Infinite Sustain - How do I get it?

drkam6 said:
Indeed. Old Santana stuff has also a lot of sustain, and it was his signature sound as he detested using pedals back then for sustain. I wouldn't say it is "infinite sustain" a la ebow-sustainiac, but it is a controlled harmonic feedback in which the fundamental keeps on ringing without going up into the harmonic. An example is Europa live from the Moonflower tour, there is a concert video which shows him making orgasmic faces as he holds the note on, adding the sustain by turning up the volume on the Yamaha guitar...
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Santana has a two-step process for producing sustain:
  1. Walk around in front of the amp during sound check, looking for the sweet spot.
  2. Park yourself on that sweet spot for the duration of the show.
He rarely moves around during a performance.
 
Rex said:
Santana has a two-step process for producing sustain:
  1. Walk around in front of the amp during sound check, looking for the sweet spot.
  2. Park yourself on that sweet spot for the duration of the show.
He rarely moves around during a performance.
Click to expand...

Satch walks around at soundchecks too. I think he finds several sweetspots.
 
guitwiz said:
It seems there should be a way to get infinite sustain - how would I do that with my axe-fx ultra?





P.S. I see the Axe-Fx 2 has come out and looks awesome and I spent every penny to get the ultra - kinda pissed! But the ultra is still pretty darn cool - maybe a bit more noisy than I'd like with some of the high gain presets and I see the new version says less noise!
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The Gate that's on the input , sucks a lot of sustain. if you set the threshold to 0 (OFF) the sustain increases.
 
Les Paul Rider said:
The Gate that's on the input , sucks a lot of sustain. if you set the threshold to 0 (OFF) the sustain increases.
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Ooh. Nine-year-old thread raised from the dead. :)

It’s true that the Input gate can limit the sustain you get. But serious sustain requires that you use acoustic feedback to keep your signal level well above the point that the gate becomes an issue.
 
I've been thinking about trying a few things to achieve this lately... maybe bring in a feedback loop with expression (send after return in chain) so that part of the signal is continuously looping back. For this to work I expect it'll have to have a gain stage between.

Maybe try a similar concept but with a compressor.

Could also be cool to have a pitch block in there somewhere where relative levels are themselves tied to pitch, so maybe lower notes sound like they're feedbacking into an octave, higher notes maybe something more like a 5th.
 
I've been searching for great sustain on FX2 for years, and read many posts on the topic, and I found two great suggestions here in the Forum.
One is the Repeat Hold toggle found in most Stereo Delay options.
Second is the Output Compression Amount dial in Amp Dynamics; depending on the amp, you can push that to 10 and that'll give you tons of sustain.
And they're both built right into my FX2; like so much else with this incredible tool, there are very easy solutions; I just had to find them.
 
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