Part III: Smilefan Patch Thread

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"Did fire come first, or this patch trick?"

Here is a totally cool trick which dates from the 70’s. The guy who
taught me rock guitar showed me this one. Its been around for a long
time, but is pretty much forgotten these days.

You can get a very ear-catching oscillation sound by feeding a Wah pedal
into two Distortion/Fuzz pedals with a Phaser in between them. You crank
the depth of the Phaser, and dial a very fast rate, with a fair amount of feedback.

When I heard my friend do this live, I freaked out. I bugged him until he showed
me how he did it. People assumed he used some special effect, but no. Just a Crybaby
wah into his Univox Super Fuzz, an MXR phaser, then into a cheap, no-name overdrive
into his ancient Marshall (which we later found out was a JTM45 – worth big bucks!).
A fun, and long-lost trick, from the Analog Stone Age, resurrected for your enjoyment
by your resident living fossil, Smilefan!

NOTE: For those that read my Advanced Amp page tutorials, take
a look at where I set the Tonestack option. Then try putting it back
to the default, “Passive”, and hear the difference for yourself.
 

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Stay tuned. Patchmaker-extraordinaire, AustinBuddy, and myself have a few
"famous player" patches in the works that will really show the kind of string
'feel' and attack dynamics you can get out of 5.0!

Smilefan, thanks for all your great teachings. You are da man!!

I would love for you to do a classic Van Halen patch. Obviously nailing the amp tone, but especially getting the plate verb to sound huge without getting in the way, just like Templeman and Landee did on those great early VH records.

It's not just a matter of hard panning guitar/verb, there is more to it than that. I know you can do it dude!!
 
Smilefan, thanks for all your great teachings. You are da man!!

I would love for you to do a classic Van Halen patch. Obviously nailing the amp tone, but especially getting the plate verb to sound huge without getting in the way, just like Templeman and Landee did on those great early VH records.

It's not just a matter of hard panning guitar/verb, there is more to it than that. I know you can do it dude!!

Mark Day has excellent VH patches here:

http://forum.fractalaudio.com/axe-fx-ii-preset-exchange/40603-mark-day-presets.html

Might be a little redundant for me to make more. There are alot of other great tones to break ground on.
 
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Mark Day has excellent VH patches.

Might be a little redundant for me to make more. There is alot of other great tones to break ground on.


Mark is great and has great patches and videos. Mark never goes for authentic tone, he is a gain freak and we love him for it!! His last patch was on firmware 3.0

I would love to get your 5.0 take on Eddies actual "Brown" sound and effects/panning settings.(I'm sure others would agree)

I look forward to the players you will be featuring next, and I hope you will address Mr.Van Halen in the near future!

You rock smilefan!!
 
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The oscillating preset freezes my Axe-Fx after a few seconds...
Maybe send it to Support for examination?
 
I'm only now going through all your presets in the last few days. Awesome work!! (previously, I thought we needed an EVM12 setup for them to sound like anything) If I may PayPal you a few, send me a PM :)

For me the Mr335 preset is overloading the CPU (though there doesn't seem *that* much in it). Might work w/o USB connection.
Axe-Edit also crashed at least twice, but that may not be preset related.

Most sound great with my P90ies Gibson as is and just a small handful really bad, although just like the new V5 presets, it seems I now have to roll the input trim or guitar volume way back to hear the intended (less saturated) sound. I don't really understand why. V4 presets were almost all perfect in that regard and I'm almost tickling the red as before... Anyway: HUGE THANKS again :)

yek said:
The oscillating preset freezes my Axe-Fx after a few seconds...
Try a firmware below v6.0 ;)
Went through all of them yesterday and didn't happen here. I stayed on it for at least 20 secs.
 
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I also have serious overload on a couple of Smilefan's 5.0 patches where there were no problems before. Like vAmp said, in Axe-Edit the patches do not look like they should cause a CPU overload, but they do.

And also a couple that cause Axe-Edit to crash--the Zappa patch does it every time to the point that I just deleted it.
 
Nile Rodgers uses Japanese-made Tokai Strat replicas (really good guitars) with Music Man amps,
or direct into the board. He plays mainly on the 2nd position (Bridge & Middle PU, out of phase).
All his effects are post production tricks (like gating his guitar track for use as a trigger for horn
sections and such).

He's a fascinating guy. He started as the staff guitar player for the world famous Apollo Theater pit band in Harlem.
He and his bass player partner, Bernard Edwards, are one of the most famous production teams of all time.
He has great taste in his Funk playing, almost never playing rhythms with the chord roots, but only
extensions notes and chord fragments. Very jazzy.

