The New Tone Thread

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Tad: That's great man!!!! I can hear Scott Weiland's vocals on this dude, reminds me of STP....I may be able to help with the tom search, depends on what SDX's you've got...Which Superior kit are you using??? Sounds pretty realistic to me man, good job!!!

Hey thanks Miner! I keep thinking of STP as well, hoping that I didn't just inadvertently rip off one of their songs. That drumbeat must be close to one of their songs because they keep coming to mind...

I'm using the Custom & Vintage SDX. The kit is the Gretsch Round Badge kit, I think sampled from a 1950s or 1960s kit. And the snare is a 70s Supraphonic. I've run the close mics on the kick and snare through a pair of Distressors, compressing the crap out of them. It really did fill out the kick and snare compared to just the overheads, but the snare still sounds a little weak. And the overheads I have running through either the Distressors or an ART Pro VLA II (I tried both, can't remember which one I stuck with), with just a few dB of gain reduction when the snare hits.

Other than that, I've just got the 2 Roots SDXs and the default Avatar kit. Roots isn't really right for this track, and I've never been a big fan of the Avatar kit because I've heard it in so many recordings. But it might be a better fit for this track since it's more modern sounding. Basically I want toms that sound like Greg's or Rami's. They always have that perfect balance between initial transient and just enough resonance to have a specific pitch, but not be too ringy or "boingy".

Oh, speaking of Superior Drummer, their summer sale is on and their SDXs are 50% off. I'm eyeing up the Indiependent SDX now that it's finally included in their sales. It's been too new up until now, so has been exempt from all of their sales this past year. It's got some sweet kits sampled, recorded in a Seattle studio. The samples sound pretty amazing.

But anyways, I know this isn't the drum tone thread. I can pester people in that thread instead about drum tone.
 
Cool man, I've got the Custom & Vintage too, but I use the cymbals from that pack more than anything...If you can find it, the Evil Drums SDX has some good stuff in it, but it's hard to find...Just a suggestion though...Another expansion I really like, & is my "main" kit now, "Made of Metal" for EZD2, it works in Superior like all the Toontrack expansions...You can probably find it pretty cheap, & the toms from that pack sound pretty similar to Greg & RAMI's....I should know, I've A/B'd them many times trying to get there myself....:)

Seems like the outboard comp makes a big, big difference dude...Good job!!!
 
I'm in a warm thud phase right now on my toms. Heavy coated heads, moongels, deep tuning. They sound great. This 18" floor tom is like a bomb going off. It's just thwoooomp. I'm gonna track about 15-20 songs like this for an album and then move on to something else. Maybe go back to clear heads.

So today I did a test track with the Hallmark Mosrite and the P-Rails, and then yanked it out. I put my custom-made-for-Greg Hallmark "Fat Pig" bridge pickup back in the guitar and did the same track through the same amp and settings and cab and mic. So tomorrow I'll put the original Mosrite-spec pickup into it and do the same track. Then we'll A/B/C them.
 
Argh, I must've forgotten to hit the reply button earlier...

I'm in a warm thud phase right now on my toms. Heavy coated heads, moongels, deep tuning. They sound great. This 18" floor tom is like a bomb going off. It's just thwoooomp. I'm gonna track about 15-20 songs like this for an album and then move on to something else. Maybe go back to clear heads.

So today I did a test track with the Hallmark Mosrite and the P-Rails, and then yanked it out. I put my custom-made-for-Greg Hallmark "Fat Pig" bridge pickup back in the guitar and did the same track through the same amp and settings and cab and mic. So tomorrow I'll put the original Mosrite-spec pickup into it and do the same track. Then we'll A/B/C them.

That's one of my favorite sounds in rock and roll: that sound of a not-too-resonant floor tom. Yours always sound awesome. I really hate that "boioioing" sound of a tom that's too resonant, it reminds me too much of bad TS808 kinds of old school drum machines.

Wow, that sounds like a very extensive experiment! 3 different pickups in the same guitar? Now that's dedication. I'll be looking forward to the results.
 
Ha yeah. Well the "Fat Pig" was already scheduled to go back in the guitar. Swaps are really easy on this thing.
 

Dumb, scatterbrain question here about your board, but I'm assuming the input/chain goes from left to right, correct??? Meaning: guitar>wah>Flange>Phase>Trem>TS9>SD-1, is that how your signal chain is???? I'm not counting the pedals going into the loop, just the pedals that hit the front of the amp...
 
No you got it backwards. It goes like this...

Guitar > Tuner > Silencer > Amp

The Silencer is where it gets goofy. From the Silencer it goes...

