of it and uh just do this theo and uh just boost that up a little bit and we should get the resulting tone sounds pretty filled out wait I'll actually just record this and play the same chords on that's all of them playing the same time so I forgot to solo it but let's just try oh all right so now we can hear this thing is this again sonically it's pretty identical the differences were going to come in the compression and that's where these blocks we've already made will come in pretty useful so this is the kind of pre set it's very dependent on what kind of guitar you're using and is very dependent on what you choose as a reference tone uh obviously different acoustics will have different pickups there also just gonna sound different by virtue of their being different uh the last thing on this this is just one method the more complicated arguably but much more rewarding method uh I would highly recommend if you have a lot of good microphones at home and a good studio space set them up, get a nice mike got nice mike pre mike your acoustic up really well and switched this tone match from it offline toe life, which is what you would use usually if you're matching an amp but really this live is designed so that it's listening and knowing that what you're putting in as the reference and local are both the same kind of thing they're both coming from the same guitar. So what you're going to do is then mike up your acoustic exactly the way you want to hear it use that as your reference tone play live into the axe effects instead of playing recording through it your own guitar through the tone match block, then play it with the pickup as the local tone and hit the tone match and you will have effectively copied the sound that you got mike in your own guitar in this space you wanted to into the expects for you to use and take wherever you're going so that is it involves a little more work than using a professional recording and obviously you can get great results from that but that's kind of the advanced uh vast way to do it there we've covered the folk music we also covered mike sir for the studio there we go turn a bland acoustic pick up into a mic to studio beast uh tone match or mike and match that we talked about that too there we go there's me uh recording actually ironically, given that we're talking about mike's uh through the pick up of that guitar into the expects all right tone matching if it feels this good getting used keep on using it uh a lot of other uses for tone matching that I don't think a lot of people think about sometimes obviously amplifiers being the big one you can tone that your amps and you can use the same sort of technology to capture I ours and that sort of thing and that's that's beyond the scope of this class but there's gonna be a video that I'm gonna be producing with fractal in the next couple weeks about I ours and which is effectively tone matching your cab's on creating impulse responses for your cabinets that you can then use the difference being that with the I r capture you can do it actually in ultras the tone matching black does not use ultra so couple other uses for tone matching though a big one is seamless live recording dumping a lot of times I'm a huge fan of concert dvds I'm a huge fan of live dvds live cds, I'm I love studio recordings, but I tend to listen more to live music more interested in what the band is doing. You know, out in the real elements and a lot of time with single live recordings, you'll run into instances where it's very clear that somebody is overdubbed a little flub or something, which I don't take any offense to. Obviously, I screw up all the time live and would love to have, uh, control over some of the videos that have popped up of me playing live to read of some of the things on some of the recordings that pop tough. I would love to get my hands on, but that being said a lot of times we'll hear these little differences in tone and up until now, there haven't been a lot of great ways to really get around that you kind of set the amp toe what you hope, uh, it sounded like and then maybe you could do some stuff in an excuse, but one of the very cool things about the expects is you can take your rockets heart tone uh, out of it whenever you're playing live and you can take both recorded feed of the amplifier and you could take a recorded feed of the amp without a cab, and you could just take the direct tone just completely unaffected dry guitar tone you could take with us, um, routing all of those out of the ax facts on either re amp or used tone matching to get the same sound that you had. So if you have your raw guitar tones from one show and let's, say for some reason, uh, you were using some amplifier you showed up, you had to rent on amber something, uh, you know, you're recording and you want to go back. If you want to fix the note, feed that tone into the expects, play your local tone, match them and then start recording on your overdubs, and they'll be completely seamless. So that's, something that I think a lot of people are going to start using this for, um and I would like to see people start using it because it's less obvious when they've recorded something, um, there's a really interesting story, and everybody knows the money for nothing tone. Um and mark knopfler recorded that abroad in a studio and it was this amazing tone. I mean, we all know it's it's such a signature tone and there's this interview where he talks about, you know, they took photos of the mikes they took. Photos of the ants they wrote down diagrams they took out settings they got another studio and they absolutely could not recapture there was nothing they could do you wanted to retake something in it although I don't know why I have heard the master tracts of that and they're perfect uh but because guitarist perfectionists uh you want to change something about and he could never get that tone again so they just gave up um as the story goes now within expects it could've just tone matched it so I think there's a lot of use you know a lot people are trying to use tone matching t I want to sound like you know, whoever like slash or you know, just tryingto copy tones from famous songs like journey or what not but I think there's a lot of exciting territory that's kind of un explored about using tone matching for your own creative uses and using it for uh your own tones and one of them being you know you can always remember how you played it in the studio like I just showed you with that first instance, I just copied a video of me playing in the studio to my existing pre set and I have the studio tone forever now one of the other interesting things is I was working actually with matt picone from fractal with a fractal artist who really liked the section on his amplifier uh, they didn't want to use the amp anymore he wanted use the fractal, but he liked the q. It was on the input section, so we ran signal into that and then ran the local tone into the axe effects through the expects a simulated bass, amp and tone matched the curve in his amplifiers preempt, and then he had that hugh curve that he said always as a tone match, we exported it to a cabinet, and that became a block in the expects that became any future, so you can copy existing sounds you like into the expects and take them wherever you want. The same goes for petals with the right kind of routing, and by that I mean that we're going to go, you know, instead of setting this to usb, we'd go and put this row one or input water and put two and run them into certain ones you could play through, for example, a drive pedal you really like and what you d'oh is. We're not going to show that just because this is kind of a bonus feature, and we're kind of out of time, but turn on this drive pedal and again, just like matching it a tone match with an amplifier where you stage the gain, right? You would pick a drive, pedal that similar, and lord knows there enough in here for you to find one that's close to the one you like, you'd gain, stage it correctly, see other right amount of gain and then play in through your drive, pedal into the expects and then playing simultaneously into this record, both and tone match it, and you've captured effectively the curve of your drive pedal while approximating the settings of it in the expect so you're using the incredibly powerful model drive pedal in here and also taking the sound you like from your existing drive pedal. And obviously, you can do that with hugh pedals as well. That's, you know, burn that into the expects the other way to do that, obviously, is to go into the section and started queuing, but if you wanted to tone match because you're very wedded to some sound, uh, that's certainly a possibility. The last thing is that just personally for me, I'm a huge movie buff, and I'm always watching movies and you here when they do a tr automated dialogue replacement, replacing the lines. A lot of the times you can tell in the studio you can hear when they punched in, because there's a really high hiss from the mic or whatever and here it is anybody working in hollywood hasn't acts effects which I know a lot of people dio start using tone matching for the e r because all the people under the age of twenty seven can hear those punches can you lose that? I think after thirty or something is where you lose where that that that high hisses this is kind of the joke part of it, but if I were working in a eighty our studio, I would be tone matching all those that they were all seamless and you couldn't tell what was what was in there after the fact so a lot of cool uses for tone matching and I guess now take some questions. Yeah, definitely so we do have a couple that came in specifically about tone matching, but how about we do one this kind of just like a general may be your kind of blanket answer on this. Andi, this is just kind of for a basic can you note on the purchase version of these? Excuse me, that's? Not specifically the question can you basically tell us what pieces of the ax effects excel are available to users that have the ex effects non excel in which pieces will be able to everything? Everything that I've done is in the xl there is a very small difference were literally talking about like a couple kilobytes of data between excel presets and expects to mark two and my one presets, I will be exporting these both as excels and as expects to pre sets for anyone who buys the class. You get these presets, they are completely cross compatible once you export them in the right format. Um, nothing I've done here, I would have to adjust a couple ex wife states, but nothing I've done here is significantly different. Like I said, the expects to mark too, and the xlr very similar. They have the same dsp chips, really? The differences in the xl is mostly output input output hardware. They're coming where outputs the xl will use the amazing fast link connector, which is the crazy technology fractal invented that will turn any xlr cable basically into a cat five cable that will control your mfc so that you don't have to have a cat five cable of gigs which are impossible to find if they break in to the radio shack or something. And aren't that many radio shacks left there's nothing mohr prevalent at a gig than xlr cable, so the excel has that but a ce faras the presets go there some very small things I have to change, but other than that, they're basically cross compatible, and in anything you're hearing sonically isn't really going to be any different. On tonal difference is yeah, the total differences there are competing if you have the same firmware version you're going toe you're going to hear the same stuff now that being said uh every day on youtube and wherever I get a lot of comments, why don't your patches sound like when you play them uh and the answer is because I don't have your fingers and we're not playing the same guitar where you didn't tune the things for the same monitors we're not playing them in the same room we're not playing him I mean we get real detailed I'm probably not the same part of the country is you are the humidity in the room is affecting how we're hearing things you know? I mean, the number of variables that affect how you hear a tone uh is quite literally infinite so it's gonna sound really close but you know if you pull it up and it doesn't sound exactly how you wanted to, you have to consider that it's probably not something wrong with the expects that's you know, there's something wrong with my expects it doesn't sound right it's well, it's there's something different about the way you're playing it's not wrong or right it's uh, you know, this guitar for example has very high output pick up maybe yours doesn't, so you need to boost a couple things on may be turned the compressors down make the compressor is a little less intense it doesn't need to clamp down it's hard it's not hearing anything it's hard you know and yeah so does that kind of answer the question yeah I think definitely any any other one more here on the tone matching I think this is probably is possible but I think the more appropriate question is like have you ever tried this or had any experience with is it possible to tone match more radical sounding elements like basically sensors air horns to use on a guitar you can uh you gotta keep in mind there's not going to make it sound like a scent it's going to give it the same tonal qualities as a set so it's kind of sound you know for example if I just I mean there's a sense block in here I could set a sign tone it however many you know but I could you know get set a cent tone to start playing at whatever frequency you know five hundred hertz or something uh and we could set that and then tone match it to your moge or whatever and it might make it sound a little bit more like it but there's so much more teo tone than e q curves you know I mean for example, if I got a the fifty nine base guy based on the fender basemen and I tone matched that to some ripping periphery solo you know uh mark holcomb trashing his you know frets on some six solo it wouldn't sound at all like it it's very dependent on what you're putting into it you know so I could tone match a trumpet and then play guitar into it but it would kind of just sound like you cued guitar you know wouldn't sound like a trumpet on the other hand you put a trumpet through it I mean you're welcome to do I think if I'm correct I think bela fleck plays banjo thrown expects and I know they're plenty people thing based through it I've recorded vocal tracks through it but you got to keep in mind tone matching is about the sonic spectrum it's not so much about the impetus tone itself I played an electric violin through mine and thurman is well there we go very cool awesome so yeah people have successfully turned the guitar into violins but ninety percent of it was coming from the programming in the center block and everything and the compressors the general soundscape was coming from the tone match of the violin you know because there are elements in and you know in our range of hearing that the violent produces that guitar doesn't maybe and that's what it's either taking out or adding in but it's not going toe for meant more the guitar into sounding like, you know, uh, violent but you're certainly welcome to try and please email me your results. That would be very cool. There's. Some wacky, wacky stuff there. Actually, I was kind of kidding about guys in hollywood not using this because they may be. They don't for eighty, are. But there are lots of guys in some pretty amazing soundtrack studios doing some really, really insane stuff with the expects, and sean strickland, who is in the fractal beta team and just a absolute genius with this thing. Uh, he has a lot of really insane presets. If you start going up into bank b and c into the higher number is a lot of really nutso presets that he and matt have developed that sound nothing like a guitar. So if you're into the weird sounds, uh, scroll up into banksy and, uh, you'll probably be pretty happy.