Thanks for the info Smilefan........ You are truly the font of all tone knowledge :0)
 
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Myself, in conjuction with my friend, and 2nd pair of ears, Austinbuddy, present
a ‘famous player’ patch written to showcase Firmware 5.0 improvements.

Malcolm Young of AC/DC fame, is not only the true sound of that band, but
one of a tiny handful of players who embody the ‘feel’ of rock rhythm playing.
Guitar Player magazine has stated that the secret to Malcolm Young's guitar technique
is playing open chords through a series of medium-sized amplifiers set to low volume
with little or no gain. Contrary to the common practice among rock guitarists of playing
power chords through high powered, highly overdriven amplifiers.

The Young family was famous in the music world before Malcolm started AC/DC.
His older brother, George Young, had a Pop group called, The Easybeats, which
achieved many number 1 hits in Australia between 1965–1968 and had a huge
international hit with "Friday on My Mind". Malcolm founded AC/DC in November 1973.
Angus was asked to join later after he turned 18.

THE GUITAR:
Malcolm Young plays a 1963 Gretsch Double-cutaway Jet Firebird guitar handed down
to him by Harry Vanda, along with elder brother George Young, of Easybeats fame. He calls
this guitar "The Beast". The guitar has the neck and middle pickups removed and only the
stock Gretsch "Filtertron" bridge pickup remains. For a while, he put socks in the cavities
to prevent feedback.

Malcolm also uses heavy gauge .012 string sets to get his big, punchy sound (in contrast,
Angus uses .009’s).

THE AMPS: Malcolm uses a variety of vintage Marshalls on stage and in the studio.
At various times he uses JTM45’s, Superbass heads, and the ultra rare JTM 45/100.

Interesting AC/DC facts:
In 1980, after singer Bon Scott drank himself to death, the band strongly considered
breaking up. It was Bon’s parent that ultimately convinced them to continue.

The album following Bon’s death, the immortal “Back In Black”, was not only their
most successful album to date, but was the 3rd highest selling album of all time,
by any artist (after “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Thriller”).

AC/DC was named by Malcolm’s sister, Margaret, who saw it printed on the side of a
sewing machine.

Part of their early concert notoriety came from Angus’ habit of ‘dropping trou’
and mooning the crowd at the end of every concert.


This patch will sound best with a mahogany bodied guitar with heavy gauge
strings.

EDIT: 02/13/2012 Sneaky update for those paying attention. Re-edited the patch
directly comparing to an original vinyl LP (Powerage). I think this version pretty much nails it.
 

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I was just hoping for this the day before you posted!! Will listen tomorrow. TYVM :) Gonna finish reading your old threads now. What a treat 8)
 
I've updated the collected posts document with Smilefan's goodbye post. You can download the pdf HERE.

Thanks for the document. Any idea of why the links to the patches in this document do not work? Is there a zip with all of the latest patches for 5.1 available? Thanks again.
 
LMO , really appreciate the updated pdf.

Of course CHeers to Smilefan, for all you've done and all you will do.
 
I think he gets paid to do stuff like that now. Which is appropriate for someone with that
level of knowledge and skill.

You actually took time out of your life to type that. Was it hard coming up with and putting all those words in a sentence. People used to make comments like that when I was in high school. I think smug is the right word to describe your response to my lighthearted request from him to just finish his fantastic tutorial. If I new how to reach him i would gladly pay he for his help.... But from what he has said here on this forum i tend to think he enjoys doing this and likes to help people.

Clearly something you dont get!!!
 
Sonny is a tone fanatic (duh, obviously) and I've seen him play several amps live. I've heard him with Demeter TGA3 (I think is the model). Also I head him playing some kind of Matchless. Can't remember which one. He sounded great through all of them. One thing I can say about all those rigs is that they were all really loud. No surprise given how huge, dynamic and articulate his sound is.

David Lindley's lap steel sound is one of the absolute wonders of the world and I'm pretty sure he was using his real Dumble on the road in late 80s when I saw him 2x with El Rayo X. Talk about tone. Again, loud as hell, but just fantastic. SRV, also loud as hell, great sound. I'm sensing a theme here. Hmm like louder makes for more dynamic range? What a concept.

Wow! Thanks--Sonny Landreth and EJ are two of my favorites--didn't know this amp had so much to do with their tone. Can't wait to try it. Thanks so much.

For some reason I can't get your presets--the MIDI lights up on the AXE ii but nothing changes. I can get other presets and firmware fine using M-Audio uno straight to Axe. I don't use edit because I'm on an old MAC PPC. I use SysEx.
 
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