Suggested formation of collaboration group for pedal board design

Pedalboards
#1

I haven’t been here for long, and am very new to these mod devices, but I do have many years under my belt of programming different processors, specifically in the genre of Jazz and Fusion music.
Some of the tones that players from these genres develop can be very subtle and complex - far more so than the typical metal tones so many players go for nowadays.
So I wondered whether any of you with similar tastes in music would like to collaborate in order to create some really interesting pedal boards for experimentation and live use?
I started off with an attempt to combine both Allan Holdsworth’s clean and lead channels using what is probably an unnecessarily complicated approach (but probably not much different from what Holdsworth actually used in his home studio). At this stage I wouldn’t want to share this pedal board unless it was via some sort of collaboration with a view to refining and improving it.
I would also like to work on pedal boards for the creation of several other players with distinctive sounds. Here is a short list:

  • Allan Holdsworth - 60’s onwards. Although Allan’s sound has changed considerably over the years, he nearly always had an excellent tone. Back in the very early days he was playing a Gibson SG through a small Marshall combo, and he already had an interesting take on a Jazz guitar sound which isn’t easy to replicate. He then went through years of experimentation with every kind of amplifier and effect imaginable before finally arriving at a lead tone which was somewhat reminiscent of his original tone, but somewhat cleaner, but his clean sound became ever more complex and nuanced.
  • Tim Miller - obviously inspired by Allan Holdsworth, but nevertheless with his own tone which has a very acoustic quality - especially when playing chordally. But his lead tone is also very interesting and quite similar to Mike Moreno’s tone, in that there is an indefinable synth tone mixed in with the light overdrive which really adds expressivity to his solos.
  • Mike Moreno - very interesting range of sounds
  • Pat Metheny (ECM to contemporary) - using both Jazz guitar inspired tone along with a beautiful ambient sound which worked both for chordal and solo work. Also known for his use of the Roland guitar synth trumpet like tone for soloing.
  • Scott Henderson (Chick Corea Elektric Band/early Tribal Tech/Zawinul Syndicate) much prefer Scott’s tone during that period over the more Jeff Beck inspired tone and approach to tremolo arm use, because his tone was really special - far better than that of most of his contemporaries such as Frank Gambale in my opinion. His tone was very Blues inspired yet combined subtle use of modern effects without losing the purity of his tone.
  • Larry Carlton - always had a highly memorable tone, again Blues inspired.
  • Robben Ford - amazing tone
  • Jeff Beck - another player who had an instantly recognisable sound. Although most of his tone was created through his subtle touch and different techniques he did use very specific core tones at different periods in his career. I’d like to focus on the Blow By Blow fusion era, since that was my introduction to Jeff Beck.
  • Gary Moore - another Blues influenced player who also explored Fusion music and had an instantly recognisable sound.

To be honest I’ve been out of the loop for the past few years, so if there are other players whose tone fits in to this category, feel free to add them…

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#2

Hi and welcome!

Always nice to see people with broad tastes are coming here from different angles.

Interesting idea to seek out an approach that could probably have a generic layer and an artist specific layer to it.

To start off the conversation and using the community as soundboard, presenting a specific use-case would be the most concrete approach to get people involved and get relevant feedback on your current approach. That would mean sharing a pedalboard and stating what you mean to achieve.

What I called the “generic layer” to this would interest a broader amount of people on a community that is, let’s be honest, involved but not as big as we would like.

Don’t worry about “complicated” :wink:
Perhaps we can suggest some ways to reduce complexity while we pick up some idea’s ourselves? When things get really crowded on your board, factors like noise or even processor power can come into play. even then the more seasoned users can chip in.

What I’m trying to say is; be concrete and offer us something to work with (and perhaps learn from)

I’m sure many players here can benefit from what you already found out while offering their own valuable nuggets.

btw:

This made me grin :wink:

I kind of chose the high gain territory on purpose to explore with MOD devices because the sweet spots seems just as specific and most of all, personal and objective.

I’ve learned quite a bit about EQ’ing here and elsewhere in my quest to land on tones that are satisfying to my ear. We probably agree on the fact there is a lot of “ugly” high gain tone out there. But as stated above… it appears to be a very personal thing :smiley:
Perhaps that’s why there is so much youtube content coming “high gain people”, searching for optimal amps, setups, mics, and other gear, digging into compression, EQ, gain staging etc.

In your defence, many “metal heads” refer to “jazz tone” as “switching to neck pickup and rolling off the tone knob” so I understand the bi-directional stereotypes :smiley:
All of this in times of so much division…we should UNITE as guitarists! Unite against those PESKY SAX PLAYERS, RIGHT? :smiley: haha

4 Likes
#3

A couple of points…first of all, thank you for helping champion this cause and thank you for providing some helpful and thoughtful feedback.

  1. High gain tones - there are many Jazz Fusion players who have excellent high gain tone and use it tastefully. Case in point, I just listened to a recent Dream Theater track featuring John Petrucci, after being surprised to find this group featured on the Fusion Institute Facebook group. John’s tone was really excellent, as was his articulation and precision and phrasing - trading solos with the equally stunning Jordan Rudess…although personally, if I were to categorise this genre I would call it Progressive Rock, rather than Jazz Fusion.
    I already included Scott Henderson on my list, and his tone can get really heavy and high gain when he feels it suits the music, and his tone is always excellent. Mind you he did have Allan Holdsworth helping him with his sound at one point…

  2. The rolled back tone knob neck pickup typical Jazz guitar tone. In my opinion this is severely underrated as a starting point for tonal choices for several highly influential players in this genre - Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Mike Stern, Tim Miller, Mike Moreno and even John Scofield each have their different takes on this basic Jazz guitar tone. But it is the fairy dust each of them chooses in terms of effects which sets them apart.
    There is a reason for this. The node at which the richest harmonics are to be found is situated right where the neck pickup is normally mounted, just behind the 22nd fret, making for a rich warm tone which lends itself to many applications.
    In fact one of the challenges in terms of attempting to emulate Allan Holdsworth’s tone is to do so using the bridge pickup as he did, since one does not typically associate that pickup position with such rich warm tones.
    But in early footage of Allan playing his Gibson SG Custom, you can see that he is actually picking right over the neck pickup node, in order to obtain the warmest tone possible.
    I own a Hartley Thompson HT130 (in bits) amplifier which was at one time Allan’s choice in amplification prior to the release of the Yamaha DG series amplifiers. What is worthwhile looking at both in the tone stacks of these amplifiers and the Rocktron Juice Extractor which Allan also co-designed, is the fact that there is effectively a tone control for each string of the guitar - six active tone controls for each channel, one clean and one with the sustortion circuit. Without that range of EQ it is going to be pretty much impossible to capture the EQ range Allan used for soloing.

  3. Regarding your comment about sax players - I understand that you were joking, but nonetheless we should not forget that Allan Holdsworth actually disliked the sound of a guitar, and was doing his best to make it sound like a saxophone or other instrument. This is what gave rise to his distinctive tone. So it was as much the expression of his intention to sound like he did as the technologies he used to achieve this which actually produced that tone.
    Something many of those who attempt to copy Allan’s sound seem not to be aware of or simply ignore is the secret sauce found in the Yamaha Magic Stomp which Allan used for quite some time. Some of his presets in the device show how he went about making the sound of the guitar pop out of the mix.
    In fact it was the 8 simultaneous delays each set to a different time delay on a very low mix setting which provided something similar to a slapback effect, but providing more of a room like ambience than anything else, often making the sound of the guitar appear quite dry, since there is no detectable reverb or even delay.
    Yet the sound jumps out, even when almost totally clean. That’s a nuance of which these Mod plugins are more than capable of reproducing, and this was one of the challenges I faced when creating my first pedal board.

