Lessons

Lesson Info

Setting Up For Tone Matching

Uh everybody wants to know how to get a good tone match for those of you who don't know tone matching it uses the tone matching block in the expects and it takes the sound of your guitar and mold it to sound like any signal that you're putting into it usually that means you know another guitar signal um but if you wanted to you could put the sound of I don't know a bomb exploding or something through it and see what happens and make your guitar have the frequency spectrum of obama split I don't know if you would want to but you pretty much do whatever you want people have used it to make the expect sound like tello's violins banjos were goingto do a couple different things here were goingto switched the slide real quick um you'll know the talent matching is not available at this time so you can match a rush tone but you're not going to get alex license playing ability ah a source of constant frustration for me trying to turn match people eyes that I find out I still can't play like the...

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So um basically what we're going to touch on first is tone matching recordings and videos so for that we're going to be using the axe fixes us be in on out and basically all you need for that is a usb cable and you're expects driver available from fractal audio dot com and you can set the expects of as your sound card and then play videos off youtube or play songs from itunes multi tracks through your dog like pro tools or I'm gonna be using reaper um and the important thing to remember here a lot of people have answered this question a thousand times online people always say, well, you know, how do you tell match something when it has drums in it or it has vocals in it on the answer is you can't sorry it's just there's absolutely no way around that one hundred percent every single time you cannot match to match anything that is not just guitar without getting the sound of the other stuff in there, so if you're trying the get a, uh, guns and roses tone, uh, go to the beginning of sweet child of mine don't go to the middle and try and get the tone in the chorus because once the drums come in or whatever it's useless for tone matching everything you want, do you want to try and kind of use high quality files? It's not a enormous deal, but I found that sometimes with mp three's and stuff because the expects the tone matching is so high quality uh, it'll capture some of the frequency spectrum of the alias singing the granule ation that comes into mp three files especially because a lot of high end that is present in guitar tone because, as we all know, uh, as guitar tones are made, as we were just talking about during lunch outside of a mixed guitar, tones are usually weigh more president wei mawr have way more high end than you think they do when they're in the mix to sit in the mix and cut through. Um, that tends to be a liest a lot by mp three's, so if you've got a really low quality final, you're getting some weird sounding high end stuff that being said, I've had a lot of successful tone matches off, very low quality, um, files streaming off youtube, that sort of thing you can get very close with tone matching on, then kind of make up for the low quality file afterwards. So, um, and then the last thing we talked about what the kind of recordings of videos is that once you make a tone match, you could export it as an I r file. Put that into your cabinet block in your expects, eh? So that you can then as we saw last time, you can have two cabinets with an x and a y, so then you have four cabinets and you can load and I are for each toe match, so you could have, um for example uh youto match four different album tones from the same artist maybe they have the same amp and you know, they d'oh but every album sounds little different cause they mastered them a little different or whatever. So you have the four different guitar tones. Um so let's uh let's hop right into we're gonna go to the editor here and, uh, as before, I've just got a blank block. Um are blank grid rather? I'm just going to drag a shots or blank lines all across and I will put in a tone match block. Now, the best way to start with two matching is you kind of need to know, uh, you can see here there's actually told magic curve looks like the editor will show you the last one that you did, uh by default because it's in the, um in the access memory of the expects, uh, or in the access number, the editor I'm not sure which, but it will always show you this one, but it's so nothing's really happened yet, so we gotta first off decide what kind of tone we want a match on. I've got a couple here um, first off of god this uh, here's our creative life course right here, uh, I've got unfortunately can't use um any music that I don't have the rights to during this, um, broadcast so I can't show you how to tone match, you know, an eric clapton toner like van halen tone or something, but there are lots of avenues, some more legal than others I suggest to you tend toward legal ones to acquire lots of isolated tracks of guitars. They're a lot available online, they're a lot available on youtube. A lot of bands have released them on their own nose there several dream future albums where they've released some tracks so you can get the isolated guitar tracks, but what I'm gonna do is during the scenes thing, if you were you were tuned in before I played a song from an album I did with a band called the wesley cook band, and in that we played through ah song with this rig right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go in and tone match this video that's me tracking the solo on that song, and I kind of just for illustration purposes, this isn't a direct feed. Um, this is a video of me playing it's the camera mic, so it's got some room tone to it, but just the kind of illustrate what this is going to do, I'm gonna play the I'll play this lead tone as it is right now. And then I'm gonna show you how the tone matching works so one thing to keep in mind about toe matching is it's not going to capture any delays it's not going to capture any river it's not going to capture chorus flander but the good thing about modulation effects is that they're all um they're all based off of on input signal meaning that the original tone is the impetus for all those things so really there just reflections of the original tone so they're not actually going to change