GreatGreen
Power User
I watched a Tim Pierce video the other day, and he mentioned that he liked his delays to sit nicely in the background, but to also have as inaudible of a trail as possible. This makes sense to me as I've always gone for setting up delays to be more about filling in the background between notes with an amorphous wash of sound that's just a bit more clear than reverb, than I have gone for the more "traditional" delay style of setting up a clearly repeated 2nd instance of notes after playing them once.
I was curious how Tim's idea of "no trails" might feel to play, so I decided to try and setup a delay block with a modifier on the Mix control, following the input amplitude, to allow for fully mixed delays while I played and then fully silencing the delay trails immediately upon muting the strings. To get the effect to behave the right way, I ended up shaping the modifier curve to look like this:
This setup represents 13% Mix while playing, 0% Mix while muted, with a slope that basically fully activates the delay when virtually any signal is passed through the block and fully mutes the delay when no signal is passing through it.
And... it works great! You get delay while you're playing, and no trails when you stop playing. Pretty straightforward but a very cool effect. It's an interesting way to add ambience to guitar lines, and because you don't have to worry about trails drawing much attention to themselves, it also allows you to be quite a bit more liberal with things like dialing in more feedback for a more washy kind of background sound, all without having to worry about longer trails distracting the audience and mucking everything up after you stop.
However, I couldn't help thinking that this whole thing could probably be done just as well if the Ducker Attenuation parameter allowed for adjustment into negative values. This would effectively make the delay "negatively attenuate," or get louder, while playing. If mixed properly, this would have the effect of bringing your delay up as loud as you want while you play, then bring the trails back down in volume when you stop playing.
I was curious how Tim's idea of "no trails" might feel to play, so I decided to try and setup a delay block with a modifier on the Mix control, following the input amplitude, to allow for fully mixed delays while I played and then fully silencing the delay trails immediately upon muting the strings. To get the effect to behave the right way, I ended up shaping the modifier curve to look like this:
This setup represents 13% Mix while playing, 0% Mix while muted, with a slope that basically fully activates the delay when virtually any signal is passed through the block and fully mutes the delay when no signal is passing through it.
And... it works great! You get delay while you're playing, and no trails when you stop playing. Pretty straightforward but a very cool effect. It's an interesting way to add ambience to guitar lines, and because you don't have to worry about trails drawing much attention to themselves, it also allows you to be quite a bit more liberal with things like dialing in more feedback for a more washy kind of background sound, all without having to worry about longer trails distracting the audience and mucking everything up after you stop.
However, I couldn't help thinking that this whole thing could probably be done just as well if the Ducker Attenuation parameter allowed for adjustment into negative values. This would effectively make the delay "negatively attenuate," or get louder, while playing. If mixed properly, this would have the effect of bringing your delay up as loud as you want while you play, then bring the trails back down in volume when you stop playing.
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