Unique/psychedelic/experimental effects in the axefx

F

FleshisFlawed

Member
What are some cool, crazy, sounds you've found in the axe-fx using modifiers, or paralell paths, or what have you, that you couldn't find anywhere else, or even ones that you could, but are still a little out-there? I've had my AxeFx II for around 4 or 5 months now, Heres a few I've found so far.

1. Chorus pitch-freak - Throw a chorus on before a clean/edge-of break-up amp, or between the amp and cab, set the depth around 10 or 20, or higher for a little more wackiness and set the rate modifier to pitch, and mix around 70-100. play some single string stuff, and try switching between octaves and using lots of muting. This will give you a crazy, pretty glitchy, pitch warble most every time you switch notes. I found that the sound got more interesting playing with picking dynamics, picking very hard makes the pitch freak harder. Not very usable for live situations as the glitchyness makes the pitch warbles very hard to control, but for a cool little sound effect in a recording project, its very fun.

2. Wonky ring mod - add a delay at 100% wet on either a parallel path, or anywhere in the chain, depending on whether or not you want to hear your dry signal along with the effected signal. Put a ring-mod directly after the delay, with pitch tracking on, and set it how you like. Put the feedback on the delay high enough to get a few repeats and then play a phrase on-time with the delay. as you play, each note is ring modulated according to the pitch of the note you are playing over it, giving crazy but controllable glitch out effects. This works best with lots of octaves, fifths, and sevenths. You could probably use an envelope modifier or ducking on the delay block here to eliminate some of the glitches that happen when no note is played, but i havent fooled around with that yet. An envelope modifier on the mix of the ringmod could also work interestingly too, but again, i haven't experimented with that yet.

3. Choir Swell - It would be hard to explain the entire signal chain i use for this one, but basically, create a swell type sound using the volume block, setting the modifier for volume to either envelope for auto swells, or exp. pedal for manual swells, and setting damping between 40 and 150. Set-up some reverbs and delays or whatever you like , and somewhere in the chain, before or after any delay/reverb, after the amp and cab, set up a formant block and set the control parameter to the same modifier you used in the volume block, with slightly higher damping. Try a few different vowel sounds to find one that stands out. Basically, this will add a sort of choir-synth type effect to your swells, that ooohs and eee's and aaaaah's on the up and down sweeps of your swell. I personally like to put the formant block after reverbs but before delays, so you get some extra high-end and trail-off going into the formant block, which make it much more noticeable, while the delays create a cascading to the vowel sounds that sounds soooo thick.

I'm sure theres more that I've forgotten about, but these are some I'm screwing around with right now. I'm excited to hear any cool tricks anyone else has figured out!

Edit: One more i forgot! Similar to number 2. Try the ring mod after a pitch block set to give a fifth or seventh harmony, mixed at any level you want, but 100% will be significantly different than say 50%. Again ,you'll be modulating the pitchshifted signal by the original notes, creating strange effects. You can get interesting effects with the synth block this way as well, or assumedly the intelligent pitch shifter, though i haven't tried that one.
 
Last edited:
My two craziest effected sounds are probably not even half as crazy as those. :)

1. Spooky trem - Attach an LFO to the frequency of a tremolo, and set the mix level of the Dimension D chorus to 25-30% on a clean sound you like. Play with the LFO min and max parameters to get a range of tremolo frequencies you like, and set the oscillation rate to something reasonably low. Sounds quite spooky.

2. Reverb-ception - Not too fancy, and this is probably just me being stupid because I can imagine this can also be done with one reverb block, but I've got CPU to spare anyway. I normally run reverb in parallel to my main chain, so in this case I use two reverb blocks in series (parallel to the main chain). Reverb times something like 5-10 s, mix for both at 100% so I can simply use level to control how much reverb I have. In the main chain I put a filter block so all signal comes from the reverb blocks, which is a big washed out volume swell type of sound. I mostly use it as intro to some songs, as a way to tell the audience "hey shut up music's coming".
 
here's a nice one - put a delay after the amp..in line...with mix and feedback controlled by an expression pedal and input gain also tied to the pedal, but set to 0% when toe is down and 100% when toe is up. tie a random lfo with a slow rate to delay time, but keep the range fairly small and located around the 16ths-whole note area. don't use the tape delay, because it will change the pitch of the repeats...use the digital delay. glitchy fun if you play and then quickly sweep the pedal forward to capture some audio into the delay...let it glitch for a bit and then you can pulll back and play normally. this would probably work well in parallel too.
 
Coolies, definitely some ideas i wouldn't have thought of, will try all these when i get back to the axe.

I have one more, and its a pretty simple one, basically just a type of delay i like to use i make a parallel path after amp and cab, 2 blocks long, and after the branch off, before it connects back, i add a chorus, so that the chorus doesn't go through the delay.High depth, stereo, the rest to taste, and then on the parallel path, a pitch block set to detune, mix 30-70, panned 50/50, pitched between -1/+1 and -7/+7, then a delay block, could be any for a lot of different effects, but i prefer to take out some lows on the eq, and keep alot of highs, set to repeat audibly just 2 or 3 times. Now you add a send and receive block to place that parallel path in a loop, and bring the mix all the way up on the send, and then slowly adjust the mix on receive and the volume on the delay until you are right on the edge of feedback hell. This will make each consecutive repeat become pitched deeper and deeper and panned wider and wider, but layered over a slightly less effected repeats from the feedback in the delay block. The purpose of the chorus on the main line is to add some pitchiness to the original attack of the guitar so it doesnt sound out of place when mixed with the extremely thick, layered sound of this delay. I also sometimes add an extra delay block right after that chorus, before the parallel path mixes back in, which keeps the whole thing a bit more grounded and usable sounding.
 
cool topic! I love freaky sounds. Although it is much easier to post some presets than to write about them...(hint)
 
One cool one i like to do is run a pitch block in parallel, mix at 100%, set to an octave up. After that, I run a reverb and a trem with a square wave, depth maxed. It creates a cool rhythmic pad under a slower single note line

I'll load up a preset later today, sounds great with a clean/slightly broken up tone
 
I'll have to upload some presets soon, been busy and a way from the axe for a few days. I've done something similar to that parallel pitch as well, except you probably run your reverb much lower than i did, i was using it as an octo-verb type setting, something like 80 mix on the pitch, and 100 on the reverb.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom