Looking for a circuit that will sustain for maybe 10 seconds or so, but not hash up the signal with white noise, for playing single note slow melodic-type stuff. Will a Fuzz do this without noise? I don't want something like the EHX freeze or a feedback distortion type, just overdriven and/or compressed without the "shhhhhhhh".
Simpler the better.
Current setup is a Danelectro Fish & Chips EQ > Rogue Vintage Compressor > VS J&H > Digitech Expression Factory > Biyang Tri-reverb > Digitech Jamman Looper > DIY tube amp
I kind of have everything set the way I want it, so this is an additional piece.
CHAD
That's a tall order not losing your signal into white noise after 10 seconds... :icon_eek:
I reckon the only way you'll accomplish that, is by putting some energy back into the string (acoustically or electromagnetically ...eg a sustainer)...else what you've got is likely a signal that doesn't sustain much past 4 or 6 seconds that's useable.
Quote from: Gurner on November 02, 2011, 12:11:35 PM
That's a tall order not losing your signal into white noise after 10 seconds... :icon_eek:
I reckon the only way you'll accomplish that, is by putting some energy back into the string (acoustically or electromagnetically ...eg a sustainer)...else what you've got is likely a signal that doesn't sustain much past 4 or 6 seconds that's useable.
Drat. What gets the closest? I have an ebow, but it practically overdrives the pickups and I'm too fumbly using it, especially switching strings.
CHAD
Consider the Line 6 Dr Distorto, which is a sort of digital update on the old Boss DF-2 Distortion Feedbacker. I see in the current issue of Premier Guitar that Boss also has what appears to be a digital update on the same pedal, the FB-2: http://www.bossus.com/gear/productdetails.php?ProductId=1181
The DF-2 was intended to simulate sustained feedback, although one can blend how much of the fundamental vs the overtone/octave you want to be held. Behringer makes a clone of this long discontinued pedal. I don't know what the FB-2 does, so you might consider looking up the usual Youtube demo videos.
Finally, consider the EHX Freeze, which is also a digital pedal and can "hold" somethng you've played for as long as you want. It works like a sort of "microlooper" rather than generating a synthesized note as the other pedals I've mentioned.
Put a "sustainiac" pickup system in your guitar. :icon_wink:
Quote from: Paul Marossy on November 02, 2011, 12:28:41 PM
Put a "sustainiac" pickup system in your guitar. :icon_wink:
Not sure I want to do that to the Fly Deluxe. :icon_confused:
With the freeze or the distortion sustain you have to hold the pedal each note. I may as well practice more with the ebow.
CHAD
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=93541.0 (http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=93541.0)
Quote from: artifus on November 02, 2011, 01:25:52 PM
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=93541.0 (http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=93541.0)
Hurdy-Gurdy!
or try a real bow. can often be found quite cheap second hand. fun on cymbals and saws too.
yay! another 'sustain' thread...great!. ;D
tiny ebow's x 6.... ;)
There's always the old-fashioned way--with a singing, saturated 100 watt amp moving lots of air in close proximity to your guitar strings!
Quote from: Ben N on November 02, 2011, 02:02:21 PM
There's always the old-fashioned way--with a singing, saturated 100 watt amp moving lots of air in close proximity to your guitar strings!
Of course what you mean is , FEEDBACK !
Quote from: seedlings on November 02, 2011, 01:20:41 PM
Quote from: Paul Marossy on November 02, 2011, 12:28:41 PM
Put a "sustainiac" pickup system in your guitar. :icon_wink:
Not sure I want to do that to the Fly Deluxe. :icon_confused:
With the freeze or the distortion sustain you have to hold the pedal each note. I may as well practice more with the ebow.
CHAD
T'wer I, I'd rather leave my hands as free as possible to do things with the strings. If I can subcontract anything to my feet, I'm happy to do so.
Quote from: DavenPaget on November 02, 2011, 02:12:39 PM
Quote from: Ben N on November 02, 2011, 02:02:21 PM
There's always the old-fashioned way--with a singing, saturated 100 watt amp moving lots of air in close proximity to your guitar strings!
Of course what you mean is , FEEDBACK !
As I said earlier..
QuoteI reckon the only way you'll accomplish that, is by putting some energy back into the string (acoustically....