the sonic shape that the tone matches hearing so like a reverb that's burned into the recording of the solo or a delay that's burned into the recording of the solo isn't going to affect your tone match unless they've done something really extreme with you cueing the delay it's going to be just a byproduct of the original tone so you don't have to worry about messing up your tone match you do have to bring it back in the mix on your own which is why on that slide the bottom I say work still required tone matching is not a panacea too amazing tone you've still got a uh you still have to do some things so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just play this solo tone so you can hear it and I bypassed the reverb in the delay and you'd hear just what the cab sounds like and this actually isn't the cab I used to record the album because I don't have that eye are on this expects its not my expects and I did not bring the I r so this sounds little bit different than what I had on the album so it sounds a little bit like this and that's the sound I'm gonna do is I'm just going by I'm gonna delete this cabinet block rather and I'm gonna replace it just wholesale with a tone match block and if I bypassed this tone match block but you're gonna hear is this nasty sound and that's the basically the amp head without a cab um it's kind of what you would hear if you had a direct out on your amp head like an effects and that's kind of what you're um that's what your effects loop is hearing really when you know it's not exactly that but it's kind of that so we're going to do is we want to make sure a couple of the settings on this tone match block are correct first off the important thing to do is we want to make sure it's set to usb which means that the tone match block is listening to whatever is coming in on the input of the usb through the aspects you said it's a row one and will be whatever is coming in here wrote to everyone and to all of this stuff and this will obviously changed what its hearing, so we're going to set it to usb. The other important thing is that the reference channel b set to either left or right, you don't want some l r because that's going to sum the channels and you're gonna get some really intense phase problems in your tone match and it's going to sound like you've tone matched a, uh, stereo sitting in a sewer tunnel or something, so you don't want to do that. Everything else we're not really going to worry about, so what I'm going to dio um, they're two ways to do this. You can either start the reference and the local at the same time, uh and play along or you can do them separately and because we're starting a youtube video, I'm going to do them separately, so what we want to do? Um, one more thing we want to check to make sure this is on offline and live modus for matching an amplifier, which we're not going to talk about in this class, but make sure the mod set the offline also the high resolution is it going to be very high? It's not quite as high as an ultra red scab, but you wanna make sure high resolution is selected so offline high rez those air, the defaults so you don't need to worry about that um and then everything else we're going to keep so I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna hit start this youtube video and hit reference and um we don't actually have a shot of the front panel or do we is there a way we get a shot of the program um maybe with this camera could move a little bit um but we'll be able to see that it'll start listening to this video and the curve will start kind of jumping around while I do it so I'm gonna start the video and then I'm gonna hit reference record so what I've done there is I've just recorded the eq u curve and if we have that front panel view all point to it you can see this is kind of what's going on in that tone on youtube and so now what I'm going to do is arm and I play pretty much the same thing uh you want play something similar on my guitar and it's going to listen to this raw amp sound and then tell match block is going to become in essence our cabinet so I'm gonna hit local record so I've recorded the local tone now and now we're gonna match so it's brought us the cq curve and in theory what should happen when we un bypass this is that we've had a pretty exact copy of what you hear in the youtube video I still can't really I'd still good sorry that was not faked it all I still get a chuckle out of how ridiculously weird it is but we'll listen to the youtube here and then you could hear how crazy similar that uh that stone match was here's what we tone ash so it's exactly the same uh the benefit of this is that if I I don't have the multi track sessions from this album on this computer but if I did I could just go into the multi track and solo out my guitar and tone match because I've changed this rig a little bit if I wanted to keep what I originally sounded like on that album for some reason I could just tone match it like I just did there um now the next thing that you can do now that we have this tone match if you don't have the tone match block just hanging out in your preset um or if you want to use this tone match on other presets what we can do is we can go and export the tone match block which we actually need to do over here on the unit itself but I believe there is not a way to do it and accept it uh yeah looks like they're not iran in this problem last week so uh unless it's that but I don't think it is note is that that's pre set okay so somebody khun chime in on that maybe if there's a way I could do that but I think it's from the front on lee from the front panel basically though what we're going to do is basically just exported as a user cab and once you do that um you'll see that you've got all these user cats and this is the uh this is the access to excel so it's got more than that to um but I got all these empty cab so I can export that tone matches a cabin using anytime I want now in a cabinet block um so if I had exported it what I would do is go into this cabinet block now and go all the way up here to use her and then I would just select the tone match block that we just exported is a cab so that's matching a tone that I already kind of know what's going on in it um let's talk about doing a tone that's not your own and so you don't really uh don't really know what's going on with it so for example I am again we don't have the copyright rights to do any songs that I don't actually own the rights to so I'm gonna act like I don't know how I made this tone um which is kind of true because I recorded this solo for uh a metal band like well over a year ago, so I'd actually this is a good example because I don't remember what am I used to record this I don't remember what settings I had on, so we're gonna have to figure it out what you want to do with tone matches let's start with something that's close ish to the tone, so for example, of your tone matching van halen, you wanted to start with a name fire that's close to what he would have used and basically what that means is you're not worried about the tone because obviously we're about to completely change the tone, but we're worried about the gain staging. We want to make sure that the gain any amplifier matches the gain of the recording because the gain is such an important part of how it feels and also is going to be a n'importe part of what kind of son expect from the amp is occupying so like what space is it taking up on any q curve? Obviously to start playing the game there's gonna be more sizzle? There's me more high end the tone match box is going to want to compensate for that when it's adjusting your existing tone to match the one that you want to match, so what I'm gonna do just so it doesn't have that ugly, ugly no cab sound is I'm going to a cabin and because this is a metal tone I'm gonna pick a uh for twelve here like before twelve mentally trying to cab I like this ultra rez callie mix a lot so then I'm just gonna route this to the output and so we just got this kind of this is a not the right amp yet but um let's go with uh we'll go with this usa lead bright plus ah, listen to let's listen to the original here will quick and see kind of what we're working with it's like a syrian kind of high gain tone you'll hear the end of some reverb on some delay that we're gonna have to copy after we turn that thing off so that's the tone we're going for it so let's uh go into the and it just kind of try to approximate how much drive that has I do remember that I had to drive pedal on for the solo so I'm gonna put one in there just because we want to try and get the game right and again we're not really worried about the tone because we're about to totally change that we'll put the tone match block in here um let's see not enough try one hyeon game don't wait here that's the o I would have to think about how I played that solo too it's not gonna tone match my not knowing remembering uh ceo yeah it's a good amount of gain and uh see if it matches here s so now what we're going to do is turn on this tell match block and I like tio just to make double sure we're not listening to both sides I'm gonna explode these multi channels to tracks and make it double sure we're just sending the left channel so they're no phase issues this is an extra step you don't really have to do with the axe effects is on ly listening to the left side anyway because we set the tone that you want to do that but I'm kind of a you know, detail freak about it so I'm just hard handing this left so that we make sure the accesses just hearing the left channel so again we want to put the reference source on usb make sure about these channels are on left and I'm gonna go in and I'm going to start playing this you don't actually have to let it play for that long it'll get it pretty quickly but if you have a section of music where you've got a lot of stuff on low on the fretboard and then high on the fretboard, you want to kind of try and capture all of that so now I'm just going to play some place um lead stuff into the tone match block that real quick well it's going it's going to sound it's going to sound pretty ugly right now because we got a cabinet running into a tone matchbox we actually have to bypass that we don't want to send the cabinet sound into the tone match block that's an important step um if you turn this on this block is gonna listen to that teo you wanna turn that off so and what? We're going for it so let's start it up. All right? We've got, uh if you see the front panel again, maybe, um I got this curve over here is the one that we listen to two and there's curve right here is the one I just played so they were gonna hit match and we've got this covered here running way closer to what it originally was we're gonna add the, uh, delay on there let's, listen to that away for a second and see what kind of a you know, kind of kind of sound we've got so it's like a tempo matched stereo delay so let's just throw stereo digital stereo delay and what you want to do here that is boost the level a little bit. The tone match block is quieter than cab blocks. Um, so so you kind of so we've got that same kind of sound going on and the difference in those tones comes in that the gain staging was a little thicker on the original tone so it's captured the sound rights we've got this curve but there's a little more of not so much a bass sound in the tone as there is more of a base feel which means that I probably used another amp type um when I dialed the sin I think I might have used actually the cali leggy um which has a little more of kind of like that fuzzy feel I was talking about that earlier actually um so we could put that amp in and then rerun the tone match and it would work a little better but it's got the same general kind of um kind of feel to it but the sound is dead on so we might have to work a little bit more on the field. So like I said, an important part of tone matching it's kind of getting too amped feeling how you want it before you do the tone match because that once you change that you're gonna need to rerun the tone match and you could do it a couple times and in fact what you can also do is export this tone match which is already a pretty good approximation then start messing a little bit more with the feel of the amp and get a little closer to a little more work to get it where I had it originally when I recorded this run another tone match um, and have the tone match block affecting the tone. Match I r that you loaded into the user slide in the cabinet and then, and you could also export that one and have the two I ours modifying each other, uh, and so on and so on and so on, and you can get evermore ridiculously detailed. Uh, tone matches out of your tone match. So that's telling, matching, um, a sound from a recording. And again, you can use that itunes youtube. Uh, your dog? Pretty much whatever you want, teo.