As with too many things in my musical life, this one is again driven by Trey Anastasio's recent uptake of this wonderful filter pedal. He used it during the Fare Thee Well shows with the remaining Dead members because Jerry Garcia was a big fan of it and I guess he liked it so much it' stuck around for the 2015 summer Phish tour rig.
The Mu-Tron III is a filter pedal where the center frequency of the filter block is controlled by how hard or soft you pluck the strings -- it's envelope controlled. It has a bunch of knobs and switches to control it's behaviour.
In the Phish sounds Trey is using the Mu-Tron III in reverse, high pass filter mode. So the pedal starts out as a high pass filter with a really high center frequency, essentially passing only the highest of high sounds, and then as you play harder the filter "opens up" and pass more and more low frequency content the hard you play. This gives it this cool, almost synth like sound, with a slight volume swell type thing happening when you pluck notes as the energy difference between the only-high and fuller-range content is considerable. It's really cool.
It sounds like this:
To build this up in the Axe-Fx II (or the FX-8) you're going to start with a filter block. Set it to highpass type. The gain can stay at 0 dB. The Q we want to bump up. I had the best results around 1.819 or so, but use your ears and your own guitar and playing style to tune the Q value to your liking. This is something you can't readily do with the Mu-Tron III pedal -- tailoring it at this depth would require cracking the pedal open and futzing with analog components in the circuit. Something that isn't easy or quick. With the Fractal products: NO PROBLEM! It's one of the things I love about them!
For the Frequency setting, we're going to right-click on the dial and assign it to a controller. In this instance we're going to use the envelope controller as the source. And we're going to reverse the curve. This means, when the controller is putting out value 0, the filter center frequency is at 20 kHz and when it's putting out value 127 the center frequency is at 73.8 Hz. That's the "reverse" part of this setup. I found it worked fine as a linear curve but I did add some damping, just a touch, to keep it feeling a little less abrupt when the envelope controller values changed.
For the envelope controller itself, I tuned it to my guitar and playing. You'll need to do this for your own gear, but here's what I had:
And that's it! Now we've got a funky, synthy reverse high-pass filter thing happening that's totally on par with a Mu-Tron III pedal. No magic really, right? And a lot of fun to play!
Here's the effect block for you from my preset: http://j.mp/1Sz5mQH -- should work with all Axe-Fx II's and the FX-8.
Enjoy!
The Mu-Tron III is a filter pedal where the center frequency of the filter block is controlled by how hard or soft you pluck the strings -- it's envelope controlled. It has a bunch of knobs and switches to control it's behaviour.
In the Phish sounds Trey is using the Mu-Tron III in reverse, high pass filter mode. So the pedal starts out as a high pass filter with a really high center frequency, essentially passing only the highest of high sounds, and then as you play harder the filter "opens up" and pass more and more low frequency content the hard you play. This gives it this cool, almost synth like sound, with a slight volume swell type thing happening when you pluck notes as the energy difference between the only-high and fuller-range content is considerable. It's really cool.
It sounds like this:
To build this up in the Axe-Fx II (or the FX-8) you're going to start with a filter block. Set it to highpass type. The gain can stay at 0 dB. The Q we want to bump up. I had the best results around 1.819 or so, but use your ears and your own guitar and playing style to tune the Q value to your liking. This is something you can't readily do with the Mu-Tron III pedal -- tailoring it at this depth would require cracking the pedal open and futzing with analog components in the circuit. Something that isn't easy or quick. With the Fractal products: NO PROBLEM! It's one of the things I love about them!
For the Frequency setting, we're going to right-click on the dial and assign it to a controller. In this instance we're going to use the envelope controller as the source. And we're going to reverse the curve. This means, when the controller is putting out value 0, the filter center frequency is at 20 kHz and when it's putting out value 127 the center frequency is at 73.8 Hz. That's the "reverse" part of this setup. I found it worked fine as a linear curve but I did add some damping, just a touch, to keep it feeling a little less abrupt when the envelope controller values changed.
For the envelope controller itself, I tuned it to my guitar and playing. You'll need to do this for your own gear, but here's what I had:
And that's it! Now we've got a funky, synthy reverse high-pass filter thing happening that's totally on par with a Mu-Tron III pedal. No magic really, right? And a lot of fun to play!
Here's the effect block for you from my preset: http://j.mp/1Sz5mQH -- should work with all Axe-Fx II's and the FX-8.
Enjoy!
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