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Q&A with Wrecker Preset Perfomance

Some performance tricks you know, like you go to a concert live and they had you know, just the typical sze stax amps and they do all sorts of crazy dynamic effects or you know, crazy distortions or anything does the x have those types of performance abilities or do you have to do really crazy tricks with these modifiers to do that kind of stuff? I'm not sure specifically what you're like alluding to a zara's performance tricks like what? Uh I don't know like you go to some rock concert and they get really close to the amplifier and feedback in facts or all those other other types of things are okay, so that actually brings up a good point a lot of people uh a lot of people start using the expects and they'll dial up a really killer tone uh I'll say, you know, I'm not getting, uh, natural feedback from this tone you know, I'm supposed to be getting, you know, my like my riel, whatever amp uh, feeds back like crazy and that's because you're really lamp doesn't get the same tone to the i...

sis gets it the same volumes so like this tone that we have right here uh miss first scene really high gain toad um that's not a tone that an amplifier that has tubes in it uh really would be able to get at this low volume so the reason a lot of people are running in tow you know, feeling like they're not having feedback is because you probably aren't going to get feedback off of this level of volume you know, in your bedroom where especially off headphones uh because there's nothing feeding into the guitar there's no feedback because it's too quiet to feed in you know what I'm tying so if you go I don't I don't use a really you know really cab live like a four twelve or anything I do everything full range um and if the monitors are you know the wedges are on there's enough volume for feedback to happen there's nothing inherent in the axe effects that makes it unable to do feedback there's nothing inherent in a two man that gives it the ability to do feedback versus the expects uh the real difference there that a lot of people don't think about is volume amps by they have power tubes on them on ly sound distorted by their virtue want wind they're loud on the real benefits processes like this is you can obviously get that kind of tone at low volumes but yeah, I mean you're not going to get feedback uh in your bedroom at three a m but I could crank these up a little bit I mean I could create these up a little bit louder than they are now probably it's a really nice feedback so um and again and you know, it depends on on the appia using too I mean, are you going to expect to get feedback off the clean channel of a mark to know you know I mean you wouldn't want to so you're not going to get feedback on the clean channel of them are two in the expects um if you crank the gain all the way up on a jason eight hundred and turn it upto eighty five d b or you're gonna get feedback hell yeah you are and you're going to get in the xx too if you turn your speakers up to eighty five tv so a lot of that um kind of touches on uh a lot of questions I get about the expects you know why doesn't it you know, for one like why doesn't it uh shake me like my amp? Why doesn't it feedback like my half it's like, well, you're playing it like thirty dvd you know it's not gonna do any of that that that quiet I think volume is the solution to a lot of issues people injured where they're like, you know, it doesn't sound like it did when I saw it in concert was like, okay, well, where did you see it in concert and they're like, oh, you know, like I saw a journey in a football stadium it's like ok, what were you playing uh in my bedroom of course it doesn't sound the same. So, um I think volume is the solution to a lot of those things um also you know, a healthy amount of ah of power tube distortion is a really nice thing for feedback so, you know, cranking the master volume is opposed to the game or ah, you know, bringing the master up a little farther then you might have it on the real lamp because you're at a lower volume we'll bring you back into the equation well, there's some things in the advanced parameters the am page you khun d'oh uh to kind of make the feedback more aggressive and whatnot but, um but no, it doesn't it doesn't take a modifier or anything special to do that. I mean, you could certainly attach a modifier to parameter that would bring in a ton of feedback like if you wanted for a special effect attach a foot pedal to the level of a dr panel on bringing into it zero and then you crank it all the way up and that's just going to super overdrive the anthem wall I mean that's certainly something you could do and the thing about modifiers really is that the possibilities our kind of endless with um you know it's like anything you can attach a modified to you can go ahead and do it so why not and actually it's a really great um really great example that using the same thing for a while and for a pitch block on for volume petal is a really powerful way tio tio use that kind of thing so awesome another almost challenge here is probably brought up by the while you were describing there is there a way to make an arpeggio ater effect with the sequence or like when holding out a cord so I don't wantto ruin this preset so let's uh let's just do something quick you're okay um truly amazing how many sounds you can get out of that I mean going from electric metal blues who stick you know we're goingto turn it into an arpeggio later we talked about putting a horn synthesizer and all different kinds of synthesis on it I mean this is is pretty remarkable yeah so the amount of things you can do firmly in the guitar you know classic guitar world as far as like ants and cabs and and all that kind of stuff is eyes really endless but you can also get into some truly bizarre uh stuff there is a um really nice are pesci ater patch I should mention uh can remember who made it but it's for a muse song um map of the problem atik and uh it has a really nice pitch shifting sequence or kind of thing but let's see what we can do here in general do you have a philosophy on running the axe effects direct into the mixer live scenario or do you run through cabinet okay yeah that was something I wanted to talk about because a lot of people asked about that um I don't use a cabinet on stage I don't uh I don't run into guitar cabinet I don't run into a full range cabinet um I go straight in to the board and uh go out the front of house uh I tweak my tones um with two stereo