JJunkie
Power User
Hi,
I have generally played Les Paul style electric guitars for most of my "guitar life". Last year, I found myself wanting more out of a guitar, and decided to get something with a different and modern design, plus some bells and whistles. The EBMM JPX really hooked me. I was never a fan of JP music, but I am impressed with his guitar tones. I tried to not let the whole "signature guitar" thing get to me.. it used to be a bit embarrassing when people asked what JP songs I liked when they saw the sig guitar, and I responded: "errm, well, y'know the one that goes like this..". Hell, most people haven't heard any Les Paul music anyway. All that aside, I know some of the songs now, oh and the guitar is great.
I have put together a patch to mimic John Petrucci's live rig (rhythm and lead tones), and its at point now that I feel comfortable with sharing it. Explanations below:
I am a big fan of the Axe-fx's ability to direct the signal down alternative routes by using external modifiers. This is done at a couple points in the patch, essentially for "rhythm" and" lead" signal paths. If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, what i mean is, you have 2 parallel signal paths, but only one of the paths is ever passng the signal. You can flip the active signal path to a different one by using a CC sent from your midi foot controller, which controls the "level" parameter in an effect block in each path. Sometimes you want a path without any effects, for which you still need to insert a "dummy" block (such as Volume,mixer or GEQ) just to control the level. If you still don't know what I'm blabbing about, just check out the patch, and look at the level settings for PEQ1 and PEQ2 as an example.
METHOD:
Rhythm tone
- Initially, selected pretty standard amp settings (USA Lead 1) and drive settings.
- EQ-matched the rhythm tone based on the method described previously by Clark Kent. Easy to do. The Intro to "kindred Spirits" has an isolated guitar part that can be analysed.
- Created a custom IR. Sounds good.
- Quickly realised that user IR slots are a precious commodity.
- So I selected a stock "4x12 30W" cab sim and passed a white noise signal through this and then my custom IR, generated an EQ-match curve, and assigned PEQ3 and PEQ4 to handle the difference.
Lead tone
- Unfortunately, there are no isolated live lead tones I could find, damn.
- The lead tone has more mids. adjusting a PEQ to the right degree took this rookie some time (actually, I adjusted PEQ2 in the Rhythm signal path as a "crooked smile", to allow me to do other stuff in the "lead" signal path PEQ1 (see below). This required me to re-adjust PEQ3 and 4).
- I had a hard time getting the lead tone to play smooth enough. The only way I could get things to be adequately smooth was to roll back my guitar tone knob, but i figured that Petrucci is most likely not doing this, as he sometimes goes from rhythm to lead playing very suddenly.
- So, I EQ-matched my guitar tone pot and placed 3 filter blocks up front in the "lead signal path" to handle this duty.
- However, once this was done, there was a bit of missing high-end.. something. Raising the amp presence brought this back and retained the smoothness. Yes!! But..
- The higher presence didn't sound nice for rhythm playing, and amp presence is not controllable via CC. So I analysed the frequency response for full passive presence and adjusted PEQ1 in the "lead signal path" to mimic the presence control (at about 5)
- Sounds pretty good to me.
CONTROLLING THE BEAST:
To use the patch properly, you might need to adjust the modifiers to suit your setup...
All effect blocks are engaged by default, except wah and delay.
"External 2" (expression pedal) auto-engages and controls wah frequency
"External 3" (expression pedal) controls the delay block "ingain". Heel down sets delay volume pretty low, but useable. The modifier curve plateaus out in the middle, for a noticeable delay effect level that doesn't require any foot accuracy to hit. The toe down position is for the ridiculously over-the-top delay levels that Petrucci just loves......
Engaging DELAY1 (for me, its the same CC as used for "External 5" modifier) switches between "rhythm" and "lead" modes. This affects:
Mixer 1 and 2 levels
PEQ1 and 2 levels
drive block tone
Amp block drive
Amp block level, and
Reverb block level
"External 6" controls a funky "stereo enhancer-like" setup. Basically, it allows me to assign different GEQs to the right and left channels, to make things more interesting. I set the GEQs to compensate for loss in bass that generally occurs when using the enhancer-type effect, and to also vary from eachother, to give the tone some depth left to right. Depending on your room size, wall treatment, you might need to adjust the GEQ settings.
External 6 controls:
Volume block balance
Chorus Block level
Pan/Trem Level, and
GEQ1 level
WEAKNESSES:
- Wah. Sounds bad in lead mode. I'm considering a parralel wah for lead, but haven't found any settings that sound good yet... ahh I don't use wahs much anyway.
- Artificial harmonics are a little difficult to come by in lead mode.
