Tactics for doubling / thickening stereo sound live when only 1 guitarist

[Will Schut]

You'll also get the "benefit" of some phase changes that the EQs introduce. Could be bad or good...

Indeed!

 

[km 202257]

Attached are my takes of doubling effect on an AXE-FX. I use "W/D/W" approach for this.
Perhaps it is just me but I've never been able to achieve a good doubling effect with 1 Amp and a stereo Cab with 1 IR - always sounds thin or drowned in a mix.
To avoid this, 1. I use 2 Amp blocks that has the same/similar models but with tiny differences, and 2. use a trio of different IRs of the same/similar cab with each other.

Here's the soundclips. You can hear the attached presets in a mix(*) at 0:00-1:13, and isolated at 1:15- :



And here's the attached presets on the AXE-EDIT.



Hope my preset sounds good and gives some ideas on how to achieve the doubling effect.

(*)
Backing Track is excerpt from: “Empire State Building” by Earliri
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ja

 

[strabes]

what's everyone's approach to doing it live

It depends on the gig but I often record extra parts in advance and put them in the ableton playback rig (or send them to the MD).

I always run my guitar stereo (different amps and cabs in L/R) with the enhancer block on classic mode, and monitor with IEMs. Stereo with the enhancer block together create a ton of space in the IEMs for the other instruments. Tough to go back to mono once you’ve experience this. As long as your signal is kept hard panned at FOH you won’t be introducing comb filtering or phasing, in fact you’ll be avoiding it because your left/right will be different. Comments about the audience not hearing the difference are missing the advantages entirely.

 

[DLC86]

It depends on the gig but I often record extra parts in advance and put them in the ableton playback rig (or send them to the MD).

I always run my guitar stereo, with the enhancer block on classic mode, and monitor with IEMs. Stereo with the enhancer block together create a ton of space in the IEMs for the other instruments. Tough to go back to mono once you’ve experience this. As long as your signal is kept hard panned at FOH you won’t be introducing comb filtering or phasing, in fact you’ll be avoiding it because your left/right will be different. Comments about the audience not hearing the difference are missing the advantages entirely.

The problem is that you're not really creating different signals in the two channels with the classic enhancer, you're just delaying one side, so just moving the points in space where those phasing issues occur.
Better use the modern enhancer or stereoizer which actually make the two signals different and also happen to be mono-compatible.

 

[strabes]

The problem is that you're not really creating different signals in the two channels with the classic enhancer, you're just delaying one side, so just moving the points in space where those phasing issues occur.
Better use the modern enhancer or stereoizer which actually make the two signals different and also happen to be mono-compatible.

Sorry, should have been more specific. I'm not just running a mono dry and widening it with the classic Enhancer which would indeed have the problem you mentioned. I run similar-sounding but different amps and cabs hard panned, along with stereo wet effects and the classic enhancer block. With this setup the classic mode still isn't perfectly mono compatible like the other 2 modes on the enhancer, but the phasing / comb filtering is drastically reduced as compared to running a mono amp/cab through it. To me the classic mode is much wider than the other 2 modes, so for me the tradeoff is worth it for live use. For recording obviously I just double track & hard pan as per usual for this effect.

Worth noting that since my goal is "real time hard panned faux double tracking," the "Petrucci Rig" pitch block is not the best choice for me.

Here's an audio demo in order of what I hear as increasing width, with every track gain matched: https://www.dropbox.com/s/aot24f3nh29q2ts/2023-02-20 Stereo Width.m4a?dl=0

1. Mono
2. Stereo amps, no widening
3. Stereo amps, Petrucci Rig pitch block (personally I don't like the artifacts produced by this block, doesn't sound anything like the Mimiq to me, especially not on the 1 dub setting in stereo)
4. Stereo amps, Enhancer Modern
5. Stereo amps, Enhancer Classic
6. Actual double tracking (clip #1 with a second take recorded through the second amp).