Silencer send (yellow cable) > SD-1 > Tube Screamer > Tremolo > Phaser > Flanger > Wah > Silencer return (black cable). I like the wah last because I like to wah left-footed. There's no true-bypass or tone shaping reason for it being last. It's as simple as I'm a left footed wah guy. Most people put it first, but I'm not most people.

So it is all one long chain, but the Silencer has it's own loop. All of the pedals are in the Silencer's loop. I could just run it in-line, but this way the gate is triggered by either the guitar or a noisy effect like the Flanger. If I'm not using any effects it just acts like a regular gate. If I kick in an effect, then it gates the effect. The advantage of doing it this way is the gate traps both sources of noise. If it were in-line, say first in the chain to clamp down on single coil noise, then everything downstream would still be noisy. If it were at the end of the chain to clamp pedal noise, then the guitar signal alone wouldn't be hot enough to blow through the gate's threshold setting. So this way all of the effects an the guitar are into the same gate, but semi-separately.
 
Ok dude, I got it now....What I was really wondering is if you put your wah in the chain before you od pedals, but I see now....Thanks dude!!!
 
Nope, wah is dead last. There is some "thought" to the order though. I don't want modulation before overdrive, so OD goes first. I'd rather boost the flanger than send flanger signal into an overdrive. I never have flanger + phaser on at the same time, nor do I do wah + flanger/phaser, so they're all fine next to each other. I will on occasion send the Tremolo through the wah, flanger, or phaser though, so it goes before those effects.

And the EQ and Delay are amp fx loop only....meaning they pretty much never get used. I might pipe them into the front-of-amp effects chain. Maybe. Doubt it.
 
Cool man, I guess I'll just have to find what works for me when I get the wah...But, it's not like I'm gonna have a hard time with it, I'll only have 3 pedals, including the wah...:laughings:
 
Yeah, the wah doesn't work as well when it's in front of distortion/overdrive kinds of effects. I ended up putting mine close to the end of my chain as well, only my delay pedal goes after it.

Here's what I'm running with recently:

006.webp

Let's see, the order is:

- Boss TU-3 (tuner)
- Boss OC-2 (octave generator)
- EXH MEL-9 (Mellotron emulator)
- Boss CS-3 (compressor/sustainer)
- Keeley 4-knob (compressor)
- JHS FireFly (fuzz)
- Fulltone OCD (overdrive)
- Ibanez TS9 (overdrive)
- Dunlop Crybaby (wah)
- JHS Panther Cub (delay)

Bumped off the board and looking very lonely:
- EHX Superego (synth)
- MXR EQ

And out of frame is another lonely but awesome pedal/preamp:
- JHS Colour Box

I just can't come up with an arrangement that will neatly accommodate this set of pedals. The giant wah fucks everything up as far as layout goes. So I've got a temporary red straight cable in there between the TS9 and the Crybaby, until I get frustrated and try another re-org of the board, or at least until I get an angle cable that's longer than a pedal coupler cable. I'm seriously considering one of those George L DIY pedal cable sets, but I spent so much on those ridiculously priced DiMarzio couplers that I can't justify replacing them yet. Seriously, fuck DiMarzio. I bought the first several coupler cables at a reasonable price, and when I went to add a few more, they were up to $17 each!
 
I came ever so close to buying the EXH MEL-9.
I only buy cheap knock off pedals, (except for a Jimi Hendrix Dunlop Wah and a Boss overdrive), but the EHX Hammond pedal had me very interested and then the Mel had me excited as i LOVE Mellotron.
BUT it's ever so expensive so I declined.
 
I came ever so close to buying the EXH MEL-9.
I only buy cheap knock off pedals, (except for a Jimi Hendrix Dunlop Wah and a Boss overdrive), but the EHX Hammond pedal had me very interested and then the Mel had me excited as i LOVE Mellotron.
BUT it's ever so expensive so I declined.

I normally only buy cheap stuff too for messing about with. I've got a Boss SD1 (which come to think of it is actually quite cheap) and an OCD. These are decent quality but I use them all of the time.

Most of my other stuff is Chinese stuff by Mooer and ToneCity - they sound find when you're using them as 2ndary effects to do something weird. But if you were to use them as part of your main sound they'd probably start sounding shit quite quickly.
 
Yeah, the wah doesn't work as well when it's in front of distortion/overdrive kinds of effects. I ended up putting mine close to the end of my chain as well, only my delay pedal goes after it.

Here's what I'm running with recently:

View attachment 97370

Let's see, the order is:

- Boss TU-3 (tuner)
- Boss OC-2 (octave generator)
- EXH MEL-9 (Mellotron emulator)
- Boss CS-3 (compressor/sustainer)
- Keeley 4-knob (compressor)
- JHS FireFly (fuzz)
- Fulltone OCD (overdrive)
- Ibanez TS9 (overdrive)
- Dunlop Crybaby (wah)
- JHS Panther Cub (delay)

Bumped off the board and looking very lonely:
- EHX Superego (synth)
- MXR EQ

And out of frame is another lonely but awesome pedal/preamp:
- JHS Colour Box

I just can't come up with an arrangement that will neatly accommodate this set of pedals. The giant wah fucks everything up as far as layout goes. So I've got a temporary red straight cable in there between the TS9 and the Crybaby, until I get frustrated and try another re-org of the board, or at least until I get an angle cable that's longer than a pedal coupler cable. I'm seriously considering one of those George L DIY pedal cable sets, but I spent so much on those ridiculously priced DiMarzio couplers that I can't justify replacing them yet. Seriously, fuck DiMarzio. I bought the first several coupler cables at a reasonable price, and when I went to add a few more, they were up to $17 each!

Cool man. That's some nice stuff. Yeah those George L kits are nice and tidy. I just happened to have a ton of patch cables laying around in various configurations so it wasn't a big deal for me. You have a few of those big-box pedals with top ins and outs, so those are a problem for sure.

On the Pedaltrain site, there is a mockup simulator program thing where you can drop pedals on your specific board and arrange them for a good layout.
PedalboardPlanner.com - Plan your Perfect Guitar Pedal Board!

Here's how I did mine...


I laid it out using that simulator pic, then it was just a matter of running cables. Pretty easy.

I used an MXR Gate because they didn't have mine in their virtual inventory, but it's the same size, so no problem.
 
Ok, here's some toans....Everything is ran through the EVH head & cab with the i5 on the upper right speaker. To me, that speaker sounds better than the others, but it may just be me as usual....

There are 6 guitars on this, so I'm not gonna type out the settings, I will say I recorded these at a decent volume, but not super loud like before. I'm hoping I've found a sweet spot I can live with, & my neighbors can live with too....

As usual, I re-amp'ed the di's as I went, so the signal chain is:

SG/Strat>EVH LBX>EVH 4x12>i5

There's some warts in this I need to edit out, & I'm not quite sure on the clean tone, I used the S-S-S Strat for those...The dirty tones are the SG....I used the red channel on the higher octave guitars & the blue on the rest....

WR 6-28


Lemme know what you guys think....
 
Sounds good and heavy miner.

Couple of things though - don't know whether its intentional, but there's a weird kinda cocked wah sound on the lead/high guitars in the intro.

When the lead guitar comes in on the 2nd heavy bit I can barely hear it.

The two strat tracks appear to be a little bit too similar to eachother - I can barely hear the difference so they just kind of blend into one instead sounding like to guitarists playing together.

It all sounds like its well recorded though.
 
Sounds good and heavy miner.

Couple of things though - don't know whether its intentional, but there's a weird kinda cocked wah sound on the lead/high guitars in the intro.

When the lead guitar comes in on the 2nd heavy bit I can barely hear it.

The two strat tracks appear to be a little bit too similar to eachother - I can barely hear the difference so they just kind of blend into one instead sounding like to guitarists playing together.

It all sounds like its well recorded though.

Thanks Jdude, the reason you're hearing a cocked wah is because there is a wah on the left high track....And the reason you can barely hear it the 2nd time, it's a fill part dude, kinda like the original...Those are my excuses anyway...hahaha

The strat is 2 different takes, using different p'up positions, one is the neck/middle, the other is the bridge/middle...I must've played 'em pretty tight for it to sound like one guitar...hahaha

I'll post the raw tracks in a few minutes....

BTW, are you not interested in those drum samples I mentioned???
 
Thanks Jdude, the reason you're hearing a cocked wah is because there is a wah on the left high track....And the reason you can barely hear it the 2nd time, it's a fill part dude, kinda like the original...Those are my excuses anyway...hahaha

The strat is 2 different takes, using different p'up positions, one is the neck/middle, the other is the bridge/middle...I must've played 'em pretty tight for it to sound like one guitar...hahaha

I'll post the raw tracks in a few minutes....

BTW, are you not interested in those drum samples I mentioned???

Your rhythm playing is always pretty tight, mate.

Yeah, you sent me the link to the drum sample download on Saturday! I just haven't had chance to get onto them yet - ended up being a pretty busy weekend actually.
 
Here are the guitars solo'd in pairs, one clip is the high fill guitars, the other is the power chord rhythms...All of these are the SG through the EVH rig, with the i5 mic...

High Fill

Rhythm

The high fill guitar on the left has a wah pedal from Amplitube ran through the amp using the automation thing I mentioned a few days ago...

Hopefully I'll have a real wah in about a week or so & won't have to fuck with that anymore...I do have to admit, it sounds kinda convincing to me, whaddya think???
 
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