Pickup Simulator?
Sunday, February 22nd, 2026 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio24F out there and windy, with random little snowflakes flying, but nothing accumulating.
I've just finished mixing the piano for, Miss Fortune, and it's exporting to test WAV now.
I was up around 3PM and went straight out for groceries and gas, a bit irked by the cold wind out there, forcing me to wear gloves again!
But... this is the final week of February, and Standard Time ends two weeks from today, so there's light at the end of the winter tunnel.
Last night, after mixing pianos for Clue Phone, I listened through all 12 of the latest mixes.
Everything's sounding pretty great, but it *is* time for another gain-balance as some of the guitars were clearly way too loud.
The new guitar sounds are great, but there are a few minor issues to deal with.
In some, with heavier distortion, if they play at low velocity, I hear a high fizzy edge. This seems to be a simple issue with the low-pass of the main PQ2 being too liberal with the highest highs... and perhaps a bit too much distiortion.
Other than that, Suburbs' guitar is the only one that sounds a bit canny, but I think that's another simple adjustment to it's "tone" band on the PQ2.
I heard some other places in different songs that could benefit from automation, as well.
But in general, they're sounding great!
It really feels now, like the guitarist in this rock trio is this kinda "shitty punk guitarist" bringing raw attitude to every song. You picture him wearing an oversized T-shirt with a huge anarchy symbol on it, spiked hair, and a nose peircing.
Like, he's capable of being mellow, in Magic Monday, and a few others, but you can hear that he's just champing at the bit to rock out harder, the second he's given the chance.
And by saying all that, I guess I'm saying this finally sounds like the same guy in every song... as the drummer, basist, and cellist already have for a while.
The song that's gotten the biggest glow-up since last October is definitely Never Rains!
It went from sounding kinda monotonous and repetitive... to the point where I considered cutting it... to now, where it rocks so much I find myself swaying to the beat in my chair!.. and that's without the thunder, or the vocals!
Speaking of that, I had the idea last night for how to use FL to EQ and compress the sound effects and the vocals... as a kind of cheat!
Basically, I'd take a finshed WAV of a song's music, say, Never Rains... and drop that into a brand new FLP file.
Then I drop in the WAV stem of the thunder, as exported out of Audacity.
Then I use PQ2, and FLs compressor to get the thunder sounding perfect in the mix.
Then I *export* that new thunder stem back to Audacity!
I could do the same with the vocals!
You may be asking, "Why export back to Audacity? Why not just do sound effects and vocals to a finished WAV of the music in FL and leave it at that?
And you may be right. I dunno. It depends on how FL handles large WAV files. I've never imported a WAV to FL, so I'm worried that having three large WAV files with effects on two of them might spike the CPU, but maybe I'm wrong.
Either way, there's a way to use PQ2 and FLs compressor on the sound effects and vocals!
So... that'll be the big experiment that begins after this music mixing phase is complete.
Okay, back to the grindstone! Piano's for Archeology, and then it'll be song-by-song clean up of those little issues I mentioned, before another gain-balance pass this coming week.
Talk to you later.
Arche is done, I went to Suburbs next and tweaked the guitar sound. Adjustments to PQ2 and also to convolver. Slight adjustment to envelope in Sakura.
After that I went through and quickly tweaked guitars for several other songs, updating the test WAVs for another review tonight.
But the idea struck me that real guitars have pickups in different places on the body to get different tones out of the strings.
I wonder if there's a way to simulate pickups, using two or three PQ3 patches, per guitar, instead of just one? I'll have to look into that.
I mean, I've got the Sakura, Fast Dist, and Convolver parts of the chain under control, so... it might be worth the time to replace the single PQ2s with "pickup simulators"... maybe a patcher preset with three EQs and some soft clipping?... before it goes to Fast Dist?
Something to ponder as I shower.
Talk to you later tonight, after the laundry's done.
I'm all clean & shiny, and the laundry is in the washer downstairs.
I began a new thread with DeepSeek to inquire about the pickup simulator, and it seems very doable.
We're talking about a patcher setup with instances of PQ2 to simulate the pickups, then Fruity Waveshaper to simulate the soft-clipping of the guitar's own electrical circuit, and then it goes to a Mixer plugin, for blending the sounds of the pickups.
