Post by ashcatlt on Nov 23, 2013 18:35:02 GMT -5
So I'm in the middle of this project. It starts with a song that I've had around for a while, then turns into a bad trip, and then becomes an extended spoken word piece kind of thing. I've actually been working on it on and off for more years than I'd like to remember, and it just keeps growing in scope, but I am finally getting to where I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had actually promised to release it as part of an album last month... Maybe by New Years?
Anyway, an important part of this production has always been feedback. It basically devolves from something that sounds like a song into feedback and strange undifferentiated weirdness for a while, and the feedback is meant to last all the way through. The original tracking actually did have something like 2 minutes worth of feedback in the middle, but that ain't quite gonna cover it. I have been working over a loop of that 2 minute section. It's long enough that if I sort of overlap and crossfade it, you can't really tell that it's a loop. It's actually pretty cool, but of course I wanted more. Much more. Like every one of my guitars feeding back for the full half hour.
Unfortunately, I don't get too many good chances to really crank up a real amplifier and let it feedback without pissing somebody off. And when the track is 30 minutes long, the hours start to add up pretty fast. I had to come up with a solution.
Now it would be pretty easy if I just wanted each guitar to hold one note for the whole time. I could really just pick some oscillator, maybe "dirty" it up a bit, and done. But that would be pretty boring. What I really want is the sound and feel of wiggling a guitar around in front of a loud amplifier where diffferent strings fade in and out and break to harmonics based on the relative position of the guitar.
The first thing I tried was an old trick I've used a number of times with varying success in the past. If you take a drawbar organ, run it through a bit of distortion and/or a guitar amp, hold down a high note, and mess around with the drawbars you can get something fairly convincing. Now, my father has several Hammond organs and a Leslie, but he spends his winters touring areas that are above freezing (read: "far from me") so that's not an option just now. What I do have is a couple different drawbar organ VSTis and a brand new Korg NanoKontrol2. So I auditioned a couple and found that I just wasn't getting the sound that I wanted, and that it's kind of a hassle to get the controller to wiggle the virtual drawbars. It's doable, but it requires all kinds of re-configuration both in Reaper and on the controller itself. So I built my own.
I started with a single track where I inserted the JS tonegenerator plugin, set to just spit out a sine wave at a pretty high D (the song's in Dm). Ran that through just a tiny touch of vibrato for a barely perceptible frequency/phase wobble that you don't actually get out of a Hammond, but added a subtlety that I liked. Then just a tiny touch of distortion both at the top and at the zero crossings to emulate a less than perfect amplifier stage. This was the top octave, corresponding to the 1' drawbar. Then I sent this to another empty track. On that track I inserted an instance of ReaPitch to drop it an octave. ReaPitch only goes so far down, so I sent this second track to a third which also had ReaPitch down an octave, then again and again. I think I ended up with 5 or 6 octaves total. Yes, most organs have "in between" drawbars which are not perfect octaves, but I left them out. These were all set up as Post-FX (pre-fader) sends, so now I could just use the default setting on the Nano to use the volume faders for those tracks as drawbars. All of the tracks finally sum into a single track with maybe another "diode" clipper and a PodFarm model of some guitar amp or other.
And it worked as expected. It's really pretty cool. I actually did it twice, the second time setting the "top octave" several octaves lower, so that the lowest notes were lower even than a drop-D bass (nearly subaudible, working more like amplitude modulation on the audible tones above). But of course, it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I will keep it in there for another couple of layers, but...
I had another idea. I posted a while ago about this Boombox device (Plug it, Stick it, Feedback!), and it came up again on another forum recently. It turned out to be the answer. So tune the guitar to open Dm, stick the thing on the back of the headstock, plug it into my headphone amp, run the guitar through a high gain amp sim (which can later be swapped out for something more appropriate) and away it goes. By running the full mix of the song through the thing, I was able to convince myself that it was sort of responding similar to what would happen if the guitar was on stage with the rest of the band pounding around it. Honestly, though, if I had left it at that the guitar would likely have just "choose" a single note and stay there. The speaker is literally stuck to the guitar. Waving the guitar around in the air doesn't change its relationship to the speaker, and therefore doesn't change the notes produced. How to get some variety?
Well, what actually happens when you move the guitar around in front of the speaker? You're really changing the phase relationship between the vibration of the string and the vibration of the air caused by the speaker. How to get that in this situation? The answer, of course, was to stick an all-pass filter after the amp sim before sending the signal back out to the Boombox. Wiggling the "cutoff" frequency of that filter gives some very convincing results. Of course, I didn't want to just sit there wiggling that knob for hours on end, so I used Reaper's built in Parameter Modulation to apply a fairly slow random LFO to that parameter. Then I set up Reaper to record for a half an hour and walked away. Recorded "raging feedback" from six guitars for a half hour each in my living room while my family and I went about our daily business - including a drive to the store. It was not exactly silent, actually surprisingly loud (especially the hollowbodies), and when the things broke to the really high harmonics it was a bit piercing even off in the kitchen, but it was livable. Half of the things were literally recorded with a baby sleeping in the room next door. Part of the reason for this whole thing was that somebody in the other forum had speculated that it would work best on a set-neck instrument like an SG, and in fact the only time I had tried it previously was on my SG clone, but it worked just as well on all of my bolt-ons, including my Squier Mini-Strat.
