"Mega Rig" - Liquid Tension Experiment live

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!
 

Attachments

  • JPX LTE LIVE.syx
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I will definitely check this out in a bit.

I'm curious to ask what you are using your Axe-FX through. (Direct, Poweramp, etc.) Pardon me if you mentioned it in the post, I just sort of skimmed through until I am able to read it to full later on. Great idea though; Petrucci's tone on that LTE Live DVD was sick. I'm curious to see how close you actually got it.
 
Ooof... fantastic work! I've not tried the patch, but the thought processes and write up are great!

Thanks for sharing
thumbsup.gif
 
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i just tried it. crazy amount of eq going on and it sounds a bit "flat" to me....sorry...

as an experiment, i turned off all the peq blocks and the filter blocks and i changed the cab to a 4x12 recto2 with a SM57 and added another cab underneath with the 4x12 german with a SM57. this to me has more of the "attitude" that seemed to be lacking in the original patch. leads sound better too - more "bite"

also turned up the treble and pres a bit and added the "mesa eq" inbetween the amp and cabs with a gentle cut in the mids and boost to the top and bottom

have a go and see what you think - may need further tweaking, but to me, it's more along right lines.

have a look at my petrucci rhythm which is based on these ideas and see if you like it. assimilate into your own patch, if you like.

sim

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Progfather: Hey, I go direct to studio monitors (dynaudio BM5As). But the patch tweaking was done by analysing tone frequencies on my computer, so the patch shouldn't be biased towards any particular set of speakers.

Simeon: Thanks for your suggestions. I will work through them on the weekend. Since I was going for an accurate copy of the original tone, thats why all the eq power was used, otherwise I would not have bothered with all that, you got it spot-on describing it as "crazy". I didn't think it was necessary to do the mesa eq, as analysing the tone should have accounted for that, as well as mic eq, though I take your point, putting in the SM57 mic sim could potentially save me a few bands in a PEQ. Finally, the 4x12 30W cab was only chosen because it had the detailed peaks and notches within a similar frequency range as was in my original custom IR. However, there was something lost in the translation when I ditched the custom IR. Maybe I should bring it back.

If I can use your suggestions and get closer to the original tone, I will re-post the patch
 
yes, you obviously put a lot of work into it, which was impressive, but there's a certain mojo missing...a ballsy crunchiness that he has. i'm sure you'll be able to nail it. please don't take my patch as an example of what it should be like...only as an example of the slightly crazy gain he has in his sound...and especially of the crunch. looking forward to seeing your update...
sim
 
Hey JJ,

Just wanted to say I tried your patch on my setup and it works nicely. Not sure what the original tone you were going for sounds like but yours is nice, crunchy and clean on my rig. Nice job and thanks for sharing! Tis a keeper on my rig.
 
Thanks rk,

The rhythm tone for me is definitely useable, the lead tone feels close to the real tone but is probably missing some life. Though different guitars / pickups from what I use might tip the scales one way or another. I'm still gonna try to improve it if I can, so feedback and tips at this point is all welcome.
 
Hi simeon,

I opened up the Petrucci rhythm patch. I have Axe-FX Standard. There were some missing slots. I connected them up and it sounded great.

The missing slots are:

1-between amp and peq
2-peq and 2 cab slots (where the signal is divided into two paths)
3-1st cab and volume, 2nd cab and delay

It may be too much but I will try my luck anyway :)

Can you make a Petrucci Lead patch as well?

Thanks!!
 
I'll have a look tomorrow and see what the missing slots were. I'll have a go at a lead patch, but I can't guarantee it'll be much cop....I'm not a petrucci expert...!
 
ok, so the wife is watching her stories and i got a chance to update this for you

i've no idea if this will run on a standard, but i've stripped it back and created a patch that does rhythm and lead.

the block order is this...

drive>filter1>amp>peq>cab>filter>volume>delay (in a side chain)>reverb

i have tied external 3 into filter1 mute, filter 2 mute, delay in gain and reverb time

this switches between rhythm and lead. change this to another controller if you need to

controller 1 is tied to volume in the volume block

the blocks you removed from the original patch were a gate after the amp and a volume block and delay block for widening

let me know if this is ok

sorry for the thread hijack JJ!
 
Hi
I finally had time to update things a bit, but now Im off for 7 weeks so wanted to post now. Thanks Sim for the tips, I used a few...

Changes are:
Played around with basic amp settings a little after watching a JP amp settings vid.

Cabs and mic sims make more sense...

Then the EQ matching process.. PEQ2 handles most of this, and as you can see it resembles a Mesa v-shape EQ somewhat, meaning that the cab sim and mic settings must be pretty good. But I took it a slight step further this time, and noticed that the left and right channels of the original recording have different EQs, so thats where PEQs 2 and 4 come into the equation (though I am sure some of the EQ is because I accidentally left the default panning on the cabs.. oh well).

I dont have so many crazy filters at the front of the preset anymore, yay, the lead tone sounds pretty natural to me now.

We still have rhythm and lead modes. Rhythm by default has a stereo widening effect, 16ms split (I know it should probably be 7ms, but 16 sounds better to me). Lead has no widening.

Still using a lot of EQ power, but this is mostly the consequence of avoiding custom IRs.

I use EXT5 to switch between rhythm and lead. This is tied to:
Filter3 bypass
Vol/pan1 and 2 volume
PEQ1 level
Delay1 bypass
Chorus mix
PEQ3, 4 balance
PEQ3 level
Reverb time.

EXT3 is a expression pedal tied to delay ingain.

Let me know how things go. differences between different guitars, assuming you aren't using something radically different should be handled with a GEQ up front. I use a ebmm JPX here

here is comparison clip and patch. the strings are a little dull.. still not "exactly there" but I think as good as it gets for me, not using a custom IR.


Kindred tones by Justin Kabat on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free

ANyway, I would like to hear some opinions please!
 

Attachments

  • JPX LTE LIVE(2).syx
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