monitors cranked up pretty loud in uh in front of me um but I use my in your monitors in my ears to tweak the tone itself so I'm getting the volume response that I would have from the uh from the loud cabs on the floor but I'm hearing the tone in my monitors so that it always sounds the same to me no matter where I'm playing and I kind of leave it up to the sound guy to adjust what it sounds like out in front of house just kind of trust that he's not screwing it up so um so yeah I do everything for range um I still like the volume on stage which is why I used the uh um sorry why use the two cabs or the two monitors rather in front but those air house monitors I don't bring my own or anything there's nothing really special to it and running out to direct and to a cab at the same time is this easy? I'll show you right now you run this out direct with the cabinet in line and then before the cabinet you tap off at an effects loop which is right there and plug your cabin to al patou and it's really that easy? Um that's if you want to do both at the same time a lot of guys do a lot of guys like having that option. Um so what I've done here is just put on the pitch of a fixed harmony um put a lot of fire with the sequencer and we're back on our dead gator here. Yeah is that awesome? So what I'm gonna do is just tempo match this um to sixteen notes and then I'm gonna attach a modifier also to this run parameter so why you here this kind of um pig onto the pitch block and do this you see two officers down is the minimum and torches up his maximum so I'm going tio into this controller here and just kind of start monkeying around well d'oh let's say uh thirty two will do sixteen stages. So, um again you got to do some math here for uh you know what shift is, what voice parameter um but this is kind of a quick and dirty thing here um up tio this will be a quick one um what's the difference between mute effects in and newt you'd end is gonna mute all signal into the bloc mean effects and is on ly gonna mute it hearing effects it's still gonna pass signal out to the next block's after it so for example with a delay block um firework to add this delay and set it to mute uh in when I bypassed it you're not gonna hear anything and when I under I pass it you're obviously gonna hear it right but with mute effects and when I bypass it near the dry signal um but it's still going to continue trailing off whenever I pass it now you hear the actual delay awesome so um all right I'll see what's going on here theo the again I didn't do the math here for uh what percentage would be what voice shift so you know you want to figure out what percent of twenty four um is what? How many you know steps or whatever it is kind of fun sounding one theo do it so it's a little more musical I could show you and you can download actually sean strickland and I were working on one that simulated the uh wonderful patch for john mayer song bigger than my body which has a really cool sounding appreciator effect in it and we did all the math wait that's kind of at least in practice uh technically how you would do it but obviously you would want to make it a little more you know musical than it is now now some of those tones into the song that you're actually going to be layering and right exactly um and there you know you can use other ones as well um you know, you could use the intelligent harmonizer which is going to do it it set intervals um and you know, modify what harmony this has on here um but it's really like I said that's kind of the illustration of how to do it but the possibilities are basically endless you know you can do whatever you want to do I mean, see here I'm just going to take it down so it has the full range so it's doing you know, down and up kind of wild not exactly the most musical but I could see you go plant a male it takes a good marketing plan. Yeah it's going planning you guys heard it first. This is the new hit song. Yeah. That's ah in technical parlance that's one way teo to do it the other there several other ways into the filter I'm trying out the filter the resonator block is actually also really powerful to use this kind of a tone generating um appreciator so yeah, but yet there there you go there, don't do it um how about this one and maybe a quick and easy one renan on the chat rooms was asking can you use an expression pedal to transition between scenes you can not I don't think I said that and then I I I said that without me you know uh you cannot use federal the transition between like set scenes but you can do what we were doing earlier where you are going between two different amplifiers very easily and we actually have a preset that um we'll show you that right here this is going between two different sounds depending on you know what we have um so that's you know two very different sounds uh in one preset very clean and sound and then like an overdressed or whatever just basically stick a volume pedal at the beginning uh and another one and set them to be opposite modifier curves like we did you see this one's running left to right on the y axis going you know it's decreasing um as you know going down on this one as you can see is increasing and so there opposite and then run to completely wild crazy signal change between the two that's that's that's that's easy that's um that's design whatever you want then stick some volume at the beginning uh I was just reminded I wantto quickly I guess show uh one more thing a lot of people request and you can actually just go. Uh into the factory preset called half or whole step down and you can copy the block out of it all to show you for kicks here people always ask how to tune the expects down uh and because of the way tuning things down works just because of the nature of physics itself and just literally the rules you know the laws of physics the more you start tuning down the more late and see you're going to introduce into the tone and and the more it's going to sound er frankly unrealistic but it's very easy to tune your guitar down a half step and you don't actually er leighton see at a half step is really not that bad I just want very quickly show this because I get so many questions about it get a pitch block um you just said it to fixed harmony and take the second voice level all the way down to zero you don't want to voices you want to mix all the way one hundred we're just gonna lower this half step ah jaws you know here it is uh without it turn into a baritone guitar and uh kind of tighten it up you can feed it a little harder signal so there you go that's