So, it's not actually all of my guitars. The LP is at the Cafe Be At LBR, and I didn't bother to go get it. The Behringer isn't actually wired up, and the lefty was downstairs. But I did my offset/tele hybrid, my Rick, the SG, my baritone-strung Squier strat, my Nashville-strung thinline, and the Mini which is tuned up to A. I think 6 is probably enough...
But then, of course, I also wanted to play around with vocal delay feedback effects. I have a number of delay VSTs which will self-oscillate, but they mostly don't actually have a limit to how loud they get. If you let them feedback on themselves they tend to just get louder and louder and LOUDER until Reaper shuts down the audio system (there's an optional parameter for how loud is too loud) or you run out of 32 bit float numbers. 0dbfs is a swing from -1 to 1, so the full resolution of a 32 bit float is...umm...way too loud! So I built myself a little feedback loop inside Reaper. I'm not in front of it to say exactly what all it entailed, but I sent the female vocal to a track with a limiter, maybe an EQ, and a delay set to just a couple repeats by itself. This then sends to a third track with another limiter and - just for fun - a "Weeper" wah sim from PodFarm which then sends back to the input of the track with the delay on it. You have to tell Reaper in the Project Settings that you want to "Allow feedback in routing", and then be aware that things can get out of hand fast, but the limiters...well...limit the damage to an extent. The send from the feedback path back to the delay track is set to Post Fader so that I can ride the fader on the NanoKontrol to adjust the number and intensity of the repeats. It's a lot of fun to play with, but again, I didn't really want to sit there and tweak it. I probably will go back once the rest of the thing comes together and actually play the fader with my hand and the wah treadle using an expression pedal, but for now I set the wah to follow another slow random LFO, and set the feedback volume to follow the volume of the musical bed. It turned out pretty cool. I actually rendered two of these - one with the delay on 1/4 notes, and one on (IIRC) whole notes. I then copied the shorter delay track, reversed it, applied a single repeat delay of a 1/4 note (to get it back to the actual original beat) and then a simple repeating delay (four or five repeats, no fancy crap this time), rendered that, and then reversed it back.
Then I muted the actual instruments and vocals of the original track (with the exception of a loop of the two basses feeding back), rendered the resulting mess, posted it to Soundcloud, and came here to tell you all about it.
Listen to as much of the half hour as you can stand here:
Lorenzo's Tractor - Not A Great Saying
Anyway, an important part of this production has always been feedback. It basically devolves from something that sounds like a song into feedback and strange undifferentiated weirdness for a while, and the feedback is meant to last all the way through. The original tracking actually did have something like 2 minutes worth of feedback in the middle, but that ain't quite gonna cover it. I have been working over a loop of that 2 minute section. It's long enough that if I sort of overlap and crossfade it, you can't really tell that it's a loop. It's actually pretty cool, but of course I wanted more. Much more. Like every one of my guitars feeding back for the full half hour.
Unfortunately, I don't get too many good chances to really crank up a real amplifier and let it feedback without pissing somebody off. And when the track is 30 minutes long, the hours start to add up pretty fast. I had to come up with a solution.
Now it would be pretty easy if I just wanted each guitar to hold one note for the whole time. I could really just pick some oscillator, maybe "dirty" it up a bit, and done. But that would be pretty boring. What I really want is the sound and feel of wiggling a guitar around in front of a loud amplifier where diffferent strings fade in and out and break to harmonics based on the relative position of the guitar.
The first thing I tried was an old trick I've used a number of times with varying success in the past. If you take a drawbar organ, run it through a bit of distortion and/or a guitar amp, hold down a high note, and mess around with the drawbars you can get something fairly convincing. Now, my father has several Hammond organs and a Leslie, but he spends his winters touring areas that are above freezing (read: "far from me") so that's not an option just now. What I do have is a couple different drawbar organ VSTis and a brand new Korg NanoKontrol2. So I auditioned a couple and found that I just wasn't getting the sound that I wanted, and that it's kind of a hassle to get the controller to wiggle the virtual drawbars. It's doable, but it requires all kinds of re-configuration both in Reaper and on the controller itself. So I built my own.
I started with a single track where I inserted the JS tonegenerator plugin, set to just spit out a sine wave at a pretty high D (the song's in Dm). Ran that through just a tiny touch of vibrato for a barely perceptible frequency/phase wobble that you don't actually get out of a Hammond, but added a subtlety that I liked. Then just a tiny touch of distortion both at the top and at the zero crossings to emulate a less than perfect amplifier stage. This was the top octave, corresponding to the 1' drawbar. Then I sent this to another empty track. On that track I inserted an instance of ReaPitch to drop it an octave. ReaPitch only goes so far down, so I sent this second track to a third which also had ReaPitch down an octave, then again and again. I think I ended up with 5 or 6 octaves total. Yes, most organs have "in between" drawbars which are not perfect octaves, but I left them out. These were all set up as Post-FX (pre-fader) sends, so now I could just use the default setting on the Nano to use the volume faders for those tracks as drawbars. All of the tracks finally sum into a single track with maybe another "diode" clipper and a PodFarm model of some guitar amp or other.
