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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Re: No biggie.

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10/18/1999 6:58 PM

Re: No biggie.

"Some folks like the sound of a resonant peak pre-distortion with a level such that most of the signal is not distorted a lot but the resonant peak really gets kicked into distortion. I have started thinking of this as Jimi's Wah Trick. "

I suspect others do it too, as they also likely do the pre-EQ thing. A rack I built for myself some 15 years ago (and sold some 10 years ago) had a single parametric stage, CMOS fuzz, and 2-band shelving EQ, which I would patch in that order. Goosing the midrange and upper bass would get me delightful tones, many of which were straight from the heart of the Reverend Gibbons his bad self. If you tweak the pre-EQ and distortion drive just right, you can use the pitch of the notes you play to inject an extra "I *mean* it!" flavour, since certain notes will snarl more than others. The natural compression of the distortion stage means that the tone will change more than the volume will.

"I've been mulling over some other things like moving resonances and cutoffs depending on a sidechain like an LFO, footpedal, or envelope filter so that the distortion character changes depending on the sidechain events. This should add some animation to distorted sounds."

I've been doing this for years, and love it. My favourite arrangement is to compress the signal, feed it into an envelope controlled filter set for slower attack, and drive the distortion with that. Normally, you wouldn't want to compress a signal that is feeding an envelope-extracting gadget, but in this case, the dueling envelope-extracting circuits fight against each other, injecting a little bit of randomness and subtle fluctuation in the resonant peak. One of the nice things about this sequence is that the harmonic content added by the fuzz fills out a lot of what is not emerging out of the filter pedal. Not sure how to describe the tone, but its a bit like talking and chewing at the same time: more or less full frequency range, with shifting added resonances.

10/24/1999 11:13 AM

Re: EQ at GEO

Hi. I understand that there's not a common standard, for choosing the freq. "bands" for an Guitar-EQ.
I have a YAMAHA GC-100 stomp-box in for repair. It is a compressor with equalizer. The EQ has the following "bands":
100Hz, 300Hz, 900Hz, 2KHz, 3,5KHz.
Apart from the fact, that the compressor section is working bad, the EQ sound fine to my ears; many usefull combinations.

Regards Preben

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