a really quick dirty thing you know, I uh I play one song and I said it's a half step down and I don't want to retune so I just kick that on for that one song and said ever have stepped down super useful obviously not the most organic sound you can feel a little bit of light and see but again that's not the expects that's just the nature of physics so all right, uh, get that last slide. This is the end of the class here. I want to thank everybody for tuning in and watching and thank you guys for being here and also thank you, creative life for, for having me, but excuse me, I want to just talk for a second about my philosophy about the expects and, uh and he expects in general, uh, it's such a powerful a tool that was created by someone who is, ah, fantastic guitarist and really designed the thing from the standpoint of wanting to create really, for himself and and for, you know, a couple people, something that was really going to enable him to play guitar and have a really good time doing it. And so as much as all of this tweaking in the last six hours and everything we've been doing is important a t end of the day, if the slides up, uh, as frank zappa said, well, not said I think it was said to him, actually, but as he named an album uh shut up and play your guitar there's a lot of truth to not tweaking so much I mentioned before the last night larry mitchell was kind enough to have me sit in with his band on I brought this axe effects that's not mine doesn't have any my presets to the show and I plugged it in and during the day fifteen second line check I got a great tone out of it. Uh this is a factory preset. This is a pre sent over thirty one if you have your display offset set toe one if it's set to zero um then its preset number thirty but this is the record preset and I really like the record and this is completely stock and what I think is so amazing about the axe effects and why it's really changed uh changed my life in a lot of ways really, but also it's really changed my ability to create music. It's made it so much easier because as much as I love chasing tone and tweaking and everything, um it's really enable me to not do that because it's so easy to get amazing tone out of it I mean, this is a it's a preset you just go right tio that's a great sounding and so what I want to do is I want to play a song here and I get my way me bar out of my bag actually it's uh over there if somebody wouldn't mind maybe grabbing it uh oh you thank you but I just want to show here in this preset I get so many comments on youtube and so many e mails asking please share your pre set like this tone sounds so good what? You must have spent hours tweaking it and I honestly ninety percent of the priest that's our ninety percent of thea the sounds I use our factory presets that I've gone in and maybe changed thank you so much three or four different things on so this is entirely stock and I'm gonna show you right now I've never uh I've never played with this tone before this isn't one of my patch is uh I'm just gonna do a couple things here and I'm just going to spend like a minute um messing with this tone and I want you guys to see how quickly uh I can get a tone that I'm really happy with out of this box and as much as I love doing all of the tweaking and everything at the end of the day uh and we're guitarists I mean everybody out there probably watching is a guitarist and I know what I want to be doing is playing guitar and I've never encountered a piece of gear uh that's so effortlessly allows my plane to come through you know it's it's not like other process of modelers before where the plugs all guitars into it they all kind of sound the same uh you put different guys through it they all kind of sound the same the axe effects reacts like a super expensive boutique to vamp which also makes you kind of up your game a little bit because all of the things that are not great about your playing come through until you figure him out so it's a great kind of kick in the butt to practice like plugging into some really pretty camp you know everything comes through but everything coming through also means that you come through more and I think that's why so many people across so many genres so many varied players guys in country and metal and rock and blues and jazz are all using this is because the thing that comes through most of the aspects is the individual player it's so easy to get good tone on this thing so let me just uh just tweet this preset real quick and this is like I said it's completely stock before I do that I want to know because that's killing me but I think I can actually tell you I'm gonna change uh probably gonna let me think I'm gonna turn the fat switch on the amplifier I'm gonna turn on the dr block holy dial down the drive and up the level and I'm going to turn the delay mix up I guess that's it seven I haven't looked I'ma turn the delay mix up to fifteen and, uh maybe we'll see all right for some of you that and uh, yeah, turn this on, turn that up, turn this down, this's that feedback or we'll be back for it. Uh, I'm gonna turn this delay on right here like a rio. It was on seven and I turned up to fifteen and I'm gonna turn this multi delay on, but I'm gonna turn the mics down to, like, five so just creates this nice kind of sonic space, right? That's all I've done and now we'll play this song and I hope you guys enjoyed this class. I've had a blast doing it. Thank you going to create a life for having me and, uh and yeah, I'm gonna see how this goes I've never played this preset before and, uh, yeah, here we go. I'm gonna stand up for this because I feel weird playing this kind of song sitting down so oh, wait, no way usually we don't close out the shows with the clap, but I think this deserves it here in studio b thank you, holy moly, I just wantto I really just want to restate, like I've literally never played with that priest before factory standard. Uh, and I would be happy to, like, I was happy to play here. I'd be happy to go put it through oppa and, like, crank it, uh, I don't want to say, like, I'm undoing all this work we've done over the last six hours and saying that tweaking is an important because god knows, thie actual priest that I use live. I've spent hours and hours obsessing over, uh, but you don't have to do that. Er and at the end of the day, it's about playing music and this box I could not be a bigger fan of and it's been, my, my honor, my pleasure to show you guys some of the things about it. And, uh, I didn't think you created alive. Thank you guys for being here.