FEB Ends & The PicSim Detour
Saturday, February 28th, 2026 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio31F and overcast today.
Over the week, the experiments with the pickup simulator, with Reavis as my guinea pig, had mixed results... or should I say... failed to have mixed results?... because mixing was the big issue.
Creating two PQ2 modules, one to simulate a neck pickup, and the other a bridge pickup, actually worked great! We used the humbucker pickups of a Les Paul as our guide for the frequency responses, and when running the signal through both, the sound was generally fuller and more realistic than my single earballed PQ2 profile had been.
Turning up the volume of one pickup, and turning down the other to compensate also sounded good! Turn up the bridge pickup, and tweak the neck down, and it sounded brighter and closer to the bridge... and vise versa.
The problem was, having these modules inside patcher, there was no way to automate the volume faders.
And then I got lost for a few days down a rabbit hole of how to create a crossfade controller inside patcher that would control them both together, in such a way that as you turned up one, the other turned down, maintaining a consistent total volume... and be able to automate that theoretical control knob.
However this proved to be a huge waste of time, due to what I call, "UI Drift."
UI Drift is when the menus in front of me, and all their labels, and the controls for the different modules, and the things you are allowed to do with them... are completely different from what DeepSeek is seeing in it's online searches... which are a mash-up of different tutorials from different time periods talking about a UI that changes over time, as newer versions of FL are released or updated.
And I probably don't have the most up to date version of FL Stuidio either... and don't want to try and update it, in the middle of recording an album, for fear of losing some feature or other.
But we're also trying to do something that is not a standard thing to do, and thus does not have a specific tutorial for it anywhere to be easily found. In other words, there's no, "How To Create A Crossfade Controller For Two Pickup Simulators in Patcher!"
So, i'm left with a bunch of instructions from DeepSeek that I can't execute, like "right click on Fruity Formula Controller, go to 'outputs', and select, 'add two'."
Well it doesn't let me do that!
And slowly it all descends into insanity, trying ten different solutions that all spiral into unworkable nonsense.
So after I got up today, I just got rid of patcher completely, and have been experimenting with just the neck and bridge PQ2s directly in the signal chain. So... Sakura---> neck EQ---> bridge EQ---> Fast Dist---> Convolver cabinet sim.
The two EQs basically act like a single EQ, but with more sliders... as i'd been experimenting with last week for the piano. And then I can automate the volumes of the two to emphasise one profile over the other.
But I can't (or don't know how to) connect the automations such that when one goes up the other goes down, and vise versa. It's something I just have to do manually.
In theory: start with both EQs at 50%. Then automate the bridge EQ to get louder in different parts where the guitarist would be plaing closer to the bridge. Then automate the neck EQ to get quieter where the other automation's getting louder. Then go back and tweak the neck EQ to be louder in it's different parts, and adjust the bridge EQ to be quieter... trying, manually, to keep the sum of both volumes the same.
I haven't started in on that task yet, because I've been ear-testing the two pickup EQs. And part of that was turning them off, going back to Sakura, and adjusting the Sakura settings to have a "natural" neutral default sound.
Having done that, when I turned on the neck and bridge EQs, it does make a big difference to the sound, as two pickups would do, and it does sound very realistic.
So if the automation side of this experiment goes well for Reavis, then I'll try to recreate it in, say, Never Rains... same "natural" sakura settings, same pickup EQ settings, same convolver... the only unique settings being with Fast Dist.
If this seems to work, then I may have worked out a global guitar sound for the whole album, where the only real difference from song to song is in the level of distortion... and the way the two pickups get emphasized as the songs play out.
Okay, back to it!
Talk to you later.
Okay, I've gotten the first half of Reavis automated for the two pickups, and i'm getting my head around what this will entail.
My first thought was to do one song-length automation for each pickup.
But I quickly realized it would go faster to break automation up into clips, for Verse A, Verse B, Bridge A, etc.... because it's always the same for those sections, so why re-do it every time?
Then I discovered that automation clips don't behave *exactly* like instrument patterns, because you can't just clone one, alter it, re-name it, and slap it into the timeline, like with an instrument pattern.
If you clone an automation clip, that clone will not work in the timeline.
So i'm doing it in clips, but I have to go back to the volume control in the mixer for the neck EQ, and the bridge EQ, and select "create automation clip" each time I want to make a new clip.
And that's kind of annoying, because then I have to re-color-code, each new clip.
However, adjusting the automations is pretty straightforward.
The mixer knobs are at 50% by default, so each new clip starts with everything at 50%.
So I create them in tandem, one for neck, one for bridge, paste them into the timeline, and then... say, for the verse, make bridge slide up to 80% for most of it... which is easy to see up in the top left corner (it tells you the percentage you're marking).
Then in the neck clip, just below it, at the same measure, I slide it down to 20%.
It's fairly easy to create two clips in tandem, and then split the pickups; 50/50, 70/30, 80/20, as the song goes along.
And the audible result is marvelous! You hear the guitarist moving his strum down lower, and up higher in the different parts! It gives the guitar a lot more character! And yet that main volume fader in the mixer never drops or spikes! the overall volume stays constant!
