John some of those swamp chicks are hot as hell!
HAHA and there is no genious involved here, just a 30 year guitarist who has road burn...

Greetings all This is my first newbie post to the forums. I'm a Reaper user wanting to evaluate Sonar to compliment my setup. It was a breath of fresh air to see a comment about both programs existing on the same machine and using Rewire to get the best of both. I'm interested mainly for the notation in Sonar and the midi features that are still coming of age in Reaper. There's a lot of heavy hype about Head case here and I'm interested in that also. I had previously downloaded Ken Mclaren's Shred and got decent sounds as I remember. I have always used a compressor but as a mastering last stop out the gate. It had never come up to use extreme compression first because of the noise factor. I was able to open John's effects chain minus headcase. The settings for Audio Damage and Rea EQ were preserved. Shred was used to replace head case and the sleeping giant was awakened. I can see this soon being my main guitar amp. Here are my questions. Is Rewire stable, especially if anyone has tied Reaper to Sonar? Does Head case use the same distortion effects as Shred or have they been changed? Does the Head case noise gate tame the input noise adequately? Keebo reported stability problems in Sonar. Have these been resolved? One last question for John. Can you hook me up for a date with Ellie Sue? Eddie V

Eddie,
 
Welcome to these forums.
 
Reaper and Sonar do link with Rewire but have occasional crashes. I’ve tended away from using them linked and use whatever platform makes the better sense for the project editing load. Sonar definitely has an edge over Reaper in the midi field currently. Reaper is way ahead of Sonar in the way it handles vst effects, and especially vsti synthesizers if you are doing midi work. I stagnated at Sonar 853. Have X1 but haven’t figured it out yet so can’t comment on what enhancements it brings. Using Reaper 4.12. Between these two programs, there’s nothing I’m missing.
 
Ken, another guy finding the magic in an upstream comp going into your creations… Eventually you need hi class compressors in the suite. If you can do to compression what you’ve done to overdrive…Allah Almighty, can’t even imagine what would result.
 
Oh, about Ellie Sue. She was the one who didn’t give a flip about HeadCase and eventually liked Amplitube 3 better. She doesn’t have a computer setup but played them both among other softwares which gives a more unbiased opinion. Her style biased the results however. When she does the psycho epileptic transform, her playing is rapid fire notes or chords about too fast for the eye to see. Both hands going Van Halen harmonics but beyond. Technical, I don’t know any guitarist who can keep up with her, but because she’s doing machine gun acrobatics, there’s no time for sustain. This is where HeadCase has no equal, period, case closed. Ellie never got to using this because she can’t stay on one note long enough.
 
About a date with Ellie Sue, yeah, I can probably arrange that. You just have to delicately respect and follow local formal dating etiquette. Ellie Sue does have a boyfriend who will be glad to negotiate for a date with the young lady. About 20 miles or so southeast of Hermiston they got a place called “the Arena”. Got to have 4 wheel drive to even get close over the logging roads, though it is said that the old gladiators walked in on their own two legs. The Arena is a giant abandoned gravel pit from the early 1900’s. Nobody remembers what it was originally used for. It’s a wet gravel flat about half the size of a football field sunk down 25 feet from the near vertical walls.
 
Two or more contenders for the same girl traditionally meet in the Arena. First obstacle is to get down to the floor without killing yourself in the fall, but love overcomes all.
 
Best to bring a good cheering escort to stand around the upper perimeter. The Arena has supposedly hosted 7 guys at once for the same girl back in the 1940’s, but it looks like just Eddie and Bid Earl, unless Ken wants to jump in and make it a threesome.
 
First 5 minutes or so is a stare down contest and a lot of howling and waving arms. This is just to intimidate. You’re standing about a hundred feet apart. Rules are no kicking, no punching, no biting. You start running full speed at each other and butt heads. You do this over and over until one contender is knocked out. Traditionally, the jousts don’t go too many rounds. Light weights are allowed chest slams which can prolong the contest to several more collisions. Last man standing gets the girl.
 
We here in Oregon are proud of our going “green”. Maximum conservation of our precious resources and always remember to recycle. Losers in the Arena are usually recycled to the raccoons.
 
Got to warn you however, Big Earl is 6’10”, weighs around 300 pounds and has a very thick skull. Wiped out the first dude several years ago in a single collision.
 
PM me if you still want to set up a date.
 
Best,
 
John

Yep, she's big and real as the muddy size 13 boot prints from my door to her pickup truck

Eddie,
Don't get discouraged. There's plenty available girls out here you don't have to go to the gravel pit to butt heads for. You just have to know how to approach things properly.
 
Best swingin' single's spot is probably an Elk's Lodge on Friday night. First appearances are important. If you can get some moose horns for the truck grill and a couple raccoon tails to hand from the rear view mirrors, this is a plus. Local girls fall for a sharp dressed man. They seem to really like those checkered sports coats with the leather elbow patches.
 