I take your point about actually uploading one of my pedal boards, and I will do that as soon as I am reasonably confident that it will be a fairly good representation of what I hope to achieve.
Like you, I am not particularly interested in mimicking someone else’s tone in order to use it to emulate them per se - even if that were possible, but rather to help me find my own sound through coming to understand which elements of another player’s tone most appeal to me and how they go about producing it.
This platform may not be unique in this approach, but certainly provides a larger range of plugins with which to experiment than other similar software.
I actually find the web GUI pleasantly simple to work with, and just wish that I could say the same for the hardware. Not that it is overly complicated, just very limited as to what one can access directly without the web interface.

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#4

OK, here is the latest iteration of this pedal board, hope it won’t be a letdown after all this talk: HOLDSWORTH LEAD/RHYTHM #4 - MOD Audio
Please bear in mind that this pedal board makes use of beta plugins, some of which are instrinsic to the design. Enjoy :slight_smile:
Please note that since the option exists, I chose not to make this link publicly available, mainly because this is a work in progress, but also because I wouldn’t be able to cope with a deluge of questions since I am not in the best of health. Thank you for understanding.

2 Likes
#5

Going to check this later this week, when I have some time to myself, my gear and my guitar.

The row of moddelays is intriguing :wink:

2 Likes
#6

Check this again, for some reason the knob assignments didn’t save the first time I created this pedal board. Hopefully this should now work as intended…thanks for your patience.

Here is a link to my latest pedal board. I believe you’ll find it pretty versatile although no doubt it needs tweaking and further refining. Enjoy :wink:

By the way, the idea of using the shimmer effect is a temporary substitute until I find a better way to reproduce the POG type effect used by Tim Miller and Mike Moreno. The acoustic IR on the second channel was also an attempt at imitating the acoustic timbre of Tim Miller’s headless guitars. This can be mixed in with either the clean Jazz channel or with the overdrive pedals - same with the shimmer effect. I’ve deliberately created low gain/edge of breakup tones, since these are the most difficult to reproduce convincingly. I’ve also used gain staging using more than one overdrive, so higher gain tones would be easy to add as well. I purposely left the reverb with a low mix in order to avoid swamping everything in a wash of reverb as some Youtube influencers tend to do far too often - without mentioning any names ;). Right now I’m using a 335 type semi-acoustic, but this should work with most guitars with a little tweaking.

4 Likes
#7

The mod delays are absolutely key to both Allan’s clean and lead tone. In the case of his lead tone the 8 delays create the ambience I tried to describe which lifts his solos out of the mix despite the typically dark tone he used boosting the lower mids on his amps, and as you can see from the ambient clean side of the signal chain of my pedal board the 8 modulated delay lines create a cascading reverb type effect without actually having any reverb effect on that channel whatsoever, since Allan disliked reverb, and I tried to stay as close as possible to the patches Allan created for the MS and UD stomp units. The knob assignments are intended to control the time for all 8 delays simultaneously, so that the length of the swell cascading reverb effect can be controlled using only a single knob - I don’t know how successful that was…later on the intention is to control this using an expression pedal, but that’s something I need help with, since I haven’t been able to get it to work properly.
Incidentally, Allan wasn’t the only one to use that ambient effect. Many other players including Pat Metheny use a tiny amount of slap back delay on their guitar to give the otherwise quite dark tone some snap. You can hear it when he palm mutes the strings during the execution of fast passages. Robben Ford often uses very obvious slap back delay, as does Larry Carlton on various recordings. The take away is that it’s delay rather than reverb, since reverb tends to cause the tone to lose clarity and as Allan pointed out - also creates sense of distance and separation of the guitar from the amplifier.
I think the reason it worked so well for Abercrombie and Metheny in the ECM recordings is the quality of the Lexicon reverbs and delays, and the access to so many internal parameters on those processors, as well as probably using ducking. But I’m just guessing about that.
I believe that there is a real art to being able to create such an ambient tone yet still have the guitar sound perfectly clear and separate from the effects. I suspect that Metheny was using a wet dry or even wet/dry/wet rig even back then.
This is where I feel Mike Stern’s sound wasn’t quite as refined as that of Pat Metheny. Mike had an excellent chorused sound on Upside Downside, but I never liked his distorted tone. But when he played just clean Jazz guitar he was superb.

