Guitar Sunday
Sunday, February 15th, 2026 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio62F and sunny out there today!
I was up by 2PM... early for me on a weekend... and after the coffee was brewed, I went out for a photo shoot to get better pics for the pokestops nearby to the building, downtown here.
But while doing so, I realized most of them would take better photos in the spring, when trees have flowers and fountains are working, rather than being shut off and capped with orange cones.
So I went to the parking garage, got my car, and made a quick run for smokes... and now I'm back home.
Last night I did finish the PQ2 for all 12 songs... for all but the pianos and guitars.
And I did get all the guitar data and Sakura screenshots from all 12 songs, copied into a new folder.
I've been flipping through the screenshots, to see which knobs move the most, and to try and find some commonality with the good sounds (Suburbs, Spell, Miss Fortune) and the others, but... no clear pattern is emerging.
This tells me Sakura is not the whole story, when it comes to a good guitar sound.
However, as far as Sakura goes, the secret is in the, HI CUT section, which features three tone-shaping knobs; CUTOFF, RESONANCE, OVERDRIVE. Those are the knobs that move the most, from one preset to another, follwed by the other three HI CUT knobs; ATTACK, DECAY, SUSTAIN.
An of those latter three, it's DECAY that moves the most.
I did, however see that Clue Phone *does* have the MIX knob for the delay cranked to 100%, while all other songs have it more at 20%, so that confirms what my ears were telling me, that the excessive delay is making the strings sound prickly and harsh.
And, Closer To You's delay bank was turned OFF for it's Guitar 1, again, heard in the review.
So, I guess it'll be a day of trial and error, with the guitar sounds... with Sakura, PQ2, Fast Dist, and Convolver.
But I'm armed with a folder full of saved presets for all of those parameters, meaning I'm free to go crazy with the knobs, because I can always revert back, if I get lost.
I think I'll start with Clue Phone, the worst sounding guitar... and I'm gonna load in all the presets from Spell I'm Under, as the starting point.
Okay! it's now 4:25PM, and I'm gonna get to it!
Talk to you later!
Okay!.. two hours later and I seem to have made the breakthrough with Clue Phone!
I started by bringing in the, Spell I'm Under, Gutar 2 settings for the whole chain.
It immediately sounded better, but it wasn't the, "Clue Phone" guitar yet.
I should take a sidebar here to note that this is a reprodution of my brother Brian's guitar for this song, which he composed back in 1992 or so, and Bri had a very unique sound, and style... as did Clue Phone itself.
[Brian is alive and well, but he lives an hour away and for several other logistical reasons, it's not possible for him to collaborate on this project]
His intro riff, which reappears after the bridge, before the interlude, and again at the song's outro is very delecate and ethereal, and yet his chord strikes and other licks during the verses and the bridge (there is no true chorus in this song) hit with a lot of depth and grit.
So the same guitar sound has to do all things... with feedback grit and low response for the harder parts, but high response and relative smoothness in the delicate parts, which also have to strum just right... in a sort of, heavenly harp kind of way.
The first thing I did was turn off the paremetric EQ, and immediately the sound felt dull and boxy, like bare wood with no varnish. That's when I realized how important PQ2 really is for these guitars. So I set it to zero and started over EQing it from scratch, which went well.
The key there was to allow in some lower lows, with a notch at 200Hz for the bass, and then another dip in the more boxy zone of 600Hz or therabouts, with a high Q, and then a boost to the rest with a wide Q.
The signal input to Fast Dist was pushed up, but the threshold was pushed down, allowing grit for high velocity strikes, but leaving lower velocity chords cleaner.
The delay, of course was toned way down, but the Chorus was tweaked to go faster... not too fast, but enough to give an ethereal thickness to the sound.
In Convolver, turning up the "self convolve" knob also helped, but then I also turned down the, WET, to pull back on the overall cabinet impulse.
After all that the sound was much better, but it still wasn't there. The chords in both the delicate, and the harder parts, seemed to be choking off too quickly. Not enough sustain, or decay somewhere in the chain.
The answer was in two places I've rarely dared to touch, on the Sakura UI... the main string sound, and the main envelope shape.
This was where I began wildly twisting knobs... getting lost... reloading the preset, and trying again.
The answer was in very sublte tweaks to the damping of the strings (easing off it) and lengthening the decay of the main envelope.
With a few final tweaks to everything in the chain... and some edits to the patterns (i'm forever editing these patterns to nail down Brian's exact performance style) I arrived at a truly amazing sound that more than does Bri's old guitar line justice... it channels it from the past!