Have a couple beers with the lady and when she starts to get a bit tipsy, give her a present. Forget the flowers. You'll get ahead with a couple cans of Skoal and a quart of chain saw lube.
 
If all this fails. Take the girl for a ride. Head due west and you will eventually hit the Oregon coast hwy 101, if you don't get lost on the logging roads.  Big advantage here is when you get closer to civilization, you'll get within range of stereo FM radio stations. Keep it on country though. You want to impress but not overdo the shock value.
 
You will either end up north or south of Newport. Ask the locals for directions. On the north side of Newport we have a real live genuine WalMart. Spin into the parking lot and let the girl see all the bright lights. Take her in all star struck and let her shop in the discount isles.
 
Guaranteed to get the girl and all her cousins too.
 
Don't want to seem sexist about this. Single girls can land them a backwood guy a lot easier. Forget the formalities. Head straight to Walmart. Go to the sporting goods section and spray a shot of deer musk behind each ear. You won't even have to move. They'll find you.
 
Hope this helps,
 
John

Ken.
 
Back into the grind here away from a computer. Will get a workable example within the next day.
 
HeadCase by itself is awesome. Headcase with input comp squeeze is magic. Don’t know what you did to achieve this response, but it’s there. I can have this thing below conversation volume and the suite seems to reach out of the computer and grab the strings to feedback and sustain the signal.
 
Will submit a clear roadmap to what I’m getting.
 
Best,
 
John
 
...drag having to edit every post to get paragraphs formatted. Maybe something to do with Firefox

Ken,

Kept me for another half shift at the pit so will have to construct some examples tomorrow. Really a good move to encorporate compression into HeadCase's front end.

My feeling is that a pre comp rack needs at least a 4 band parametric with variable bandwidth before the main amps are hit (parametric downstream from the comp). The unique quality in HeadCase is the differential response to fluctuations in the input. The real heavy stuff is latent in your design but needs a higher level input than an ordinary guitar pickup to bring out the effect properly. A compressor extends the signal to accent the changes over time. The comp should be a good wide band response design with the traditional attack, release, ratio, threshold and a strong makeup compensation.

A strong compressor would then be fed into a transparent parametric. Rea EQ has an excellent design and layout for this purpose. The eq would tailor the frequency curve of the comp and indirectly the pickup. The comp/eq unit would in effect be an active pickup device giving long sustain, custom frequency filter and plenty of gain over unity as needed.

HeadCase is great, but HeadCase under heavy upstream pressure is incredible.

Will get some examples as soon as possible. I did post the link for the Reaper fx chain... Rough Rider comp into Rea EQ into HeadCase. The before and after can be easily demonstrated with this chain. Open the effects page and uncheck Rough Rider and Rea EQ bypassing them. This leaves HeadCase alone. Rechecking RR and ReaEQ chains them back in and the response is radically different.

Will get some examples uploaded soon.  Thanks for all your hard work on this fine amp suite.

John

John thanks for doing that. I now understand what you are looking for. Head Case cannot do that by itself you're right. I'll look more into it. Our new compressor can do that without a problem whatsoever, we may need to increase a couple settings, but I know its capable of it. So thats good... 

I owe all of you for turning me on to the Acme products and new ideas for signal processing. The idea of precompressing the guitar gives completely unique sounds.
 
I'm interested in feedback from users about differences in shred and head case.
 
Also for John, you seem to have done a lot of experimenting with the compressors. In your opinion what are the free to cheap vst compressors that work the best in getting this live recoil effect. Any specific shred heads or settings that bring it out. I have an American strat and have been a long supporter of Amplitube. It may be time to retire the old girl. I may have found a new love.
 
Eddie

Hi Guys, I have been stuck away with my nose fiormly planeted in the code...:)
Anyways, Eddit, the gioggest difference between Head Case and Shred is in the potential selectable/settable component combinations. Shred had something like 2 billion combinations whereas, Head case is virtually uncountable. Thats why it has auto save and take snap shot features in the builder. These features were added because I had built a head with it that was probably the best High gain sound I had ever got. I clicked the load button instead of the save button and overwrote all the settings. Even with screen shots I was unable to get back to the original sound. I got close, but not exact. So at that point I built in features that can be used to help you not loose your work.. HAHA

Shred had variations on one set of tube code(curve), whereas Head Case has as many curves as you can dream up including 7 internal calculated curves. They both have the same graphic size for heads, but under the hood they are 100% different.

Thanks Grem, Just a little back ground, which I have never spoke about but should have. The opportunity/reminder never arose.

