That "Tuned Thunder" setting really made the part sit wonderfully in the mix. I used Dim Pro's "Dull Bass 1" and applied the Sonitus MB to the bounced audio. Round, warm, sits perfectly in the mix. Thanks for this tip; I think I'll be using it all the time!

Thanks

Week 165: The Modeled Guitar Tone Control
 
A lot of people think that guitar tone controls just roll off the highs. Well, yes…but…they also interact with pickups to produce a midrange peak. After all, we’re dealing with capacitance and inductance, and you know what happens when they get intimately involved with each other.
 
Anyway, rolling off the highs with a tone control can help create smoother, creamier distortion. However, guitarists are also fond of trying out different tone control capacitor values to vary the tone control characteristics, as well as using different volume control settings because they influence the action of the tone control. This involves finding capacitors, warming up a soldering iron, voiding your guitar’s warranty, and of course, remembering never to solder with shorts on.
 
But hey, it’s the 21st century! We don’t need soldering irons to change capacitors, we can create a virtual tone control and model what would happen with different capacitor values simply by changing filter frequencies…which brings us to this week’s tip.
 

 
(To see this full size, right-click on it and open it in a new tab...then click again to magnify it. Or right-click and copy the image, then paste into a paint program.)
 
The filter curve is typical of how tone controls interact with pickups. Note the additional high frequency “bump” that’s found on some guitars, which gives an even more distinctive sound. If you suspect this curve models certain Gibson guitars, you’d be right—because I was able to borrow a bunch of guitars and analyze them, which I did with the volume control turned down partway. This “tone control” doesn’t emulate any one guitar, but is sort of a composite, and taken to a bit more of an extreme than passive circuits just so that you could be somewhat amused on a Friday evening.
 
Band 1 emulates the high frequency rolloff we associate with guitar tone controls. It’s tracked by Band 2, which provides the midrange bump. The EQ folds into an FX Chain so that one control could cause the two bands to track each other properly. We’ve covered FX Chains before, and this is a simple one—after all, it has only one knob. Right-click on it, and set the start and end points for the two bands as shown in the screen shot.
 
Use this “tone control” after your DIed guitar (or synth patch playing something guitar-like) but before distortion, and you too can have that creamy, smooth distortion sound. 

Good Day,
Thanks for FX Chain(s), Ill have to try it was just recently was trying to get a rhythm guitar to pop a bit more in a mix. Also BTW, discovered the, Rockabilly TH3 FXChain, excellent!, was searching desperately to create that sound in my 50's tribute song Im going back and remixing, now I just need to add a little "whammy/detune FX to it. 
 
Cheers 

never to solder with shorts on.
 
Church.

Thanks Craig.
I always check in weekly for your great tips, though I don't always chime in.
I love building your FX Chains & gaining audio expertise at the same time.
Thanks a bunch!  
 
By the way, they're working you way too much  

Since I assume this is a lesson for those who are not experts, I'll go ahead and ask the dumb question.  Where do you get the gold box with the tone control?

konradh
Since I assume this is a lesson for those who are not experts, I'll go ahead and ask the dumb question.  Where do you get the gold box with the tone control?

Konrad, since your CD is so effing cool, I'll PM you with a place where you can download the background. That graphic was courtesy of Michael McDivitt at Gibson, who also provided things like the steel backgrounds for other FX Chains.
 
Still digging your CD...   "15 Minutes of Fame" is a classic!! Carry on, my friend. Sorry I've been out of touch, but Gibson is a VERY demanding mistress. Then again, she's hotter than hell, so I can't complain.

Week 166: Perk Up Percussion with Probability
 
Time for a step sequencer tip! But before you click over to something else, you might want to keep reading because we're going to make the step sequencer a whole lot more interesting.
 
Let's face it, few sounds are as boring as placing a note on every step of a step sequencer. In fact, there are rumors that you can force unwanted house guests to flee in terror simply by placing a tambourine hit on every step of a sequencer, and looping it.
 
No, the tip is not how to get rid of unwanted house guests.
 
So here's the deal. SONAR's Step Sequencer makes it easy to draw velocity curves that affect each step. If we take our tambourine part and do the following, we'll have a much better part. Here the 1 and 3 are emphasized the most, with 2 and 4 next. The level of the hits falls off a bit at the end so you're ready to start over with the emphasized 1.
 

 
However, what makes the Step Sequencer graduate from "cool" to "outstanding" is the Probability curve. The changes the probability of any given hit occurring at its appointed time.
 

 
Here, the 8th notes play all the time, but the remaining 16th notes play...most of the time. The difference this makes in "humanizing" the sound is really quite stunning.
 
But wait! There's more: timing offsets. 
 

 
Here you need to be really careful, as just a tiny offset will make a big difference. Offsets below the line push the hit slightly early compared to the beat, offsets above the line push the hit slightly late. The eraser tool can erase the offsets. The above example pushes 1, 2, 3, and 4 slightly ahead of the beat to give a sense of urgency, and it really does make a difference in making the feel more "on top" of the beat.
 
This technique of dropping out 16th notes from time to time seems to work best with percussion, but if you don't get too crazy, it can also do cool things with hi-hats. And if you're interested in hi-hats, be sure to check out the tip for Week 141, which makes a good companion to this tip.

I hesitate to bring this up again, but going back to week 159 - Matrix triggering: I have everything working as far as the MIDI routing with LoopBe1. The thing is, it won't trigger more than one cell at a time. So if I have a nice beat laid out in MIDI, it drops everything except for (presumably) the first cell. In other words, it's operating monophonically instead of like a polyphonic instrument. Any ideas?
 


 
<rant>I get the sentiment that, as long as this works, Cakewalk shouldn't get distracted with making the MIDI routing work internally. But the thing is, how many people are going to stumble across this (very particular) solution? Is it really too much to ask for a bundled sampler and/or drum rack that are actually intuitive to use and don't crash Sonar every day or two? If Matrix is the solution (and maybe it could be, with some changes), then I'd like to see it made into a best-in-class tool.</rant>