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#8

There seems to be an issue with saving the changes made to pedal boards to my Mod Duo X. Not all the pages are saved to the device, and not all the switch/knob assignments either…so even though I re-uploaded the pedal board only a few of the assignments are the way I assigned them on the web interface. This is really frustrating. Does this need reporting?

Thanks to Julien’s invaluable assistance, hopefully I’ll be able to cross-check with a version of this pedal board which is known to work on Julien’s Mod device, and this will also help eliminate any element of user error on my part so that it will be clear whether the error occurs on the Web interface, on my device, or whether I simply did not save the control assignments correctly before saving the pedal board and uploading it to the server.
Once I have a version with all the assignments working correctly I’ll re-upload it so you have a better idea of what can be achieved in terms of tones.
The next stage will be assigning MIDI foot switch assignments once I have my M-Vave Chocolate up and running - could use some help with that ;).

#9

it’s best to do that but you’ll need to describe the exact steps you are following.
It could be a specific sequence of steps that is throwing it off course.
It could also be that you are saving snapshots versus the whole board, which is a different level.

Check the bug reports sub-category;
The opening posts follow a kind of “template”

#10

Thank you. I created a bug report. Of course since I am so new to this platform it’s possible this is down to user error on my part, but I suspect that there may be a bug in the web interface when it comes to saving quite complicated knob/switch assignments to the Mod device. One issue is that the GUI doesn’t clearly show what has already been assigned, so when one is dealing with multiple assignments on multiple different devices withiin the signal chain of the pedal board it’s really easy to forget where each assignment was supposed to go. There should be some sort of graphic representation of all the control assignments made for each device and each of the knobs and switches on the Mod device itself for easier referencing and problem solving if anything isn’t working as expected. After all these pedal boards can be very complex, and unless one is constantly taking notes of each tweak one makes, if the save function fails to work properly it becomes impossible to remember. I suppose that’s one use for snapshots, but for the time being I have just been using the ‘save as’ function and renaming the pedal board per iteration. I’ve yet to learn how best you use the snapshot function effectively.

1 Like
#11

Hi there - don’t want to be pushy, in fact I’ve been finding it difficult to find time to continue with this myself - but I wondered whether you’d had a chance to check this pedal board out yet, and if so, what you think of it, or what suggestions you might have to improve it?

#12

What can we do to stimulate interest in this group, I’d really like to see some more like minded users get on board with this?

#13

Sorry, work has been…messy to say the least

I’m trying to free up a time window on Sunday.

I like your idea to be working on boards together but I’ve been pondering on how this could be a true shared project; sharing boards back and forth on the public side would flood the page with iterations of the same idea; not an ideal experience of the regular end user

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#14

Not an easy issue at all

I would recommend using git and GitHub, since after all a pedalboard is a set of text files, but it would require some skill fair common between software guys but not between musicians

Git is a SW version control system, GitHub is one site where is possible to share software projects using git

  • Init a GitHub repo with the current state of the PB
  • clone such repo on your computer
  • configure ssh keys to connector to the mod unit
  • copy the repo files on the unit using winscp or similar and verify if the pedalboard is recognized
  • modify the pedalboard on the unit
  • copy the modified files on your PC, and commit them
  • do a pull request from the repo on your computer to GitHub to share with others
1 Like
#15

Hacky idea: A pedalboard is just a small JSON file. With some light wrapper, it could be synced via a service like etherpad.org.