Once we bit the bullett and made the decision to drop Shred 2 development in favor of Head case, the bulk of the sonic work concentrated in two areas. We did'nt concentrate too much at all on the effects as they are used far too often from others to mask the sound. Too us it made perfect sense to focus on the initial behavior and resulting tone from the first ingredient. The head itself.

There we spent time working on the dynamic charactreristics, ie what happens when a tube distorts and what factors can change naturally. Then it became, now how do we control them? That lead to several controls that all work in tendem with each other to alter the way the distortion character changes from initial strike, to fade out. In head case with any head, if you play for example a single "D" note on the 3rd string and add a little bending to it, as it fades you'll hear the character of the distortion change. Or, hit an open E chord and just let it fade out. That change in dynamics are controlled by the Choke setting in conjunction with the the Even(which you don't have yet), and the dynamic character setting.

Then we started concentrating on arguably the most important factor of the tone, the cabinets. As you already know, we released iFace, MIMIC, and Filter Cabs. The problem here is that convolution alone I don't think really amounts to the sum total of what a speaker does. I think there is dynamics that are not, and cannot be represented through that process alone. Now others have tried adding tube code (ie poweramp) to their convolvers in order to add dynamic capabilities to them, some have played around with simple techniques like volume swells, some are adding mild dynamics through the use of volterra. All fantastic approaches, with decent results. I look forward to seeing these companies progress with their chosen paths. Our chosen path takes more of a modeling approach combined with convolution.

Enter MIMIC and Filter Cabs, (iFace does not apply any of these techniques because its meant to 100% support the original tone of the Redwirez Library). So, because Head Case is meant to allow you to craft your tone, we needed a way to allow you to craft a custom cabinet wth it. Mimic incorporates some of the modeling techniques discovered as part of the Filter Cabs development. The idea is to take any IR and essentially ignore how it was recorded, then apply modeling techniques to that signal. We really could not perform an analysis on the original recording to determine things like mic distance, on off access, etc. That would have been too far outside of the scope. I am not really sure we would have ever got that to work properly, I think at best we would have ended up with a genealization and when you add to that fact that the user can load any IR into it, the vastness of that alone practically guarantees that you would be generalizing. So, you can't beat em, join em and just make the assumption that all IR's start in the same place. After all, its up to the user to find the tone they like anyways. So, MIMIC adds modeling techniques, to any IR loaded into it, these are the same techniques used in filter cabs. The idea is that the user can find the particular mic distance, mic placement, and original IR that sounds best with their head they created. They can then create a new IR of their cab selections and distribute it with their head. (Depending on licensing of course). The internal built in cabs you are free to create derivitive works from and distribute, and I believe someone is obtaining official permissions from the freeware cab developers for this as well. Actually I need to be completely clear on that. What I'm saying is that if you use the internal built in cabinets in Mimic to generate a cabinet file, you are free to distribute that cabinet file. If you use a different file from another creator, then you are bound by that creator's licensing.

Ken, Grem,

Blessings to you warriors.

We do an "open mic" jam at the local bar. Some incredible men and women come out of the woodwork and disappear never to be heard again. I was getting pounded in a lead dual. Way better guitarist, but the guy was floored by the sound I was getting.

Squier reject into a laptop into four Fender 212R's (200 watts stereo on each side). Would be accurate to say the house was rockin'

The guy offered $1000 cash for my laptop. Quote was "How the F** are you getting those sounds??"

Laptop not for sale but the sounds were simple. Eddie, you still out there? Want recoil sounds? Check this out.

Posting a link to what I was doing. The upstream unit is the same Chris Kerry Synth Edit creation with a couple more thoughtful adjustments. Any upstream compressor fed into a decent equalizer will deliver, but here's what I was using at the time. Chris's unit available at:

http://www.chriskerry.f9.co.uk/CK_VST.html#MultiFX

The following is a killer Reaper fx chain. Install the Kerry unit and HeadCase. Disagree with the local guitarist even if he can play better. Got more than a thousand in the laptop but this is a million dollar sound. Optimized for single pickups. Ken's recent post makes some sense as to how this in happening or even possible. Also seeing the wisdom in not overkilling the included effects. If needed, you can get these free from anywhere.


http://en.swoopshare.com/file/fe09d3879ff334ff610882e7aa6a11ec/howling.RfxChain.html


Best,
John

@john will listen when I get home. @Ken that's even better! 

KenMcLaren


Yeah its a pretty simple system. Move the mic...You like the sound, save it..
Anyways, after the head case release the first update will be that MIMIC gets put into Head Case builder. It should have been there all along, but at the time we didn't have IR saving capability. So for now you have to generate the cabs for your heads outside head case builder...

That's  not a bad deal. iFace let's you use all IR's anyway. But to have Mimic in the builder so that you can develop a total package would be great!

John we're going to need some cjhains like that done for the freeware head case when it comes out...