tgorycki
Inspired
Last weekend, I made a couple of guitar cover videos (The Anarchist and Clockwork Angels) from the latest Rush album, Clockwork Angels. I really liked Alex’s guitar tone on The Anarchist, so I tried to recreate his sound by using a Brit Silver amp model, which is based on a Marshall Silver Jubilee, the amp Lifeson supposedly used in the studio. BTW, Firmware version Quantum 2.04.
For The Anarchist, I setup the Scenes like this:
Scene 1: Crunch panned a little to the left.
Scene 2: Crunch with Enhancer engaged to sound double-tracked.
Scene 3: Tremolo and Phaser with Enhancer.
Scene 4: Flanger with Pitch Shifter. Expression pedal 3 controls Pitch mix while expression pedal 4 alternates between 1 or 2 octave lower harmony (used on guitar melody line before drums cut out). Heel down on both exp 3 & 4 for 1st half of melody line. For 3rd quarter of guitar melody, which is 1 octave down, exp 3 is toe down while exp 4 is heel down. For 4th quarter, 2 octaves down, both exp 3 & 4 are toe down. For C chord at fade out, exp 3 is heel down.
Scene 5: Lead with Flanger and delay.
On the song, Clockwork Angels, there’s so much going on between clean, distorted and acoustic guitar tones that I couldn’t feasibly fit everything into a single preset without compromising too much (and taking more than a 90% cpu hit), so I put most of everything into Preset A and made Preset B for the acoustic blues section near the end.
Here’s the Scene layout for Clockwork Angels:
Preset A:
Scene 1: Clean chorus sound using tremolo piezo pickup on input 2 (for clean arpeggio). This sound is set to Scene 1 since the song switches back to Preset A after the acoustic section, and defaults to Scene 1.
Scene 2: Crunch with Enhancer engaged to sound double tracked.
Scene 3: Chorus, mega-delay sound.
Scene 4: Lead with longer delay into reverb.
Preset B:
Scene 1: Simulated acoustic guitar sound using tremolo piezo pickup on input 2.
I downloaded one of Yek’s acoustic guitar simulation presets from Axe-Change and used some of his compressor settings (Thank you Yek!).
I recorded the guitar parts live in Cubase while shooting the video and added no additional effects in Cubase, just some level adjustments here & there. No additional guitar tracks were added, although the Enhancer in the Axe-Fx II makes an effective double-track effect. I made effect/preset changes using an MFC-101 with expression pedals during a practice run and recorded the MIDI track in Cubase.
The presets have been uploaded to Axe-Change for anyone that’s interested.
The Anarchist preset
Clockwork Angels preset A
Clockwork Angels preset B
I’m a huge Alex Lifeson and Rush fan, so this was a blast!
For The Anarchist, I setup the Scenes like this:
Scene 1: Crunch panned a little to the left.
Scene 2: Crunch with Enhancer engaged to sound double-tracked.
Scene 3: Tremolo and Phaser with Enhancer.
Scene 4: Flanger with Pitch Shifter. Expression pedal 3 controls Pitch mix while expression pedal 4 alternates between 1 or 2 octave lower harmony (used on guitar melody line before drums cut out). Heel down on both exp 3 & 4 for 1st half of melody line. For 3rd quarter of guitar melody, which is 1 octave down, exp 3 is toe down while exp 4 is heel down. For 4th quarter, 2 octaves down, both exp 3 & 4 are toe down. For C chord at fade out, exp 3 is heel down.
Scene 5: Lead with Flanger and delay.
On the song, Clockwork Angels, there’s so much going on between clean, distorted and acoustic guitar tones that I couldn’t feasibly fit everything into a single preset without compromising too much (and taking more than a 90% cpu hit), so I put most of everything into Preset A and made Preset B for the acoustic blues section near the end.
Here’s the Scene layout for Clockwork Angels:
Preset A:
Scene 1: Clean chorus sound using tremolo piezo pickup on input 2 (for clean arpeggio). This sound is set to Scene 1 since the song switches back to Preset A after the acoustic section, and defaults to Scene 1.
Scene 2: Crunch with Enhancer engaged to sound double tracked.
Scene 3: Chorus, mega-delay sound.
Scene 4: Lead with longer delay into reverb.
Preset B:
Scene 1: Simulated acoustic guitar sound using tremolo piezo pickup on input 2.
I downloaded one of Yek’s acoustic guitar simulation presets from Axe-Change and used some of his compressor settings (Thank you Yek!).
I recorded the guitar parts live in Cubase while shooting the video and added no additional effects in Cubase, just some level adjustments here & there. No additional guitar tracks were added, although the Enhancer in the Axe-Fx II makes an effective double-track effect. I made effect/preset changes using an MFC-101 with expression pedals during a practice run and recorded the MIDI track in Cubase.
The presets have been uploaded to Axe-Change for anyone that’s interested.
The Anarchist preset
Clockwork Angels preset A
Clockwork Angels preset B
I’m a huge Alex Lifeson and Rush fan, so this was a blast!
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