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

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#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.

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#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:

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#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.

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#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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