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 guitars in low tunings results from their attack behaviour (the beginning of a note being played). Because the strings are usually too slack at low tunings, the act of picking them, especially when picking hard, detunes the string. This will cause note to have a characteristic sound, being sharp at the beginning; to me it sound somewhat like ‘DAU’. I don’t really like the sound of that. Fortunately, the MMM1 has a 712 mm scale, which is longer than most baritones are, so I can tune it to standard B or drop A without the notes going sharp when picking.

But how to go even lower? Why not use effects for that? The SY-300 doesn’t have an octaver or whammy effect, but I found out some time ago that you can use the sine waveform instead of the input signal for highly distorted guitar sounds without it making a huge difference. Actually, the sine signal of generated by the SY-300 isn’t a pure sine but still retaines some of the harmonic components from the original guitar signal. And while you can’t select a (relative) pitch for the input signal, you can do so for the sine. This opens up a lot of opportunities for variations of distorted guitar sounds. One of the more simple ones is to shift the pitch. In the patch below, I used a copy of the high gain patch I presented previously, but changed OSC1 to a sine with pitch -12 (an octave down, for convenience). The result sounds somewhat synthetic but still distinctly guitar-ish. I found it somewhat similar to the old midi/wavetable guitar sounds used in video games in the 90s. Play the Doom riff on it and you know what I mean.