Plugins for the layman

[kawliga]

Although I have a reasonable technical understanding of general computing, I confess I am ignorant of a lot of the technical aspects of recording. I do not understand all the jargon.

I have used Garageband in the past and what I liked about it was that the plugins had names that a layman could understand, such as "Electric Blues" (I'm paraphrasing - I can't remember the exact name).

I really like Ardour but, when I open the plugins manager, I am confronted by plugins with names like "Transient Designer" and "X-Over 3 Band". I have no idea what these things mean - I just know that I want, for instance, an Eric Clapton style guitar sound.

I realise many of these tools are designed for professionals who understand the jargon and that, if I had a deeper understanding, these tools would allow me greater control than something like Garageband. However, I find it baffling and I end up spending too much time tweaking knobs I don't understand by trial and error and still not getting a nice sound, instead of making music.

My question is whether anyone could please share any simple "recipes" they may have for emulating the guitar sound of any famous players or styles of music.

Perhaps something like this, just for instance:

to sound like Keith Richards:

use foo plugin
turn gain to 4
turn something else to 6 and a half
etc.

[ssj71]

Pro audio is a technical field, audio engineers used to be as highly trained in mathematics as any other engineering discipline. I think that has changed a bit, though I could be mistaken, but the fact remains there is a lot of jargon. It is a technical task. You are signal processing whether you realize it or not. If you'd like to learn pro-audio an audio engineering there are many quality introductory books out there. Google any term you are unfamiliar with. I'm kind of a want-to-know-it-all so this is the approach I took. I have learned a lot and am still learning much.

However if you're frustrated and just want to play, install rakarrack. It has 3 banks of great presets you can learn from and just load and play. Guitarix does't have quite as many presets but the ones there are good. Ardour is meant a bit more for serious pro-audio engineers and many of the plugins are similarly targeted.

For sounding like your favorite guitar hero, you should probably first realize that probably 80% of their sounds comes from their hands. As keith richards said himself (from wikipedia):
though he has used many different guitar models, in a 1986 Guitar World interview Richards joked that no matter what model he plays, "give me five minutes and I'll make 'em all sound the same."

You might be able to get similar sounds through finding what equipment they used then selecting similar plugins/effects. i.e from wikipedia it looks like Keith used a mesa boogie for a while and a fuzzbox on I can't get no. Guitarix has a mesa emulation and I believe a fuzz too. I'm sure rakarrack has a fuzz, and you can link the 2 with jack. Most of the effects and things are based on real-world equipment so any generic guide to getting guitar tone will be applicable.

Trying the rakarrack presets is probably your best starting point though. Recipes really only work when you specify every ingredient including pick weight, string gauge, pickups, hand size and position, amp, mic type, placement, pre-amp etc. etc. etc. And you won't be able to match their exact technique anyway. I have tried finding such recipes and been pretty frustrated. If it were easy to dial up a Clapton sound, he wouldn't be very famous.

I hope this is still helpful. I remember the first time opening ardour I was overwhelmed and just closed it again without playing a note. You'll get there if you're willing to climb that learning curve. I'd be happy to try to help answer any specific questions too.

p.s. If you start finding/creating some great sounds, save them as presets and share them with the community! Thats how rakarrack got those great banks.

[DepreTux]

I guess the best approach here is to learn at least the basics of electroacustics and dsp. I don't mean all the maths background, at least just the concepts. At the same time, read on specific effects and how they affect signals in the time and the frequency domain. Complement all this with hearing music targeted at certain kinds of textures, such as Terry Riley's "A rainbow in curved air".

Another really useful thing for me is to route all the music you hear through the jack audio connection kit, so that whenever you want, you can insert some compression, eq, reverb, or any other processing to achive a certain sound characteristic.

There are lots articles on soundonsound.com which will introduce you to this topics, and searching the web will produce very colorful results.

Tools like ardour are complex because music is a complex thing in itself. And sound production adds another (big) layer of complexity to the bare musical thinking.

