Hello all, lots of good information in this thread about doubling effects. I will be purchasing a new Axe this week, and one of the things it will hopefully be able to replicate/replace/improve on is the doubling effect I had on my Eventide. One of the things I don't think has been mentioned yet is that during real doubling, each guitar track or guitarist is either ahead or behind the other at any given moment. I reconstructed this by simply fixing a delay time of 7 ms on one side and sweeping the delay on the other from 0 to 20ms, 100% wet. Obviously this introduces latency, but I got used to it and didn't use it on every piece of music. The stereo effect was further enhanced by the fact that I had an EL34 Marshall JCM 800 on the right and another 6L6 800 on the left running into dummy loads as the inputs to the Eventide, which gave each amp its own tone and dynamics profile. This delay effect sounded phasey on some other devices I tried, but worked well on my H3000SE, I think because that unit had settings for the length of crossfade/splice between the changing delay times, which I optimized for smoothness/anti glitching, and which I have not seen in other units. Does anybody know if the Axe has settings for splice and crossfade on the delay blocks?.
The other thing I have not seen mentioned, is that the differences in pitch between two guitar passes or two guitarists playing at the same time, mostly come from the different picking dynamics from one take or guitarist to another, or from their fret hand grip, and whether they are sharp or flat on one or more strings as a result of either hand at any given moment. The best way to mimic this is obviously with an envelope follower of some sort, but then the questions become exactly what parameter should that LFO modify, to what degree and how to create those moments of fixed detuning which result during held notes, and which keep a doubled track from having that sweeping, 80's big production wash we get even from good rackmount modulation devices. My feeling is that the best pitch modulation would be something that mostly toggles, rather than sweeps between generated values, which I think would better mimic the momentary detuning between doubled parts with any held notes, or momemts of greater playing precision.
The last thing I want to mention, is that while I think it's cool that TC has come up with a doubling pedal, it's hard for me to believe that any pedal has as much headroom and general fidelity as a quality piece of rackmount gear. So I will be certainly trying to replicate all of the above phenomenon in the Axe, with all its CPU power and fidelity, as opposed to running my guitar through a pedal filled with 75 cent components. I thought the Mimiq sounded almost credible, but also a bit too clumsy and flabby. Surely the Axe can do better than that, right? I hope so!
