Ableton Forum

I am trying to create a instrument rack that mimics a specific guitar texture effect and am running into some dead ends. Note... I'm wanting to be able to recreate the sound from my keyboard or other trigger device.

The guitar texture is normally created with a simple delay and very fast picking - basically 16th notes. You can hear an example of this if you search for Hillsong - With Everything. Its right at the very beginning.

So I've sampled a single note from my Tele and loaded it into Simpler... now all I need it to do is loop it based on the tempo of the song at 1/16 and we'd be golden... but I cant seem to figure out a way to accomplish this. You can loop, but not based on tempo intervals as far as I can tell. Does anyone know if this is possible???

I've tried simple work around like placing a couple simple delays behind the sample, but it needs to loop until I change notes. If you set the feedback forever it doesn't release properly then.

Any Ideas????

I haven't done the delay part, but you can use the Arpeggiator MIDI Effect to repeat notes. Make sure the Sync button is on, the Rate is 1/16 or 1/32 and the Step is at 0.

Here's a link to a picture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/27959604@N00/3293894640/

You could use the velocity section of the arp to synthesize something similar to the alternating up/down strokes, this is part of the sound. I would set the velocity to decay to a pretty low value over 200 or 300ms, retriggered every 1/8th note while the arp goes at every 1/16th note; you'll get alternating notes of high and low velocity.

In Simpler you can set the filter to be modulated by velocity, the filter parameters will require some fine tuning but as long as volume isn't modulated by velocity you'll end up with alternating sounds with a high and low cutoff.

To add a little life I would also recommend modulating the cutoff of the filter with the LFO a little, as well as using the Ableton velocity plug to add a little bit of randomness. Neither of things needs to be more than subtle.

On top of this arpeggiating, I'm 99% sure there's a tremolo effect on the sound. The autopan plug can do this, or a clip envelope for finer control. The sinewave, rate 1/16th, 0 phase should do well as it most closely matches the generic guitar amp tremolo.

Finally there is a pretty wet, lush delay on this sound, as well as reverb. You may want to put a fairly resonant filter at some point on the signal path of the delay/verb (autofilter with some LFO modulation is great for this), in addition to using the filtering ability of Ableton's reverb. If you're using an audio effects rack, I'd recommend having a verb channel and a dry signal channel, experiment with putting effects in different spots, it can really make a difference on how lush the result is.

Using milliseconds to set tap times on a delay unit, or pushing the taps a percent or few will add some life.

U2's Edge I think really nailed this kind of sound, using some brighter sounding amplifiers and a delay pedal that also chorused the whole signal a bit, and also a 'sustainer' pedal that equates to setting a higher sustain in an ADSR envelope.