Lessons

Lesson Info

Dialing in a Bluesy Tone

I think we should break up. We're going to talk about picking an app that has a nice break up quality to it that's got that kind of grit, but not in your face, but it also gets clean when you roll off the volume knob uh, then we talk about cabs, and then we're gonna talk about how midgate amplifiers really are an ideal pedal platform that a great place to start stacking on a bunch of stuff here, you know you're too distortions, you're two drives, trim, alos courses, everything compressors, those the mid game naps are really where I find the most fun in adding stuff so that big x right there was supposed to be a great name of a lord of the rings character, saying one does not simply cover voodoo child, but because it ran into copyright issues it's now replaced by this big x, but it was a serb or amir of the white city, saying, one does not simply cover voodoo shop, but we're going to dial into voodoo child tone right now because we have the expects. All right, so with mid gain, I always...

think about the fender twin a lot of guys think of the twin is a clean amp, um, but that's, because unless you are on a huge stage, you can never get a twin to the point where it breaks up in the real world because it's so so loud and it was like one of the loudest amplifiers ever invented on dh I love the fender twin and this is a model based on that this is the double verb and again without a cab ugly and I've actually switch guitars here to get a little in blues mode here I've got my strat so we're going to add a cabinet block here and just because hello camped out there just because I'm going to go to the default double verb cab we could just you know, type in double here and we'll find all the double verb calves we've got several different options here I'm going to go with the new ultra rez mix and we're gonna talk about ultra reservoir is a little bit later but if you guys don't know about them they're the the new eye our technology which is impulse response, which is basically a snapshot of what a cabinet sounds like. So it's ah, I guess in layman's terms a very, very fancy powerful curve that makes it sound like a cabinet so right off the bat we're completely default settings with this double verb mix, so this is basically like I just put a turn defender twenty on and it's sitting in a room that has no reverb of its own so all right so it's not a bad tone um it's not a particularly exciting one it's just a good starting point so I'm gonna throw um and for this I'm gonna actually simulate a internal spring reverb in offender type and I'm gonna go into the river block here and I'ma change this tio um small spring and the benefit of having the axe effects is that when you knock into it the springs are going to go crazy and go which anybody who's ever knocked into a spring reverb on stage knows that it's really embarrassing uh it also tends to happen when the drummer gets a little too excited so I'm actually gonna boost this level up a little bit in the ant block and again I don't want to change what I'm hearing from the amplifier I just want to do this kind of transparent isn't really the word because I guess transparent is not about work kind of a transparent level game so it's not changing the tones just bring it up a little bit all right a little spring reverb on there it's kind of nice um actually gonna bring the time up just a tiny bit a little bit of mix as well and so basically you could put the river but the end and that's fine but I'm putting in the middle just to kind of get us in the mindset of um thinking about it being an internal reverb all right, so that tone is a little too clean for me so again with a fender twin type amplifier you don't have a master volume on the real thing so the mask falling is going to stay at ten um and we're going to just do what you can't really do in the real world without really hurting yourself my crank this sucker all the way up and this is not a tone that a lot of people here out of twins because you will die if you turn it up that high all right? So that's all the way up I'm actually gonna bring it back and I'm going to start bumping knees up a little bit middle little bit travel little bit of bass and just a tad more mids than anything else I could do the old like try and true it's called like the six six six for the seven seven seven method I can remember somebody said the best you know kind of twin type town has put everything on six or seven I can't read what it is but so let's see how that sounds ah it's not that I'm actually a dollar river back but I want to get a little bit more grit in there uh and this is kind of where I get to that question that we had on the on the chat room uh one of the things you khun d'oh um in the axe effects is if the input on your guitar is a little bit low you can boost this input trim which is kind of bumping the amount of signal that's going into the amplifier at the front of the amp so it's not really changing the it's not gonna do what the drive now it's going to do so it's not gonna you know start messing directly with the power amp settings it's going to mess with the power amp when the input hits it a little hotter uh but it's it's kind of more of just like a signal booster ah the master volume trim on the other hand is kind of a similar thing but it's going to start affecting the way the character of the amplifier much more than the input trim I find you start kind of the field changes a little bit more when you mess with the master volume trip so I'm gonna put that in put trim up a little bit just to compensate for the fact that this guitar is pretty quiet versus the ernie ball so his tone I'm a switch over to this that kind of other pick a position all right so that I think is a really nice base level kind of bluesy tone and again based b a s e be a double s alright but as I mentioned before the great thing about these mid game kind of amplifiers and I say mid because they kind of go either way they're somewhere in the middle so they're pedal platforms so if I go in here and I start adding on everybody's favorite the uh key s eight o eight overdrive it's going to turn this from this kind of bluesy type sound and turn this drive on it to get a little noise because he's pick up sarah not grounded very well but ah little margaret but what I'm going to do and I think this is a kind of a standard method on this feeds in well the kind of my whole philosophy about the aspects which is that I treated just like I would a real rig like a really meaning you know, cables and everything except without all the annoyance of nine volt batteries and cables and all the tone loss and everything else but I like to take a lot of real world approaches to dialing in these blocks so what I would do if I had a physical t s ate away in front of me is I would take the drive down pretty low and I would turn this level way up and what that's doing is just boosting the signal into the amp all right? So I think john mayer in an interview one time said that what you do with the drive pedal is you set the level as high as you want to be for your solos and then depending on how confident you're feeling that night you'd take the drive down the drive is the cheat knob so we put the drive zero we're gonna get this kind of sound if we drive it all the way up we're going to get a lot more distortion which is going over dr brother uh which is gonna make it a lot easier to play but it's also obviously be a lot dirtier so it's really good I like that sound a lot but it's a little too much tried for this kind of mid game thing we're doing so I'm gonna take the drive down to about four and I'm gonna bump this level up a little bit more so this is gonna be kind of like a solo tone so going along nice kind of gritty, you know and control of the volume knob and get much later when you come back up we've got kind of a nice snappy midgame tone then kick this on for the solo and you've got a nice booth. All right? So I'm pretty happy with where we are with that uh I'm actually gonna take that down a little bit on the level it's a little too intense and I'm gonna start putting some effects pedals in we're gonna go into ah delay here and I don't want a super super present delay I'm gonna put it on the analog mano here and I just wanna have a little bit of kind of something something on the back cooper I wonder if I can interrupt teo any rule of thumb on where you put in effect before after the amp cab kind of your your process there and shortly get out okay so um obviously with a real world uh fender twenty type amplifier there's no effects loop so you can't put any effects after the pre amp you also unless you're going to do it the mixing board can't put them after the cabinet but because this is the expect you could do whatever you want uh I don't put my delays in front um so I'm not distorting the delay I'm delaying the distorting if that makes sense so I would I would put stuff like triple o's compressors dr petals in front of the amp um if you put a tremolo after the ant before the cab is going to be much more pronounced on that maybe is an effect you want we can talk about that later actually when we get to the high game kind of thing but so with delays I like to put him after the cabinet you can put him before the cabin it really doesn't matter it's kind of up to you on what sounds better to you and what makes more sense to you honestly and this is just kind of how I do it but no no rule out there if you if you guys are putting your delays before the amp I'm not saying you're doing it wrong that's the way you would have to do it if this were uh uh physical you know, wood and wood and speaker amplifier so yeah sure I mean we can hear that it's going to be pretty subtle probably, but let's sow the wolf asked if we could hear the difference all just kind of e kind of like that's the delay after the and we'll put it in front ah it's a lot more per analysis like much more present you'd want to dial the mix pretty far down on that if you're going to put it in front of the um some of throwback after but yeah, I mean it's it's a tonal choice um this is kind of more like putting, putting it after the anthem cab I say was more akin to kind of doing it at the board live we're doing it in iraq processor in the studio. So yeah, the one other thing that I would want to put on there I'm going actually dial down the mics on that delay a little bit so let's see ah a little bit more bring it down and I'm gonna die all the time down a little bit as well so I almost want this to kind of be like a more discreet reverb so I'm gonna put a default settings compressor in here and what that's gonna do is just kind of warm up the tone a little bit I would do that for kind of maybe the lesson tense, huh? Maybe like a kind of more sensitive solo just gives a little bit of a snap a little bit more of a present kind of presence in the mix so you know turn it on it's also boosting the volume but you can hear it's kind of a little snap here as well uh and then the one other thing that I would want to do to this tone before we move on um is I would put a tremolo and I really really am a big fan of the sound of a tremolo we're going to the tremolo pander and again this is another thing where you're going to hear a much more pronounced effect depending on where it is so right now with default settings wait put it afterwards or in your face I can actually space this out and put it uh in between the cab and you're here with me e I'm gonna actually put it and this would kind of be simulating like a bias trim maybe although we could actually do a bias trim in the actual amplifier but that's beyond the scope of this discussion um I'm going to take this depth down, but it's a little too intense, so ah, a little bit more and I really like where that sitting. So, cooper, you want to feel the question from ben here and sort of course, yeah, I'm hearing a lot of noise from the desk this guitar. Okay, so if you plug in your music, man, you wouldn't here's a cz much of that, and and I saw some online videos on people are changing the input gate and like reason some threshold. Okay, so let's, talk about that real quick before we move on there's a really this noise you're hearing and you can dial it up. Jamie is looking here that, uh, is an ugly combination of having single coil pickups that were made before I think dimarzio figured out how to make homeless single coils uh and, uh, who? Well, you would know it was invented them, but and then that's also the combination of that and sitting next to this laptop, which is powered by a grounded plug, which has hum and everything and home bunkers are called home bunkers for a reason. We also got about, I don't know, probably two hundred thousand watts of forty, six hundred, you know, forty, six hundred kelvin lights or whatever, I don't know yeah it's uh I would expect it to actually kind of noisier it given the amount of lights that are shining on me right now anyway so yeah let's talk about the really powerful gate in the expect so there's an input noise gate here uh you could put there's an actual um there's a gate block but at the very beginning we've got this imp a gate and if we could just crank up that this noise here jamie and I'm going to take this ratio up so this is the ratio of how hard it's snapping down on the tone so it's already gotten pretty quiet um and you can see if I dollars threshold only back that's going to be anything that's louder then this is gonna start getting quieter so at this point we have really no noise so I start playing though teo back up you're gonna hear the noise kind of under it a little bit way s so I'm actually going back that ray show off a little bit right now when I stop playing the noise is gone so kind of nice and then obviously we turn this on that's introducing more noise into the signal so we're gonna you know you want to turn the gate up more if that's your default tone but this is gonna be our default kind of mid game tone here and says what we have so I wonder on that clean tone, blue zi tone is the process the same, then in the rock tone and kind of getting that that set up, or do you have you are really different. Yeah, I would approach that a little bit differently. Come on, we're going to get into that right now, so, um, I'm gonna go up so that's, kind of why I called it dirty, clean. You could call it blues, follow whatever you want.