Steve Harris wrote:

>On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 12:47:53 +0200, Tim Goetze wrote:
>> the neck, usually placed exactly where the second octave is on
>> an over-sized fretboard, has far less dominant harmonics than
>
>Cheers, I really should learn how to play the thing sometime.

i've found playing along with a prominent and slow one- to 
three-shot delay a fun crash course in both rhythm and 
harmony, without having to know a thing about musical theory.
try not to move the left hand too much in the beginning, rather 
use all fingers and all strings.

>> always. i think it might be because a real valve amp sort of
>> 'spreads the excess power' by turning the wave into almost
>> square at this point, where the guitar signal carries a lot of 
>> energy. more of a limiter effect, right?
>
>Maybe, or maybe the valve reacts to transients in some way - that could
>partly be a side effect of the HP filter, emphasised by some valve effect
>we haven't modelled yet.

i think that what we are missing is this transition from hard
to soft clipping as the input becomes weaker soon after the 
string has been struck. 

can you drop a hint about how you came up with the valve
algorithm?

>> i just tried it before the first valve and it does help a 
>> good deal to have a better attack [in fact i got carried 
>> away strumming a funk pattern, a first time for playing the
>> guitar through the box], but i'm slowly running out of cpu. 
>
>OK, the CPU problems can be improved. Looking at the rectifier I haven't
>really optimised it at all. Do you have a feel for whether it should be
>faster or slower?

probably it should be quicker to react. it's not easy to sort
out though, i still haven't got around to get the pre-eq right.

four (or more, if more list members care) ears are certainly 
better at sorting this out than my biased two. i've put three 
files for testing setups on http://quitte.de: 

/power-chord.flac -- a low power chord (root, fifth and eighth)
  you know this one from the guys that want to be really bad.
  the more distortion the better. should really give a wall
  of sound, without any auto-wah at all.

/arpeggio.flac -- a fast-paced arpeggio on an unwound string,
  this one should sound familiar from ego-maniac solo work. 
  should sound clear and sharp, with lots of distortion.

/riff.flac -- excerpt from a jazz melody. i'm particularly 
  interested in getting this to sound right. unlike the first
  two, this was done on the neck pickup, so it's a good 
  candidate for testing for muddyness. should, but needn't go 
  with little distortion, but ringing attacks.

there's no eq or other fx on these recordings.

tim

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