How Do Electric Guitarists Create Indefinitely Sustained Notes?

cool thing to have in ones bag of tricks for occasional use in synth tracks. If you have a synth to play then there is the hold pedal and guitar patches (that are suppose to sound like a guitar but never quite do unless you are playing some old type of music and then trying to form the chord like a guitar which leaves it even harder to do.) But there is distortion guitar and other patches like that also. Mainly it is feedback from the guitar and amp.

This is a recording of a single pluck of a pick which can be heard at the onset:

http://harmoniccycle.com/...ngles/Dunkirk_128k.mp3

I just positioned the guitar so that the strings resonated with the sound what was coming out of the speaker. On occasions I would lightly lay the head stock on the speaker cabinet to create a sense of rapid acceleration.

The only way I know of to do this thru a amp sim is to work a studio monitor to near death.

I think it's much more practical to do it with a music instrument speaker that was designed for such use.


best regards,
mike

you can also do this with a fernandez sustainor, or a E Bow

Hey David,

You've gotten great responses so far. Keep in mind though, there is a difference between note sustain and feeding back in key like what Mike has presented. There are some guitar players like Bats and Mike who like what we call natural sustain where the notes are sustaining from volume or just the right set-up for a player and the guitar. This relies more on right place, right time as well as making things loud enough to carry over. This is usually achieved by using less gain at the gain stage and either allowing a tube power amp to do the work, or extreme volume push through the right speaker cab to help...or a little of both at the same time. It's a great method that will give you a cleaner gain sound that won't go to mud. Guys in the 60's and 70's used this method and some of the great players of today still use it. It's what we like to call "pure tone" because it's not synthetically created using a gain stage.

The other method is to pump up the gain stage. The more gain you use, the more sustain you get. However, there are pro's and cons to this. With more gain comes a muddier tone unless you can compress it just right so that it tightens up the extreme gain and stops it from soundinglikearunonsentence of mud. LOL! Newer amps of today come with a much better pre-amp in them to where it becomes subjective as to whether you would want more gain at a low volume, or less gain at a loud volume for the purist type tone. Both work incredibly well.

But for what you are looking for, if I'm reading correctly, you pretty much want a guitar note to scream and sound like you pressed a key on the keyboard, correct? Like an infinitely sustained note, right?

This is hard to get. The only way I know how to do it is to use a Fernandes Sustainer (which is built into the guitar...Neal Schon from Journey uses one and he can hit one note and it lasts forever) or a Sustainiac system. All the other methods I use are hybrids of what Mike and Bats shared or you must have a really hot pre-amp (guitar pre-amp that is) to give you the right drive.

Now, with that TH2 and other guitar sims, most times you get loads of gain, but little sustain because amp sims are missing that buffered signal you get in a regular amp. You can put a compressor in your chain BEFORE the amp sim to sort of simulate this or even a light distortion pedal or something. This way the sound will react and sustain more like a real amp would. But most sims are lacking that sustain unless you can crank up your monitors and get a little power from the volume so things feed back like what Mike presented.

The only other thing I can suggest (which I've done often) is to get the hottest and most driven sound you can out of a guitar note, and then sample it. Once it's sampled, trim it up the way you want it and search the sample for even sustain...then copy that part and ammend it to the original by copying and pasting. Crossfade/edit so you can't hear where the ammended file was added, and you can make one note scream for minutes if need be. I've done this several times with success. Sometimes a player would hit a note and it would die out. He'd try to punch it in and do it over and over with volume, more gain etc...sometimes, a particular guitar and sound just doesn't equal "infinite". So you have to manufacture it.

I just would take some of the clip that sustained evenly, copy it and then paste it into a section to make it longer while experimenting with the slip-editing/cross fading stuff until it sounded like one big long note. That's the only thing I can really suggest that would work for you though. The TH2 has some cool stuff in it to bring up the input gain (from what I've read about it) so it very well may give you that simulated input gain most amp sims are lacking. I've not tried it for myself, but one of my friends is a tester for that company and he told me how awesome it was.

Anyway, hope some of this helps. Good luck. :)

-Danny
 
P.S. +1 on the Ebow...that thing is madness!

so then use the other devices i mentioned...
voila, done

it's much more fun to try to tame the beast in real time

much more visceral


much more inspiring

Danny Danzi

But for what you are looking for, if I'm reading correctly, you pretty much want a guitar note to scream and sound like you pressed a key on the keyboard, correct? Like an infinitely sustained note, right?

Thanks for the lengthy response, Danny (and thanks, everyone else, for all the other responses).
 
Actually what I had in mind was just the opposite.  I was thinking there might be some kind of feedback controller plug that could let a synth or sampler go into a sustained-note mode like electric guitar players seem to routinely do.  I don't have a specific application in mind, but with the introduction of TH2 in X2, the discussion got me wondering again if guitar simulation control suites like TH2 supplied that kind of capability.   Sounds like they do not, but the question seemed worth asking.

why do it fake...

when it's so much fun to do it for real?

I also wouldn't discount sims for sustain. It's not the same as real feedback (usually) but with the new models out there if there is a signal to be had you can do a lot. But the thing is once the string stops vibrating the only thing that will drag out is the feedback which is different than the original tone. You could just pluck your note and copy/paste/blend it to stretch it out as long as you'd like and that way you get actual note, note residual hardware/sim gack. You'd probably want to clone the track so you have two or three instances of the note and then offset the clips over top of each other so it sound consistent throughout the duration and you don't hear a splice point.

Frank Zappa - Duke of Prunes (orchestral version) - solo at 1:26 - now this is the kind of beautifully controlled musical feedback that I could never replicate. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk_Tr5ZxmNY

Definitely semi-hollow as mentioned. They will feedback much more easily and at lower volumes. The whole body is reacting to the amp instead of just the strings. A volume pedal can be used to hammer down on a note, and then bring the volume up after the attack is over, which will typically feedback quite nicely in a more legatto stringy type way. With some reverb, it can sound pretty cool, and the reverb tail covers the volume pedal being brought back up for the next note (has to be before the reverb of course, not at the end of the chain.)

You hit it really hard? And hold it next to the stack of Marshalls...