martedì 26 giugno 2012

Day 6: New Joe Satriani Tone with Metal2000

As you may have read in my previous post, i've found similarity between the Metal 2000 and the Soldano amp, so i managed to experiment with my Satriani patch.

Some word:

1) stomp boxes: i've found that the fuzz wah do a pretty good job in the wah department. This one is twaked to my touch

2) Amp eq: need a good amount of high freq but without sounding too raw, also need some mid to make the wah wah work properly

side notes: if you want a solo tone without the wah i may suggest you to lower the amp gain and put the overdrive in front of it. I heard that in many songs Satriani is clean channel + Boss overdrive!


You can find it here:

https://fuse.fender.com/mustang/preset.php/mordor74-satch-wah-satriani-summer-song-metal2000

lunedì 25 giugno 2012

Day 5: work in progress on Amp Models on the Mustang...

When run any of my guitars on my Toneport GX i have the basic 18 amps + 24 from the power pack + 18 from the Metal pack: 60 amps!

The amps i use most are the L6 clean for the clean and a range of high gain: The "mesa", the mark IIC+, the "soldano", the "marshal preamp", the "engl", the L6 Insane plus a number of other that really does not make much difference to me other than have a different graphical front end.

When i switched to the Mustang I the number of emulated amps dropped to 12.

I use the twin for the clean, the bassman for my bluesy moods and for the high gain things the American 90 ("mesa") and the Metal 2000 ("peavy 5150 and sons"). I dont use the Marshall, i dont like them that much!

As i stated before i have recovered a functional model of my beloved IIC+ by tweaking SEG and BIAS.

this leads me to a consideration: you have 12 amps with 3 SEG setting and another 3 "extreme" settings for the BIAS (with a lot of finetuning possibility...). A total of 12*3*3 model possibility: 108?

So i started a little research on guitar amp genealogy to better understand where my experiments lead.

I found this interesting video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5kf5CuB8FA

It shows that the Soldano, the EVH and the Peavy sound pretty similar with some small diffrence that you can also find on 2 copy of the same model that slightl differ in the bias twak or in the valve "condition".

If you use the settings from the video on your mustang amp you will get a pretty similar sound :).

So in my todo-list i added this:

Getting a round and warm lead, soldano like, tone from my Metal2000 model.

Finally i started building a "guitar amp's family tree":



Day 4: The Mustang BIAS setting and the Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ sound

I've been experimenting to fake a Mesa Mark IIC+ with the American '90. I found i nice sound with SEG and BIAS to the max so i started reading about BIAS on valve amps, especially Mesa ones...

It tourned out that an higher BIAS warm the sound and a lower BIAS make it raw, so:

1) high BIAS for warm soloing leads

2) low BIAS for cutting edge solos and metal rythm

As a final result i got a pretty decent fake of the IIC+ sound that i used to make a patch that sound like Rob Balducci in the clinic i've recently been.

Here is the preset:

https://fuse.fender.com/mustang/preset.php/mordor74-mesa-mark-2c-rob-balducci-v4

Next i will be sperimenting to obtain a flat clean sound and to obtain further more result with my bias settings...

lunedì 11 giugno 2012

Day 3: Fender Mustang volume tips


ANTIFACT

At the beginning i manage my volumes on the mustang like i used to do on my L6 products:

i set to an high level my clean channel patch and balance the volume of the dirt/high gain channels to the clean ones

i sorted out with a clean channel at 8-10 and 6-8 fot the overdrived channels...

THE PROBLEM

this gives me 2 issues:

usb recording was a bit "confused" and "undefined"

i was unable to control the master volume: it was too sensible! in passed from not enough volume to too much volume with a light touch of rotation

THE ANALYSIS

When i recorded i started to lower volume for the channel and then i understand:

while L6 channel volume act "digitally" with no change in the tone, the mustang channel volume act more like a real amp: the more you push it the more it changes, act differently

THE SOLUTION:

I set the volume for my overdrive channels at 4 and then balanced the clean to them

THE FINAL RESULT:

1 - better recording

2 - a good fine tuning of the master volume