Anderton's Multiband Distortion for guitar
So I was watching the recent Sweetwater interview with Craig Anderton about SONAR and he started talking about multiband distortion for guitar. He only really mentioned it briefly in passing, but it got me thinking I would like to try that but had no idea where to start. (Great interview by the way. Go watch it if you haven't already!)
Soo...
I would really like to hear about some other people's techniques with this. What are you doing? How many bands do you use and what are your crossover frequencies? Do you mess with the levels of each band in your mix or do you pretty much just leave them alone? Anything else to add?
Here is what I did today to get my feet wet:I used some of my Google-fu and found an article C.A. wrote a few years ago on Harmony Central...
http://www.harmonycentral.com/articles/the-guitarists-guide-to-multiband-distortion I copied those settings from the picture of the Sonitus multiband compressor settings and tried it out with a simple guitar track using the TH3 simulator on some moderately distorted tracks. I made sure to record a dry track that used a bit of open-E with harmonics and some big open E chords so I could really see if the hype was true or not.
I copied the same dry track so I had four identical tracks.
I set up an amp sim in TH3 and saved the preset and inserted it onto all four tracks.
I put the Sonitus multiband compressor on three of the tracks (before TH3 obviously) and set them up as in the article's picture.
I did
not adjust the levels or input gain of any of the three "multiband" tracks.
I routed the three "multiband" tracks to a single stereo bus.
I routed the one "full bandwidth" track to another stereo bus.
I matched the output levels of each stereo bus using the input gain control.
I put a mild ambient reverb on each stereo bus, same settings for each one.
I turned on "exclusive solo" mode so I could quickly A/B the busses.
WOW was I impressed with the multiband distortion!!! The chords sounded so much more "open" and "alive." The highs were just there all the time, no matter how hard I was banging the low E string at the same time. Harmonics just popped-out at you.
Then when I panned the high channel about 30% left, the mids channel about 30% right and left the lows in the center it was really amazing and just completely blew away the full-bandwidth sound. I decided stereo imaging was not fair so I messed with some stereo-field plugins on the full-bandwidth bus and it was still no contest. I also compared without any reverb and my conclusions were still the same (reverb settings were exact for each bus.)
It got me thinking that my next tube-amp design/build will be a multiband design. Gears are already turning!
Here are the two tracks...
https://soundcloud.com/makerdp/full-bandwidth-guitar-testhttps://soundcloud.com/makerdp/multiband-distortion-guitar-test
post edited by MakerDP - 2016/05/27 23:50:25