Amplitube Jimi Hendrix

is now available with a downloadable 10 day demo on the IKMultimedia website.

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/MainPhp.html?NewsDisplay.php&Id=815

I've been playing around with the demo today and it is awesome, my favorite setup so far is the Marshall amp with Classic fuzz, univibe and wah pedals or the Classic fuzz, octav and wah. It even comes with several presets cataloged per album/song/section of hendirx's work plus some misc ones. Any Hendrix fan needs to check this out.

I put together a quick and dirty demo of some of the JH effects in 3 sections and a couple of tempo and rhythm changes.

1st section:
Rhythm - "Are you experienced" rhythm preset
Solo - "Are you experienced" solo (Fuzz Ace stompbox)

2nd section:
Rhythm - "Foxy Lady" rhythm preset (XS fuzz)
Solo - "Purple Haze - Octav" solo preset (wah, univibe, octav stompboxes)

3rd section:
Rhythm - "Little Wing" verse preset
Solo - "Little Wing" solo 2 preset with added fuzz effect (wah, classic fuzz, univibe)

I am no Guitar God so the guitar parts might seem a little rough and it was done without editing.
www.westlinkrbc.com/downloads/Amplitube_JH_Demo.mp3

Enjoy,
slughand

All of this virtual stuff is getting strange what with this and the fab four virtual instrument

ORIGINAL: BillW

None of the virtual stuff really sounds like a real amp though (especially for leads)...disappointing.

Dunno, I can take a simple midi, and just fool around with standard sonar trickery + a few simple (free) plugins, and I'm not complaining - did this rough outtake in just a few minutes after reading this thread and listening to the samples, from scratch, I even had to get the midi somewhere first :

http://aidanederland.nl/downloads/littlewingmidi.mp3

only listened to it on my headphones, probably sounds too 'hollow'. But, with a bit more work I think it could fool a noob.

Yeah, I left the warts in ofcourse, it's not even randomised or anything, and not an envelope in sight. The original midi is totally clean-sounding though, sounds like my sister on nylon strings. So it's just a matter of playing around with the sounds, most of the distortions you are looking for are basically a form of controlled demolition and trying to achieve desirable interference, you just keep twisting knobs till the effect stays, but does not go over the top.

Seriously I think there's more Jimi hiding in vanilla Sonar than most people would believe possible. I'd never buy such a plugin unless I really realy had no clue how they did it, or find out I simply cannot do it with what I have.

[edit for disambiguity, and possible offence-taking]

I do happen to have a sister who plays stuff like the Carpenters on nylon, poorly - hence the comment. Sorry to any kick-*ss female musician reading this, just realised how dumb it looked.

Thx, corrupted

[off-topic] Just played back the .mp3 version and thought 'What the....' - all the transients are gone from the .wav version, gah - this is one baby you do NOT want to .mp3 without remixing.
I could put up the .wav too, so people can compare and KNOW how utterly *evil* on-the-fly compression can be.... holy smoke.

http://aidanederland.nl/downloads/littlewingmidi.wav

[edit for added link]

Was already in the .mid file, did not have the time to change anything but the guitar bit starting at 1:47 thereabouts:

http://aidanederland.nl/downloads/LittleWing_jimihendrix.mid

So that's how it sounded before. All just set to TTS-1, and the guitar only gets some effects, is all. Nearly pure sonar, only a few add-ons probably everybody has installed already, your average totally basic and free VTS plugin.

That's my main point - Jimi just maxed out what he had, and tried EVERY switch, button, slider and knob - to gently mix those into something that *just* not rips itself apart. My take: Jimi didn't PLAY directly what you hear, he was a genius at playing it straight DESPITE all that sonic mangling and interference.

Coolest drum part I am currently working on is originally not a drum at all - it's a synthesizer riff, rather lame actually, that I put to toms by mistake, and I just slid off my chair in amazement - craziest whacko drumbeat in ages, totally perfect. Experiment. Dare to make mistakes.

No, that's not me playing, that's just player-piano stuff really. Midi is not a music file like wav, but just instructions for your soundcard, to play those notes in that order. Player-piano.

The effects I just put in, and that's the point, it not 'just' putting them in like a pre-made effect out of the box, but tweaking what you have to get the same result. So I used the simplest thing I could lay my hands on, and tweaked that to get the 'sound' of Jimi by making it 'cry and sing' - sort of, it's far from a 'professional job', you cannot do that in 15 minutes. A day, yes. Then it would simply be unmistakably someone playing exactly like Jimi, if not the Man himself.

And not a guitar in sight.

No, this is not 'what I do', but I do use the trick here and there, and it's one of the best excercises imaginable - take one of the kazillion midifiles of a song you really really know well and like, and get one that has as many tracks/instruments as possible, so all is essentially in place, just sounds horrible. Then, one by one, replace all the instruments with better-sounding ones, and try to make it sound like the original, just without the vocals. Compare with the original at times, just by listening to it once. Then continue.

Is a marvelous way of really getting to know your softsynths and effects, plus the extra tricks of randomising the midi in such a way it contains the sort of timing-errors humans make, to add to the effect.

Another good trick is to start changing pieces of midi by changing scales, speed, and assign them totally different instruments than intended.

As to using the midi as is, well, that's not legit in most cases, they are somebody else's work. But:

If you listen closely to a song like Guantanamera, you can hear that Jon Anderson's 'I'm gonna find my way home' is just one of the melody lines... borrowing, intentionally or more likely unintentionally, is not exceptional. It's the norm, really. We hum it to ourselves and forget we heard that ages back, as a bass-line in something else.

OK, fair enough

I'm not really good yet with drummaps either, so what I did was cheat bigtime for a lot of stuff, and use little handy free programs like HammerHead

http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/

or if you want a easy-to-use free VST sampler:

http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2000/DR-002-Drum-Sampler.html

and try to lay your hands on things like Kong PhatMatik loops, there's free sample files floating about, like 30 Megs ultracool free loops, ready to be mixed off. I could upload some stuff for you, but since I am not exactly myspace.com, I cannot put up links, I don't really have that kind of bandwidth, and will even take down that .wav file now, it's a bit too big, and so's this forum - I'll leave the .mp3 and midi in place.