I don't specifically know about Clapton's sound, but I can sure tell you his sound is a combination of his playing, his instruments, amps, and all the engineering behind both.

Good luck and enjoy the journey

[bazsound]

have a look at guitarix, it has a standalone program that you can load amp heads, cabs and fx into to create a chain like a real guitarist would.

Just bear in mind that you are going to get some latency unless you have a really good interface and powerfull system, but it is atleast playable even with ok hardware.

I can get 5ms latency with onboard soundcard and using a head, cab and distortion so that it is playable while recording.

There are also lv2 versions of some of the guitarix stuff that you could load into ardour.

use the plugin manager to search the plugins, thats the easiest way of filtering through what you dont want.

so, if you want an EQ. search for EQ, there is still alot, so start with calf EQ its what i use for channel EQ, there is eq1q eq5q and eq10q however i find it to cause too much phase issues if used on a channel i only ever use it on the master bus with tight q to notch out commen problem frequencies in a mix.

generallly, calf is a good place to start as they have nice eq's and the compressors aint to bad aswell. they have gates too.


invada has a really nice compressor aswell.

there is quite frankly too many plugins, too many to go through and try them all, i have tried, and found that most of them ones ive tried are either useless or dont work correctly, like the dvider which supposedly is a sub octave generator, all it does is make nasty breaking up distortion.

You might find it hard to emulatre a sound of a specific person in linux, as the availible good plugins are much less than windows, plus to get that specific sound is not always down to the FX being used. you have to have the right instrument to start with. Then as others have said the player often has the most influence over the sound just by the way they play.

Best starting point would be to record with no processing, then add an eq to correct the sound. enable the bands in calf eq then make a boost, tighten the Q so that your not effecting so many freuencies at once, then scan through the frequenies back and forward to find what is sticking out or what you dont like, then cut it. then you can either widen to q as desired, or using another band to shape the sound with wider q.

Play around with the eq and learn what it does and how it works, and what works for removing problem frequencies and what works for shaping the sound. Eq is used in several different ways. tight q's for singling in on specific frequencies, and wide q's for removing a bunch of frequencies. 1 is corrective , the other is shaping.

A note about using distortions, try avoid going for super high gain distortion which tends to bring distortion into the point of compressing the signal, which kills all the dynamics. Also i find that some guitarists tend to want to kill all the mids and bring out the highs in certain types of music which again kills all the musical content. Unless there is a very specific reason for it but generally i think it just doesnt sound musical and is tiring to the ear hving all that fizzy top.

its best to start with basic mixes, gain structure, EQ once you can get solid good mixes with just that you can then start adding compression and FX like reverb to add space. using reverb to lengthen a short snare drum, or adding depth to a vocal (doesnt have t be on all the time)

so EQ, compression, reverb, delay. is your starting point.

And for gutiars there are some amp simulator plugins and distortions.

Make sure you have your plugins in the right places. Generally they will be pre fader as you dont want to effect the level going into plugins by moving the fader (generally i keep EQ Compression distortions pre fader, infact pretty much everything is pre fader except for bus sends)

For a guitar plugin chain, i would probably have EQ first, then an amp simulator, then distortion plugin keeping it in line with how a real amp would be setup.

[ssj71]

You might be interested in this guide on the guitarix wiki:
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ ... that_rocks

In the end, we can try to give some tips, but most recipies won't work because you have different setup. But all you really need is ears. If you can hear that your sound is not what you want that's half the battle. The other half is tweaking around until it gets better. Knowledge just speeds up the second half I think.

[tramp]

guitarix provide also a other way to get a " Eric Clapton style guitar sound" for example. The tool for this is called "SpecMatch", the way to go is convolution. Once you have understand to use this tool, you could leave all the "twiddle with the knobs", behind you.
http://sourceforge.net/p/guitarix/blog/ ... opy-sound/

But indeed, don't use this tool is the best way to keep your soul clean from the influence of the free minded guys who try to rice you down under the limit witch your social integration allow.
In other words, don't play with the dirty child’s tools, or they will get you!