But yeah, a CVS (like Git) is the way to go.

#16

It sounds as though you may be confusing my primary objective with the issues I’ve been experiencing with getting my pedal boards to save correctly. I couldn’t avoid bringing that topic over to this thread, but the real objective is to have like minded users each contribute pedal boards which represent the particular musical genre we are interested in working with and their approximations of the most prominent players within that genre.
The only problem I can see is how to group these contributions once they are shared to the server, since from what I have been able to observe pedal boards are only categorized according to the types of effects they make use of.
But when you look at other similar resources for different devices or plugins, one often finds the patches categorized according to genre and artist. So perhaps it may be an idea to suggest the addition of a ‘genre’ or ‘artist’ category to the pedal board listing to the Mod team. I doubt that it would take much work, and I am pretty sure that it would make it easier to make use of the user shared pedal board resource. Being new here I really have no idea who to approach with this idea, but perhaps you know a member of the team, or have a better idea in which section of the forum to post on this topic?
Although there is typically quite a good selection of music genres, Jazz Fusion isn’t overly represented, so it’s important - at least to us - to ensure that this genre is included, since it’s likely that if they were to agree to this idea that their own stylistic compilation would not automatically include this genre.
You could think of this as a folder-like compartmentalization such as we are used to using in computer software. Having looked at the way the pedal boards are organised currently I really don’t find the present system particularly useful - especially when one considers that it’s very rare to find a pedal board using only a single type of effect. In other words, there is unavoidably a significant cross-over between different effects in any given signal chain. Most often it’s a combination of several different effects which provide the range of sounds the user needs to work with, so I really don’t feel that the current way of organising the pedal boards was particularly well thought out.
Also, given the Open Source nature of this system, I don’t see why members should not be able to request such changes if they are likely to benefit the entire project.
Once there is actually somewhere for this group to post their pedal boards I see no reason why we would not be able to build a useful resource for those interested in this genre. And of course others could begin to contribute to whichever genre they most feel attuned to - resulting in a library of pedal boards for different musical genres and or artists, which could only benefit this forum as a whole.

#17

I also think that the online pedalboards repository could use some improvement, and adding metadata could be a way to do it.

But that should not be stopping you to start creating and sharing peldaboards: just use a consistent naming convention and your pedalboards will be easily retrieved by the search function.

Most similar pedals to the Rude?
#18

@gianfranco wrote on the MOD reboot thread that after the release of the firmware build 1.14 they will focus on infrastructure improvement. Let’s hope that the pedalboard repo will be involved

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#19

The thing is that I am endeavouring to stimulate interest among other more experienced pedal board creators than myself. I have only had hands on a Mod device since a couple of weeks prior to my starting this thread, so I’m still finding my way around the GUI and the way the web interface interacts with my Mod Duo X, so I’m pretty limited in what I am personally able to contribute until I really understand how everything works.

But if you have a look at the two pedal boards I already posted here, you will at least be able to see the type of configuration or virtual stage setup I was aiming for, and hopefully provide some useful feedback and perhaps suggestions for ways in which these pedal boards could be improved upon or expanded further (taking into account the problems I’ve already documented regarding important control assignments).

So since you are here and appear to be interested in this project, may I invite you to upload anything you feel might fit into this musical genre?

What we should perhaps do is come to an agreement on labeling of our uploaded pedal boards in such a way as to make it easy for contributors to this group to find and compare pedal boards uploaded by other contributors - until the Mod team decide to improve the labeling and categorization of uploaded pedal boards at some point in the future.
Do you have any concrete ideas in that regard?
One idea which just came to mind might be to simply add a link to this thread on each of the pedal boards any of us upload to the server, in addition to an easily recognisable naming convention which we all agree to which we can subsequently input into the search function.
That way we are not forced to wade through hundreds of slow loading pages which are not relevant to the subject matter. What do you think?