guitarbytes

The number of the loops

I recently explored options to incorporate additional effect pedals in my Boss SY-300 based pedal board. I am running the trivial options (before the input and after the main output) for years, but never tried to add pedals using the effects loop. For some reason, I never noticed that there is a sound lift switch for the “through” socket and...

leander / 2024-01-17 / sy-300 / 0 Comments

Formantic modelling

Have you ever thought that some guitar or synth patches sound like a specific vowel (in a phonetic sense, not as written vowels). There is even an effect that is named after the phonetic vowels it sound like: A wah-wah, where speaking its name make you vocalise the transition from [u] to [a] (see/hear IPA vowel chart with audio for...

leander / 2021-01-30 / signal processing / 0 Comments

Patch: Downtuned

I like low guitar tunings, but I don’t like how they (usually) sound… and I can’t play seven or more string guitars. The workaround for the latter is of course to use a six string baritone guitar, which I do. I have a Fishman-equipped Ibanez Mike Mushok Signature (MMM1) that I really like. That I don’t like the sound of...

leander / 2021-01-17 / patch, sy-300 / 0 Comments

Don’t replace those capacitors

Seriously, don’t replace the tone capacitors in your guitars with more expansive ones. If you need some, don’t even buy them at a music store. If you spent more then a few cents, you spent too much. Period. Okay, maybe I should elaborate: Music stores around the world will sell really expansive capacitors, build like they did it seventy or...

leander / 2021-01-07 / electronics / 0 Comments

Patch: High gain

When I described my general guitar setup, I mentioned that I use the Boss SY-300 for all my guitar sounds. So here is the one I use for standard high gain guitar sounds, basically using only an overdrive module and some equalisation. I design the patches I actually use live to be run through the PA without or with minimal...

leander / 2021-01-05 / patch, sy-300 / 1 Comment

Patch: Tesla Coil

Is started working on the patch aiming to create a sound similar to a Tesla coil or to electrical discharges in general (the colloquial German term would be britzel). As far as a know, musical Tesla coils are wired to release a discharge every time the acoustic signal crosses zero. For a sinusoidal signal, this would basically mean, that discharges...

leander / 2020-12-28 / patch, sy-300 / 0 Comments

Noise gating bitcrushers (Patch: Signum)

Here is a thing about bitcrushers I noted recently: At low resolutions, they also work like noise gates. A bitcrusher is an effect that enables you to reduce sampling rate and resolution of a given digital signal. If you use a stand-alone bitcrusher pedal, it typically contains an analogue-to-digital converter that first turns the input signal in to a sequence...

leander / 2020-12-26 / patch, signal processing, sy-300 / 0 Comments

Patch: Linked

This one isn’t what you’d call a synth patch, because it doesn’t use any of the synth waveforms, just the plain input signal. So you should be able to build it, even if you only use standard guitar effects. It’s based on a video I saw once, but don’t remember where… However, the goal was to make a guitar sound...

leander / 2020-12-23 / patch, sy-300 / 0 Comments

About those Fishmans

Over the last two years, I equipped two of my guitars with Fishman Fluence pickups, and while they do a great job of sounding how a guitar pickup should sound, I primarily chose to switch to them based on the design principle. I’d consider them the only real innovation in pickup technology since EMG released the first active pickups. Once...

leander / 2020-12-22 / electronics, pickups / 0 Comments

Patch: Submerged

The SY-300 has the option to generated narrow band noise by raising the sharpness parameter of a noise oscillator up to high values. You can, in fact, raise sharpness (and thus limit the bandwidth) of the noise so far, that it doesn’t sound like noise any more. It’s sounds more like a gaussian modulated sinusoidal pulse. And you know which...

leander / 2020-12-20 / patch, sy-300 / 0 Comments

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