Agreed, absolutely spot on. But with the power of these devices we can go much further than that - the lead tone is obviously a possibility, but what no-one seems to have considered is the possibility of emulating the Synthaxe as well! I haven’t tried out the clean pedalboard yet - just found this thread and only received my MODX yesterday, so I’m still finding my way around, but I’ll certainly provide feedback on that…
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Hi Rogerio, it’s really nice to meet another Holdsworth aficionado. Your pedal board is very good, except that it can’t reproduce Allan’s famous swell tones, and in my opinion neither can the Magic Stomp. It comes very close, but there’s always something missing.
I spent quite a few hours experimenting with a very complex pedal board yesterday which allows switching between Allan’s lead and clean channels on his rig.
I don’t think it’s ready to be shared, but I do feel it shows considerable promise, but before knowing how to assign the pedal board switches and other controls to the MODX and an external MIDI foot controller I am unable to really put my pedal board to the test.
I don’t know whether it’s possible to share pedal boards privately, but if so it might be nice to collaborate on this project, since you have far far more experience than me with both the web interface and these devices, so you could probably find better solutions to some of the things I was trying to create.
I started off by trying to replicate Holdsworth’s clean swell tone, but then I thought it would be a waste of the power of the MODX not to try and create a dual rig which would allow switching between lead and clean channels directly. There are several different approaches. One is to use a stereo switcher and assign that to an external controller.
Another approach is to use an expression pedal to morph from the clean channel to the lead channel.
An alternative is to use different snapshots and use an external controller to switch between them, or maybe the expression pedal could be used to switch between snapshots rather than switching between channels on the rig.
I also actually used 8 separate modulated delay lines on the clean channel of the rig, and I was surprised to find that no reverb effect was necessary, since graduating to a slightly longer delay time in each of the delay lines has a cascading effect. I need to find a way to control the delay times and switch out the longer delays when the swell is not in use.
But one problem I found is that very few of the effects plugins actually have a wet/dry mix function. So what I did was to keep the delay lines wet, then add a clean guitar tone separately, which has its own volume control to allow mixing in the dry signal at the end of the chain. That actually works far better since it’s basically a wet/dry rig, which is what Holdsworth used.
One of my first influences was also John Abercrombie, and I love your take on his early tone, although to my mind it actually sounds more like Pat Metheny’s tone around the time of the Bright Size Life recording - a tone I really used to love.
Unfortunately my guitar sound is a lot thinner than your tone in the demo recordings you made.
But what I really want to investigate and attempt to replicate is the sound one finds players like Tim Miller and Mike Moreno using - adding what sounds like a very subtle synth tone to their lead tone.
Recently I heard someone saying that this tone was produced by combining their slightly overdriven tone with an Electro-Harmonix POG, but I’m not sure. But now I have access to this wonderful little tool I believe that it will be possible to replicate that sound - probably far more easily than the tones Holdsworth used on his Synthaxe, since those were never combined with his guitar tone, leaving them totally exposed. But he mostly used Oberheim synths if I remember correctly.
I also love Pat Metheny’s synth sounds, and those are probably far simpler to reproduce, since they were based on very early Roland guitar synths which were pretty limited.
I’m also going to ask on the plugins section of the forum whether there are any physical modelling plugins available, since I really love those sounds from the days of the VL1-M using breath controllers in a similar way to Holdsworth with the Synthaxe.
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