(These problems are likely because of the filters at the start of the "lead" signal path. Maybe a compromise is in order. Suggestions would be nice)
- Inefficiency. Heaps of EQ power used here. Somebody who's clue-ey could probably play with tonestack types, mic sims, amp depth etc to cut down on EQ requirements and make it axe-fx Standard-friendly.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
I have generally played Les Paul style electric guitars for most of my "guitar life". Last year, I found myself wanting more out of a guitar, and decided to get something with a different and modern design, plus some bells and whistles. The EBMM JPX really hooked me. I was never a fan of JP music, but I am impressed with his guitar tones. I tried to not let the whole "signature guitar" thing get to me.. it used to be a bit embarrassing when people asked what JP songs I liked when they saw the sig guitar, and I responded: "errm, well, y'know the one that goes like this..". Hell, most people haven't heard any Les Paul music anyway. All that aside, I know some of the songs now, oh and the guitar is great.
I have put together a patch to mimic John Petrucci's live rig (rhythm and lead tones), and its at point now that I feel comfortable with sharing it. Explanations below:
I am a big fan of the Axe-fx's ability to direct the signal down alternative routes by using external modifiers. This is done at a couple points in the patch, essentially for "rhythm" and" lead" signal paths. If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, what i mean is, you have 2 parallel signal paths, but only one of the paths is ever passng the signal. You can flip the active signal path to a different one by using a CC sent from your midi foot controller, which controls the "level" parameter in an effect block in each path. Sometimes you want a path without any effects, for which you still need to insert a "dummy" block (such as Volume,mixer or GEQ) just to control the level. If you still don't know what I'm blabbing about, just check out the patch, and look at the level settings for PEQ1 and PEQ2 as an example.
METHOD:
Rhythm tone
- Initially, selected pretty standard amp settings (USA Lead 1) and drive settings.
- EQ-matched the rhythm tone based on the method described previously by Clark Kent. Easy to do. The Intro to "kindred Spirits" has an isolated guitar part that can be analysed.
- Created a custom IR. Sounds good.
- Quickly realised that user IR slots are a precious commodity.
- So I selected a stock "4x12 30W" cab sim and passed a white noise signal through this and then my custom IR, generated an EQ-match curve, and assigned PEQ3 and PEQ4 to handle the difference.
Lead tone
- Unfortunately, there are no isolated live lead tones I could find, damn.
- The lead tone has more mids. adjusting a PEQ to the right degree took this rookie some time (actually, I adjusted PEQ2 in the Rhythm signal path as a "crooked smile", to allow me to do other stuff in the "lead" signal path PEQ1 (see below). This required me to re-adjust PEQ3 and 4).
- I had a hard time getting the lead tone to play smooth enough. The only way I could get things to be adequately smooth was to roll back my guitar tone knob, but i figured that Petrucci is most likely not doing this, as he sometimes goes from rhythm to lead playing very suddenly.
- So, I EQ-matched my guitar tone pot and placed 3 filter blocks up front in the "lead signal path" to handle this duty.
- However, once this was done, there was a bit of missing high-end.. something. Raising the amp presence brought this back and retained the smoothness. Yes!! But..
- The higher presence didn't sound nice for rhythm playing, and amp presence is not controllable via CC. So I analysed the frequency response for full passive presence and adjusted PEQ1 in the "lead signal path" to mimic the presence control (at about 5)
- Sounds pretty good to me.
CONTROLLING THE BEAST:
To use the patch properly, you might need to adjust the modifiers to suit your setup...
All effect blocks are engaged by default, except wah and delay.
"External 2" (expression pedal) auto-engages and controls wah frequency
"External 3" (expression pedal) controls the delay block "ingain". Heel down sets delay volume pretty low, but useable. The modifier curve plateaus out in the middle, for a noticeable delay effect level that doesn't require any foot accuracy to hit. The toe down position is for the ridiculously over-the-top delay levels that Petrucci just loves......
Engaging DELAY1 (for me, its the same CC as used for "External 5" modifier) switches between "rhythm" and "lead" modes. This affects:
Mixer 1 and 2 levels
PEQ1 and 2 levels
drive block tone
Amp block drive
Amp block level, and
Reverb block level
"External 6" controls a funky "stereo enhancer-like" setup. Basically, it allows me to assign different GEQs to the right and left channels, to make things more interesting. I set the GEQs to compensate for loss in bass that generally occurs when using the enhancer-type effect, and to also vary from eachother, to give the tone some depth left to right. Depending on your room size, wall treatment, you might need to adjust the GEQ settings.
External 6 controls:
Volume block balance
Chorus Block level
Pan/Trem Level, and
GEQ1 level
WEAKNESSES:
- Wah. Sounds bad in lead mode. I'm considering a parralel wah for lead, but haven't found any settings that sound good yet... ahh I don't use wahs much anyway.
- Artificial harmonics are a little difficult to come by in lead mode.
(These problems are likely because of the filters at the start of the "lead" signal path. Maybe a compromise is in order. Suggestions would be nice)
- Inefficiency. Heaps of EQ power used here. Somebody who's clue-ey could probably play with tonestack types, mic sims, amp depth etc to cut down on EQ requirements and make it axe-fx Standard-friendly.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy!