Latest / Electronic Music / Sound Design Using Guitars
Transcript
- Hello and welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast. I'm Paul White and this time we'll be looking at some ways to use the guitar as a sound source for creating electronic music rather than the more obvious synthesizer. Thanks to the wide range of effects available today it's quite possible for guitar players to create some quite complex sounding electronic music. Indeed you'd be hard pushed to identify the sound source as a guitar. There are, of course, guitar synths and pedals, such as the Electro Harmonic Synth 9, that change the guitar sound into synth sounds. Or guitar to midi converters, such as the Midi Guitar from Jam Origin. But in this podcast, I'll be exploring ways to get synth like sounds using only effects. A suitable string of effects used on a guitar can approximate the signal path of a simple analog synthesizer, where one or more oscillators feed a resonant filter and an envelope shaper. Here the guitar takes the place of the oscillator. A guitar played through a heavy overdrive or fuzz provides a harmonically rich waveform that can be used in place of a sawtooth or a pulse waveform. However, cleaner guitar sounds can also be processed to create interesting results. Now a guitar waveform will never be as harmonically pure as the waveform produced by an analog synth, but on the plus side it does have a more organic quality and can change in response to playing technique. For the filter stage we can use an envelope filter effect or even do the job manually using a wah wah pedal, which is really just a resonant bandpass filter. Traditional guitar effects chains place the wah wah pedal at the front of the signal chain, but if you're looking to approximate a synth sound, then the wah wah or filter needs to come after your distortion so that the filter has plenty of harmonics to work on. We also need an envelope shaper, and while there are some excellent pedal solutions, such as the Electro Harmonix Attack and Decay pedal, All the plugins, such as Physion from Eventide, you could use a volume pedal or even the guitar's volume control to create slower fade ins for your notes. Add some reverb or delay and the result can sound quite synthetic. I tend to use a plugin or pedal just to take the sharp attack off guitar notes when going for a more synth like sound. Even if I'm not trying for an obviously slow attack. To emulate a synth that's running two detuned oscillators, a chorus pedal or a plugin helps to create the required ensemble effect. And when it comes to pitch bend and vibrato, well, guitar players already have that at their fingertips. To really move the sound away from that of a guitar, then a shimmer reverb can work magic, as it shifts the reverb up by an octave, creating a kind of pseudo string sound. I find that shimmer reverbs usually sound best on undistorted guitar and often work best when placed close to the start of the signal chain. You can also create this effect using standard DAW plugins by chaining a compressor into a pitch shifter, set to one octave up with a 50 50 balance, and follow that with a healthy dose of reverb. A chorus or ensemble effect at the end of the chain helps approximate the sound of vintage string machines, but if you're after a more organ like vibe, then a rotary speaker cabinet emulation is always a reliable choice. Now, while synths can sustain notes indefinitely, the volume of a guitar obviously decays after a string is plucked. Using heavy compression or distortion can lengthen the notes significantly, but they'll still die away eventually. So if you need longer sustain there are a couple of options. One being a freeze type of pedal such as the Electro Harmonix Freeze which locks in the sound at the point when you press the switch and then plays it indefinitely until you unfreeze the sound. This works equally well on single notes or chords. Another option is to buy a guitar with a sustainer system built in, or to use an Ebo, a handheld electromagnetic sustainer that works on one string at a time to keep the string vibrating. This gives you infinite sustain along with the ability to change the harmonic balance of the sound by moving the device along the guitar string. With just a little practice and some added reverb or delay, it's possible to produce some really evocative sounds from this that are far removed from conventional guitar sounds. If you're feeling really adventurous, then using the Ebow on a fretless guitar leaves you free to play synth like pitch slides. I converted a cheap electric guitar by removing the frets and then filling the slots with plastic shims to mark the note positions. Playing single note lines in tune doesn't take too much getting used to, and if your intonation isn't perfect, then a real time pitch correction plugin set to a very slow response time will ensure that your sustained notes always end up in tune. If you have a guitar with a vibrato arm, you can also approximate the sound of a theremin by playing guitar harmonics, and then using the vibrato arm to create two or three note melodies around each harmonic. Add a slow fade in and few people will guess that the sound comes from a guitar. Heavy compression will help to keep the sound sustaining. To create the effect of oscillators tuned to different intervals, a pitch shifter pedal set to around 50 percent wet and dry balance and placed after any distortion pedals will produce the required effect. While polyphonic pitch shifting doesn't always sound that good on cheaper pitch shifters, most will do a perfectly adequate job on a monophonic source. Octaves and fifths often work well as parallel harmonies, but bass sounds can also be created very effectively by using a pitch shifter. This time set to 100 percent wet and dropped by an octave. If you have a bass guitar you can use, then you can treat that in the same way as your usual guitar to create bass synth effects. The fun really starts when we start to explore plugins and pedals that offer something outside of the usual reverb delay modulation effects. One of my current favourites is this Strymon Cloudburst. It's an ambient reverb pedal, but it adds harmonics to the reverb tail, creating complex pad like sounds. It's a bit like a shimmer reverb, but more texturally interesting. Here it is combined with a slow attack courtesy of Eventide's Physion plugin. The cloudburst can give you reverb decay times of up to 40 seconds, which gives you plenty of time to figure out which note to play next. Well, that's enough of that. I'm also intrigued by the way granular delays can completely change the character of a sound. On offer go from rhythmic or glitchy, to some quite exotic textures that incorporate pitch shifting, grain reversal and time stretching. Here are just a couple of examples created using Arteria's EFX Fragments and Output's Portal plugins. If you want to get this kind of effect from a pedal, then the Hologram Microcosm is a good choice, along with Red Panda's Particle 2 and the Walrus Fable. Create ear candy effects by tapping the guitar strings over the pickups using a glass slide or a metal spanner. Then you can add effects to the resulting chirps and pings. When recording, you might find that time stretching and editing unintentional guitar sounds, such as the hum or the clunk as you plug in, make useful percussive sounds for looping. In the example tune that I've done at the end of the podcast, I've used the sound of the strings being deliberately pushed against the pickups to create some drum sounds. If you want to add a rhythmic element other than drums to your composition, then you don't have to look further than a tremolo pedal or plugin that has a square wave setting. Set this to a multiple of your song tempo and chop the sound into a pulse. Here's an example using a granular delay followed by tremolo with an autofilter placed after the tremolo. There are some even more exotic plugins and pedals that can be used to create sequencer, like pitch shifts, and there are delays that include sophisticated filtering such as Rob paper's, Delane, or the applied acoustic systems object delay. So it all was space to experiment. In the studio you can also time stretch and reverse guitar sounds as well as adding your own envelopes using automation. Syncing delays to your song tempo obviously helps solidify the timing, and you can often come up with your own unique sounds by combining two or more effects. By putting together just a few of these ideas you can create your own electronic soundscape entirely from guitar. Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound. com forward slash podcast website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.