Chasing Somewhere in Time tone

kavoo

Inspired
Definitely one of the hardest tone to dial among my all-time favourites. Tried so many times before, of course without any success. Now with Axe-Fx I have the feeling it's going in right direction. Still not satisfied with tone when playing intro riff on a single string, still something's missing - especially if I'll compare it to other tracks from SiT album (like CSiT intro for example). Chords are much better to my ear. Would be much easier if there would be some isolated guitar tracks from SiT album to ToneMatch... :roll

Maybe someone will have an idea how to get this preset closer to original? :roll Wish I had much more than 4 days of experience with Axe-Fx tweaking... ;)

Here's the recording:


Here's the preset:
View attachment Wasted Maiden.syx

Updated preset below:
http://forum.fractalaudio.com/axe-f...-chasing-somewhere-time-tone.html#post1164892

BTW - don't mind crappy playing, I'm a bedroom player with 2,5 years of experience ;)
 
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Your pretty close IMO sounds good.

What amps and cabs are you using

Maiden would be a Jcm800 likely and a V30 cab .probably an overdrive like a boss od in the
front

from wikipedia Throughout his career, Murray has used and endorsed Marshall amplifiers almost exclusively, other than on the Somewhere in Time (1986) and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988) albums and their respective tours, when he instead used Gallien-Krueger amps.

although not the GK he did/does tour with a JMP1 rack OD 1 channel used
 
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Pretty spot on!! They use Gallian Kruger amps on this album, which are solid state amps. The chorus effect is dead on and that's a big part of the album guitar tone. Your playing is accurate. Good job!
 
This sounds pretty close I think.
Some Wasted Years
Played the solo from memory, never learned it but it resembles the original at least :)

[soundcloud]http://www.soundcloud.com/user8166445/maiden-preset/[/soundcloud]
 
Great. I think Your tone is too full/ Gibsonlike?
That's exactly what I have to resolve, original tone is distinctly thinner. Well... weekend is ahead, I'll try to finetune it. Won't be easy 'cause I don't have much experience in this area ;)
 
OK, here's the updated SiT tone version. Sounds much better to my ears. First attempt was way too fat, it crosspassed the bass guitar territory. Now it seems bass and guitar tracks are more separated.

Tone is more trebly than original studio recording, but the only backing track I've found is heavily overdriven compared to album track, so my tone is somewhat adjusted to backing track because the other way it would sound too dull in the mix.

Reamped recording:
 
pretty good...although flipping back and forth between your version and the original studio version, i hear the original has a bit more treble, less lower mids and the chorus is much "richer". i think finding the right chorus will help a lot. don't know what you used here, but dimension or tri-chorus seem like the obvious choices. the default settings for the quad chorus in the axe don't cut it...but it can be tweaked to sound really good. try downloading the patch called "dripping wet" from axechange and saving the quad chorus to your blocks library with axe edit. you can then drop it into your patch. you'll probably have to reduce the mix level a bit, but it might be worth a shot.
 
Did you try the preset I posted? I think it has something With the type og delay too. The original picking on the E string isn`t as defined as Yours.

OK, here's the updated SiT tone version. Sounds much better to my ears. First attempt was way too fat, it crosspassed the bass guitar territory. Now it seems bass and guitar tracks are more separated.

Tone is more trebly than original studio recording, but the only backing track I've found is heavily overdriven compared to album track, so my tone is somewhat adjusted to backing track because the other way it would sound too dull in the mix.

Reamped recording:
 
Yes I tried, sounded worse than my work-in-progress patch. The only thing I've adapted was Pitch block which indeed improved my tone. I may try Delay block later. The core of this preset (Amp/TMatch blocks) are pretty useless to me since I'm certain they were adjusted to different pickups than mine - I have DiMarzio DP218 Super Distortion S (which are single-sized equivalents of DP100 Super Distortion) in both bridge/neck positions.

Still trying to improve... no one said it will be easy ;)

BTW - I'm curious about that ToneMatch block in the preset you posted... I'm wondering what was used as reference material? I've searched the internet for any isolated guitar track from SiT album last 2 years and found only one broken link to YouTube (clip was already deleted because of copyright issues).
 
Someone elses presetm, but likely from youtube. The isolated guitar tracks on youtube seems to be deleted now. There were lot there before. I got some mp`3 of guitar tracks from other albums though.

Yes I tried, sounded worse than my work-in-progress patch. The only thing I've adapted was Pitch block which indeed improved my tone. I may try Delay block later. The core of this preset (Amp/TMatch blocks) are pretty useless to me since I'm certain they were adjusted to different pickups than mine - I have DiMarzio DP218 Super Distortion S (which are single-sized equivalents of DP100 Super Distortion) in both bridge/neck positions.

Still trying to improve... no one said it will be easy ;)

BTW - I'm curious about that ToneMatch block in the preset you posted... I'm wondering what was used as reference material? I've searched the internet for any isolated guitar track from SiT album last 2 years and found only one broken link to YouTube (clip was already deleted because of copyright issues).
 
OK here's updated version of my SiT tone. I guess you can call it the final version, 'cause frankly speaking I'm a bit tired of almost a week of tweaking ;) I'm going to hospital tomorrow for a few days, maybe after that I'll try to tweak this preset more. But right now it works quite well with other tracks from SiT album and that was main goal to achieve.

Reamped recording (I have corrected backing track):


And here's my preset:
View attachment Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time.syx

Have fun! And if someone thinks that something in preset can be improved - any further suggestions will be welcomed. But keep in mind that much of the tone comes from hand that plays... and I don't (and never will) have such brilliant hand like Adrian Smith ;)

BTW - previous recordings attached in this thread may not work anymore.
 
That sounds pretty damn good. What firmware is this and is for an XL? I couldn't load the file.
FW 18.00beta, but it shouldn't be a factor since Brit Pre is used in this preset and AFAIK it hasn't been ported to G3 yet. Axe-FX version is in my signature in case you didn't noticed ;)
 
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