Grateful Dead Music Forum

A little bit of our second set from Sat. April 16 at Johnny D's in Somerville ... tried out some new things on the AxeFX for the lead guitar tone ... a little bit of limiting to squash the loud peaks off the guitar, and adding a little more dirt and sparkle to the base tone. Also adjusted the overdrive (gave that a good workout at the end of Morning Dew). As always, guitar is AxeFX Ultra direct to soundboard.

http://www.archive.org/details/pd2011-0 ... hnnydsset2

Foolish Heart > Estimated Prophet > Alligator > Uncle Johns Band > Truckin' > Morning Dew

Crispy goodness!

Then again, you guys make such great recordings, anything sounds great after listening to our schlock...

Digging it, especially the Dew.

The overdrive sounds much better.

Chuckles wrote:Crispy goodness!

Then again, you guys make such great recordings, anything sounds great after listening to our schlock...

Digging it, especially the Dew.

Yes^^^

As always...sounds fantastic...and I would love to know some of the specifics of what you did.

Very nice!

I hear what sounds like a 'clicking' noise on UJB - listen from 3:00 on. Any idea what it is?

mk

That is the stuff...Sounds great Im thinking your piano is getting better all the time! Jimbo is bock on the phaser. lol

Thanks for the kind words ... Mark always thinks the keyboards are too loud in the mix, but I turned him up on this one anyway. And Jim is nice and loud because I threw an FET compressor on his track when I mixed it. I did not do anything to the AxeFX guitar track, though, that's untouched in the mix.

I'm not sure about the clicking noise, is it just in my guitar sound or in the overall recording? Maybe the Adamas pick adding a little zing to the notes? Or the subtle delay and reverb interacting?

That guitar solo from 3:00 on is a good example of the tone I was after here. Somewhere between the 79-81 and 82-on Tiger tone.

Great sounding stuff, Vic! I like the tone.

I don't have the patch in front of me, but the basics were a soft limiter block that only interacts when the output spikes very hot ... it's almost never on but will activate at around 95 percent, mostly picking very hard indeed or when the envelope filter is really peaking. That block lives right before the final output. This was to help tame a little clipping to the board feed but also to emulate a little of that soft clipping believed to be from the MC2300's circuit. No idea how it compares to the real thing, but it definitely smoothed out some of the hard transients that were causing problems before. A subtle difference but an important one.

Also added a drive block right before the main amp block, using a tube distortion (if my memory's correct). Rolled back some of the highs on the block and set the distortion level around 2 o'clock, but then used the "mix" control to dial in just a little bit of hair to the clean sound ... a tip Hogan suggested, which works pretty well, I think. So the block is emitting mostly clean guitar sound but with a little bit of edge added to it.

Then found that with that block engaged, the original overdrive block was reacting a little bit differently (that block is based on an MXR Distortion +), so I tweaked the drive setting just a little bit. It's a little more creamy sounding, and works quite well rolling off the tone control, too.

Grate Tone Vic! I loved the Foolish Heart. Keep up the most awesome work and make your way to Charlotte, NC sometime with the band

I loved the Foolish Heart. What a treat. The Dew solo climbed so spectacularly. Yummy.

Vic, what wah did you use w/ your analog rig? A friend of mine has a vox847 that doesn't play nice w/ buffer/active guitars.

I never did find a real genuine wah that wanted to play nice with my Tiger guitar ... tried a Vox, a Clyde, older CryBaby ... always sounded too thin.

Wound up using an old Roland digital guitar preamp I had, a GP-100, that has a wah onboard ... ran an expression pedal back to the rack via the Ground Control and used only the wah on there. Worked okay. I still have it, it was top of the line in the early 90s with its COSM modeling, and sold for a grand or so. I put it on ebay every so often for $300 and no one ever buys it ... LOL ... has some other nice effects on it, Roland's Slow Gear which is pretty cool.

It was always available as a backup if my real preamp had gone down, but I never had to use it that way. Nice little piece.