The mixer's settings can be automated so that we hear a different blend of the pickups in different parts of the song; verse, bridge, chorus, lead.
As to CPU useage, they said, "Your proposed pickup simulator will be very light on CPU. You can absolutely duplicate this Patcher preset across all the songs on your album without worrying about performance issues."
They explained that the PQ2 draw is very low, mixer is negligible, waveshaper is low, and patcher is very low overhead, concluding...
"Your entire proposed 'Pickup Simulator' inside Patcher is roughly equivalent, in CPU terms, to having maybe one and a half instances of a simple EQ. It's a very efficient design."
But because three pickups feels like it's a lot for me to keep track of, I'm considering a two-pickup simulator, which would be roughly modeled on the old Gibson Les Paul.
At first it seemed like this was a good choice to match the more vintage sound of the drum kit, but then I described my "shitty punk guitarist" to them and...
"When I hear 'early punk era guitarist with a Les Paul,' my mind goes immediately to one player: Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. His primary guitar was a 1970s Les Paul Custom, and that sound—huge, snarling, slightly chaotic—defined the entire aesthetic you're describing. Think about the Never Mind the Bollocks guitar tone. It's: Thick and aggressive from the humbuckers. Drenched in distortion but still articulate enough for those sneering chords. Room-filling and raw, like a band in a space together"
So, this feels like a no-brainer!
Especially given the fabulous success with the LoFi parts of Archeology, using a very similar technique to simulate the casio transducer, the condenser mike, tape deck preamp, and direct-inject bass guitar!
After last weekend's sweeping re-vamp of the guitar sounds, they all wound up with very similar PQ2 settings.
Other parameters may vary a bit, in Sakura, Fast Dist, and Convolver, but the PQ2 part of the chains are nearly identical.
The only differences to them have been with me, fussing with the high fizz, and the placement of that "tone" cut, from song to song.
So, I think it makes perfect sense to replace the single PQ2 with two of them... one to simulate the neck pickup, and the other, the bridge pickup... giving me the option to favor one or the other, or max-out both, depending on the changing situation in the song.
Waveshaper then takes that blended sound of two pickups and gives it a bit of warmth before handing off to Fast Dist.
I think this is what I'll be working on this week... it's the perfect project to re-ignite the motivation for late-sessions after work.
And the next gain-pass can wait until this is done.
But it should go fast because once I perfect the patcher-pickup-simulation-circuit for one song, I save that as a preset and it's nothing to drop it into the other 11 songs!
After that's its a simple matter of automating the blend of pickups in each song
... which also shouldn't be too difficult to rough out.
Lastly, it's worth the effort, because I'd eventually have done this on the next album, and then looked back at Archeology and regretted not doing it... forever cringing at the "almost" guitar tones that could've been better!
Okay, the laundry's back in and put away, all the files are backed up, and i'm in for the evening.
Let's revew how the weekend went!
Yesterday's big breakthrough was learning how to automate, and using that to improve the mix by dynamically tweaking EQs and other effects in denser passages of the songs.
Last night's big epiphany, in the post late-session mix review, was that I can use FL's EQ and other effects on the vocals and the sound effects, even though they currently live only in Audacity.
Basically; the magic of stemming, applied to both platforms, rather than it being a one-way street from music in FL, to final mix in Audacity.
A technique I won't be able to test until further down the road.
Then tonight's big epiphany was the concept of the pickup-simulation-circuit, as the final puzzle peice to the guitar signal chain, album-wide.
A technique I can begin testing tomorrow night, and apply immediately, here in the tone-shaping phase.
So... after a wasted work-week feeling perhaps I'd been bested, and wasn't up to the challenge of the final mix... a weekend with one breakthrough and two big epiphanies that will absolutely define the final mix!
A game plan! A road map!
So, as February draws to a close this coming week, I'll be thinking spring, and simulating guitar pickups!
And, yeah, there's still a lot of work left to do before mastering, but... I'm feeling more motivated now to get to the finish line... and I'm very confident that that finish line is somewhere between now and summer.
Okay! I'm gonna review the mixes again, and then throw three little pot-pies into the convection oven, to be dumped into the same bowl for my late night dinner... perhaps with some crackers and cold-pack cheese as the side dish.
Sounds lovely!
Talk to you next Saturday!
°¦}