And it worked as expected. It's really pretty cool. I actually did it twice, the second time setting the "top octave" several octaves lower, so that the lowest notes were lower even than a drop-D bass (nearly subaudible, working more like amplitude modulation on the audible tones above). But of course, it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I will keep it in there for another couple of layers, but...
I had another idea. I posted a while ago about this Boombox device (Plug it, Stick it, Feedback!), and it came up again on another forum recently. It turned out to be the answer. So tune the guitar to open Dm, stick the thing on the back of the headstock, plug it into my headphone amp, run the guitar through a high gain amp sim (which can later be swapped out for something more appropriate) and away it goes. By running the full mix of the song through the thing, I was able to convince myself that it was sort of responding similar to what would happen if the guitar was on stage with the rest of the band pounding around it. Honestly, though, if I had left it at that the guitar would likely have just "choose" a single note and stay there. The speaker is literally stuck to the guitar. Waving the guitar around in the air doesn't change its relationship to the speaker, and therefore doesn't change the notes produced. How to get some variety?
Well, what actually happens when you move the guitar around in front of the speaker? You're really changing the phase relationship between the vibration of the string and the vibration of the air caused by the speaker. How to get that in this situation? The answer, of course, was to stick an all-pass filter after the amp sim before sending the signal back out to the Boombox. Wiggling the "cutoff" frequency of that filter gives some very convincing results. Of course, I didn't want to just sit there wiggling that knob for hours on end, so I used Reaper's built in Parameter Modulation to apply a fairly slow random LFO to that parameter. Then I set up Reaper to record for a half an hour and walked away. Recorded "raging feedback" from six guitars for a half hour each in my living room while my family and I went about our daily business - including a drive to the store. It was not exactly silent, actually surprisingly loud (especially the hollowbodies), and when the things broke to the really high harmonics it was a bit piercing even off in the kitchen, but it was livable. Half of the things were literally recorded with a baby sleeping in the room next door. Part of the reason for this whole thing was that somebody in the other forum had speculated that it would work best on a set-neck instrument like an SG, and in fact the only time I had tried it previously was on my SG clone, but it worked just as well on all of my bolt-ons, including my Squier Mini-Strat.
So, it's not actually all of my guitars. The LP is at the Cafe Be At LBR, and I didn't bother to go get it. The Behringer isn't actually wired up, and the lefty was downstairs. But I did my offset/tele hybrid, my Rick, the SG, my baritone-strung Squier strat, my Nashville-strung thinline, and the Mini which is tuned up to A. I think 6 is probably enough...
But then, of course, I also wanted to play around with vocal delay feedback effects. I have a number of delay VSTs which will self-oscillate, but they mostly don't actually have a limit to how loud they get. If you let them feedback on themselves they tend to just get louder and louder and LOUDER until Reaper shuts down the audio system (there's an optional parameter for how loud is too loud) or you run out of 32 bit float numbers. 0dbfs is a swing from -1 to 1, so the full resolution of a 32 bit float is...umm...way too loud! So I built myself a little feedback loop inside Reaper. I'm not in front of it to say exactly what all it entailed, but I sent the female vocal to a track with a limiter, maybe an EQ, and a delay set to just a couple repeats by itself. This then sends to a third track with another limiter and - just for fun - a "Weeper" wah sim from PodFarm which then sends back to the input of the track with the delay on it. You have to tell Reaper in the Project Settings that you want to "Allow feedback in routing", and then be aware that things can get out of hand fast, but the limiters...well...limit the damage to an extent. The send from the feedback path back to the delay track is set to Post Fader so that I can ride the fader on the NanoKontrol to adjust the number and intensity of the repeats. It's a lot of fun to play with, but again, I didn't really want to sit there and tweak it. I probably will go back once the rest of the thing comes together and actually play the fader with my hand and the wah treadle using an expression pedal, but for now I set the wah to follow another slow random LFO, and set the feedback volume to follow the volume of the musical bed. It turned out pretty cool. I actually rendered two of these - one with the delay on 1/4 notes, and one on (IIRC) whole notes. I then copied the shorter delay track, reversed it, applied a single repeat delay of a 1/4 note (to get it back to the actual original beat) and then a simple repeating delay (four or five repeats, no fancy crap this time), rendered that, and then reversed it back.
Then I muted the actual instruments and vocals of the original track (with the exception of a loop of the two basses feeding back), rendered the resulting mess, posted it to Soundcloud, and came here to tell you all about it.
Listen to as much of the half hour as you can stand here:
Lorenzo's Tractor - Not A Great Saying
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