[transmogrifox]

I'll apologize up front I don't have an easy recipe for you. My answer is similar to all above answers, in that, I give you tips. What it boils down to is I don't think anybody has really developed anything like that in the Linux/Free Software environment in a way that can be compared to the consumer-grade product offerings. I conclude people don't pay big dollars for advanced signal processing, they pay large sums of money to have advanced signal processing presented to them in laymans terms. That is a tall order, no doubt.

As a software developer and electrical engineer I often forget how confusing things like these plugin names can be to the layman. To me, these names are exciting (like a new playground) -- something I loved when I was first discovering audio production in the GNU/Linux environment. These plugins have names that really mean something...to somebody with technical insight into the realm of signal processing.

To a musician who focuses on music and less on technology, these plugin names have the opposite effect: they hide the power that lurks "under the hood".

I have in the past contributed a lot of code to Rakarrack, and I can speak from experience about how these names come into being (I hope this will be helpful if you end up using Rakarrack).

Take for example the effect in Rakarrack "Convolotron". I felt so clever naming this because it's like a convolution machine in which you can apply all kinds of filter responses just by loe yoading a ".wav" file from your favorite amp. Unfortunately, if you don't know what "convolution" is, and what it can do for you, then you have no idea that you can emulate the sound of any amplifier cabinet and/or small room if only you have a wav file of the "impulse response" of that room. An "impulse response" is basically what happens to a bell when you whack it with a hammer. As applied to a Convolution engine, if you had a .wav file of somebody ringing a bell, then the effect on your guitar would be like putting a speaker driver core on a bell. The possibilities are endless.

If you want to sound like, say, Eric Clapton...well the first thing is get a Fender Strat and listen to a ton of Clapton so you have an ear for it. If you know what you're going for, you can get pretty close just by plugging into any old amp and playing until it sounds like Clapton.

Well, next, you have this certain sound on a certain album. Really, most popular (especially classic rock) boils down to 3 effects (as mentioned by others):
Compressor
EQ
Distortion
Reverb
Amp Cabinet

Guitarix gives you all of those, but with less for presets. Rakarrack gives you all of those and more controls than you will know what to do with...but tons of presets to get the idea (but few that actually "sound like" anybody famous)

To boil it down to a recipe:
Compressor :
Ratio 4:1
Threshold tweak until you can hear the "watery" effect
Attack 25 ms to 75 ms
Release 50ms to 200 ms

EQ:
On a 7-band EQ typically pull down 250 Hz about 3 to 6 dB
Sometimes a little boost in the 3 kHz to 6kHz range for a little "sparkle"

Distortion:
Well, too many things to cover here, but Rakarrack has the "StompBox" effect with attempt to emulate several different types of distortion pedals. I think the RAT is the one I nailed the closest to reality. Leave all the EQ's flat and adjust the "high" EQ to emulate what the real Tone knob on the RAT does. This one actually is pretty versatile in its sound.

Amp Sim:
Use a "Convolver". Gutarix has a good CPU-efficient convolver. The trick is to find what amps and cabinets your target artist uses then try to find .wav file impulse responses for these amps. This is probably the single most useful tool in terms of "getting that sound". If you can get the basic amp cabinet response into the foundation of your tone, you have captured most of the salient features of the sound. The rest can be accomplished by doing the right things with your hands on the guitar and pushing it through some kind of fuzz box if you need some octane.

[ClausRogge]

I went to Coursera and took the six-week audio production course, it's just about to start again https://www.coursera.org/course/musicproduction - it's free and I can really recommend it!

[bazsound]

you should check out pensado's place on youtube, he has a wealth of information on mixing recordings, though he does use protools and commericially availible plugins, alot of it is translatable to what is availible in linux