The guitar sound went from a choppy, prickly, honky mess to... well now it sounds like Brian is in session, with his old guitar and effects pedals, being magically perfectly recorded, and right on top of his game!
So, in just a couple hours I've learned a lot!
And now I'm certain I can get the rest of the guitars to be exactly how they should be.
After Guitars and Piano are EQed, then there will need to be another gain-staging pass.
And after that, if needs be... I'll go into those new PQ2s and do whatever additional notching may be necessary. All the new PQ2 settings leave room for that, but it may be something I do on a song-by-song basis.
For example, no need to notch a space in the guitar's spectrum for the trumpet, in a song that has no trumpet! That sort of thing.
This means, in the end, every song will have a customized EQ profile. All the PQ2s will have the same overall shape from song to song, but there will be unique notching in each song, depending on what the "traffic conditions" are.
I also, tonight, took down all the winter/valentine decorations... snowflakes, lights, etc, and put them away. I hung my big shamrock in the window.
So now the winter/holiday vibe in the flat is a memory, and I begin looking forward to spring.
Okay! It's now only 7PM, so I guess, on to Other Friends, the next most problematic guitar song!
Talk to you later in the evening!
Okay, we're at the cusp of the late session here.
I watered the ZZ plant, and dusted off it's leaves (we get a lot of dust up here on 11, from the dirty downtown below), and then tackled Other Friends, in the iLouds, while there was still time.
I replaced the Sakura settings only, with those of, Bed In The Suburbs Guitar 2, and went from there.
As with, Clue Phone, there was a challenge here to reproduce the performance of my other brother, Tim, for this punk-pop anthem.
The Suburbs G2 was a good start, but it was too dark and smokey, but I brightened it up, while mainaining a good bottom. It didn't take as long as Clue Phone, because... punk pop!
But the final result, over the loud monitors was a 100% improvement! As with Clue Phone, it now channels the energy of Tim, circa 1989, at the peak of his career as the lead guitarist for Publik Nuisance, our original, teenage band.
After Other Friends, I had to turn off the iLouds and go to the headphones, as I booted up Reavis, once again, to tackle those guitars.
This was a case of... they're nearly good enough, so just work with what's there.
It was a long fight, over very subtle ground, if that makes sense.
Reavis is a strange beast. It grooves and has a kind of bosa nova swing to it, but the guitars are kinda proto-punk... with a bit more grit and attitude than one might expect.
I composed these guitars myself, two years ago, but I was inspired by what Brian or Tim might've played, and so it had to walk a tightrope between Tim's rebellion, Brian's subtle invention, the song's classy, post-war era groove, and the injection of youth a'la late 1980s, early 1990s.
It took many sublte tweaks to every part of the signal chain to get the right sound, and I did go in and edit the patterns, to breathe a bit more humanity into the peformance in different parts.
But then I got all bogged down with the Cello, because it now sounded a bit dull against this shining new guitar sound, so I boosted the mid-high a bit on it, and then found myself going into those patterns to edit the performance.
Many parts were transposed down an octave... because they were too safely high for a Cello... or in parts where it's octave was fine, I threw in octave drops to low notes here and there... like, instead of the E4 this time... it's the E3! Hahah!
This is because the overall PQ2 of the cello allows it to really cut at the low end, without any mud or conflict with the bass or kick drum... and it's a feature that needs to be flexed!
I did save the adjusted PQ2 preset, to the main FNMX foler, to propagate.
Xylo is the only other orchestral we hear in Reavis, starting in the final bridge, and occurring more in the outro.
For this, the EQ was fine, but I did adjust the velocities of different patterns to get a more consistent volume against the rest of the mix.
I teared up at the outro, as I have at other stages with this old song.
Sixteen or twenty measures of just the music, with the strings doing a kind of pondering, romantic, counter melody that evolks the magic of a college campus in the fall... with the xylo being very extra, doing a repetitive trill-donk, trill-donk, straight out of a 1950s promo for the department store of tomorrow.
The sound of utopianism!
The two together, the romantic strings and the googie-utopian xylophones, create this sense that you are safely in the past... the non-dystopian past, before the world was the deconstructionist hellscape junkyard that we stumble through now.
And that's something to get teary-eyed about, I think.
I suppose this obviates that Archeology is a kind of, "period peice."
But this music was odd, even for it's period, so it's got it's novelty, as well.
Okay, I guess I'm a little buzzed now, and needn't wax poetic any further, in my state.
The late night session begins with, Never Rains, and maybe I'll make it to, Magic Monday before bedtime.
So I'll talk to you tomorrow... on President's Day!
°¦}