So, this is a great proof of concept, building on the idea from last weekend about using two PQ2 modules and automation to create dynamic EQ.
Last weekend there was a static PQ2 on the guitar to shape it's general tone, and a secondary to come in and "help" in places where the orchestration is dense.
This weekend, that idea's evolved into two dynamic EQs, modeled after the freq response of real neck and bridge pickups.
So this is the way to go, but the workflow has to be streamlined or this will take forever!
The workflow should be to create all the clips first... with all of them just sitting at 50% from start to finish. So create BR V-A, NK V-A, BR BRD-A, NI BRD-A, BR INTLD-A, etc...for all the different sections of the song... and past that all into the timeline at the right places.
Then, go through and change the volume relationships. Everytime I make an adjustment to BR V-A, it changes that for every instance of BR V-A in the song, and soforth.
Okay, so for now I'm still working through Reavis and may make a few more discoveries about the process as I go.
But when this is done, maybe I'll try Clue Phone next, as that's one where I had a lot of trouble with the guitar sound. If I can get this same model to work on Clue Phone, with it's hypnotic intro licks, and harder verse licks, then I'll try, Suburbs next... with it's heavy guitar throughout, and then, Other Friends, with it's punk frenzy throughout.
If the PicSim model works for all four, then it should work for every song.
Of course, as always, these PicSim tests are new files, with the older files still there to fall back to if this experiment goes sideways.
This does add a lot of time to the tone-shaping phase of the project, and puts the compression phase further off into the future... but a realistic, consistent guitar sound for all 12 songs is worth the time and effort... especially if it makes the guitarist sound more human in the process... adding neck movement to velocities, strums, and slides.
Okay, back to it.
Talk to you later tonight.
Okay!.. the Clue Phone experiment went extremly well!
First a clarification: I said above that the distortion would be the only thing different in a global PicSim model, but actually, delay and chorus would also differ from song to song.
Delay and chorus are done in Sakura so... even while the "natural" settings for string sounds would be the same in every song, those two effects would vary.
Second, a technical discovery: If I select the block of measures I want to do automation for first (the verse block, or the chorus block, etc) however many or few measures that is, then when I go to "create new automation clip" it creates a clip of that exact length, which is very helpful, especially doing bridge and neck pickup clips in tandem.
That said, the sound I'd curated for the Clue Phone guitar earlier this month, which felt hard won... was scrapped and replaced with the "natural" Sakura settings, and the same two pickup EQ profiles from Reavis, and instantly it sounded better, and more realistic, even before automation.
So this pickup simulation model is definitely the way to go!
But my God, after the automation of the pickups... it's SPOOKY how much this sounds like Brian playing!
I know I said that a few weeks back, but this is yet another level!
To really dial in the performance, I also automated the distortion's, THRESHOLD knob, just to start low in the intro at 10%... kick it up to 20% for the verses... and then another boost to 30% for a part of the bridge phase I call, the "zooms".
The zoom part is where he hits a low chord strike, followed by a high chord strike that slides down... into the next low chord strike... over and over four eight measures "BLOMP!.. ZAaaarm... BLOMP!.. ZAaaarm... BLOMP!.. ZAaaarm..."
The distiortion kicks up for these 8 measures, and meanwhiule the Blomps are all neck pickup, with the Zarms all bridge. It's really sensational!
So... I began February kinda floundering, not sure how to tackle the tone balancing phase, with one big problem being the inconsistent guitar sounds from song to song, some sounding better than others, but none sounding as realistic as I wanted.
That lead to a re-vamping of the guitar sounds, hybrizing the best models together, for a more consistent guitar sound, but there was still this issue of reconciling the piano and some other orchestrals with the guitars in different places, in different songs.
What's dawning on me now is that, for the tone balancing of this album, The Room is the north star, and Simulation takes precedence over "space carving" when it comes to complex problems, like the guitar, and piano.
Space carving is great for the rhythm section, and most of the orchestral, but at the end of the day, this is a band in a room, and so when push comes to shove, with the guitars... space carving is no longer the answer.
The answer is to double down on the guitar's reality, by simulating the pickups that are capturing the string sounds... one with more depth and body, one with more pluck and high end clarity... and maintianing a blend of the two.
This tells the ear and the brain that it's a real guitar, which instantly puts it into the room context.
And then we hear it always dodging either the mud, or the tin, by shifting between neck and bridge... without ever losing it's funamental character.
Hopefully tomorrow I'll get two more experiments, Suburbs, and Friends, under my belt to solidify this new model, but I think the pickup simulator was a game changing inspiration, for this album!
I think, after the compression phase, when this is all said and done, this room sound is going to be something truly novel!
It's gonna be a perfect hybrid of the old school session recordings of the 1950s, with the better isolation and compression of the 1960s, with the stereo and distortion of the 1970s... creating a production sound that never truly was!
Okay, with that, it's time to listen through my two experiments and wind on down for bed.
March bills await me when I wake up, as the first matter of business!
Talk to you after I'm back from the Sunday errands.
°¦}