What everyone calls feedback, I view as (normally) uncontrolled string resonance....learn to contain it & you've as much sustain as you want! (but your neighbours might not see the funny side)
Quote from: deadastronaut on November 02, 2011, 01:55:32 PM
yay! another 'sustain' thread...great!. ;D
tiny ebow's x 6.... ;)
My apologies friend! I read through some sustain-topic threads from the search, and since they were kind of old, and didn't answer my question directly... I asked directly. And I understand why there was no clear answer via pedal. Well, a sustain pickup may come upon my wish list (I did see a diy thread on that too).
Thanks all-
CHAD
Have U heard of the PAiA Infinity Plus?? ;)
A incandesent bulb compressor that sustains cleanly and for days :icon_eek:
I had one many many many yrs ago.....don't know what happened to it :-X
Can't find the original PAia manual on the web, but here's some mods with a partial schematic.
http://www.lynx.bc.ca/~jc/pedalsInfinity.html
This page talks about the Infinity Plus and the history of PAiA.
http://sonic.net/mjones/paia/paia.html
IIRC, the complete manual in PDF is over at the Paia-YahooGroups site in the "files" section.
You'll have to join the Group to view the manual.
8)
The Infinity + was a respectable compressor, but no more than that, and any claims of "sustain for days" should be chalked up to bombastic ad copy not actual functioning.
Quote from: Ben N on November 02, 2011, 02:02:21 PM
There's always the old-fashioned way--with a singing, saturated 100 watt amp moving lots of air in close proximity to your guitar strings!
I agree. Turn it up and get some air moving. You don't even need 100 watts.;-) That's always the best way imo.
Quote from: seedlings on November 02, 2011, 04:42:48 PM
Quote from: deadastronaut on November 02, 2011, 01:55:32 PM
yay! another 'sustain' thread...great!. ;D
tiny ebow's x 6.... ;)
My apologies friend! I read through some sustain-topic threads from the search, and since they were kind of old, and didn't answer my question directly... I asked directly. And I understand why there was no clear answer via pedal. Well, a sustain pickup may come upon my wish list (I did see a diy thread on that too).
Thanks all-
CHAD
no need to apologise...i wasn't being sarcastic .........and yep that 'diy sustainer' thread is massive...with massive lengthy novel like details..but no definitive result..
by which i mean full sustain all over the fretboard on each string....but hey, it is the diy holy grail imo... :icon_cool:
Quote from: seedlings on November 02, 2011, 12:07:25 PM
Looking for a circuit that will sustain for maybe 10 seconds or so, but not hash up the signal with white noise, for playing single note slow melodic-type stuff. Will a Fuzz do this without noise? I don't want something like the EHX freeze or a feedback distortion type, just overdriven and/or compressed without the "shhhhhhhh".
This is another of those questions which pop up from time to time that seem like they should be simple, but are not because they run afoul of a natural law or two.
In this case, it's the law of conservation of energy. When you pluck a string, you put energy into it to make it vibrate. A string in a vacuum with perfectly rigid mountings on the ends that is made of a material which has no internal friction would be able to sustain for a long time. In the real world, every movement of the string leaks some of that initial "pluck" energy out into air friction and sound waves as it moves, heating from the internal bending friction, and energy coupled into the mounting points; also a pickup if it has a pickup, the energy being coupled out as the electrical power to move signal down into the controls, jacks and whatever else is there.
All of that put together makes for a constant fraction of the energy being drained out per unit time. It's the exact analog of a pendulum, which swings for a while but runs down. Some of the running-down products like sound waves and conversion to electrical signal are why you're doing this in the first place, so you can never make it ring forever, only longer by taking less energy out.
What that amounts to is that for a given initial "pluck" loading X energy in, Y% of the energy is lost per unit time. Engineers recognize this as an exponential decay, and can tell you from the value of Y (the percent of energy lost per time) how long it will take to delay to some percentage. This is also expressed as the time constant, that being the time to decay to 0.632 of its first value. After five time constants, it's generally conceded to be over with.
A given string/guitar/pickup *will* have a decay time constant of some value.
Compression sustainers fake a long sustain by taking in the signal and comparing it to some output level they want. They adjust the gain up or down to get the output to be the right level. So high input signals are lowered to the reference level, and as the note decays, the gain of the compressor is raised to make the level come out the same. In time, the compressor must lose, because it will spend all of its gain and the signal will still get smaller. The signal also gets hissier as the compressor gain goes up.
Distortion increases the apparent sustain by amplfying the signal up and clipping off the tops at some level. All of those flat tops are the same level, so the signal seems to sustain. But the string signal under it is not being sustained, just amplified and clipped. Again, eventually the signal decays down to where it can't be covered up by clipping, so the sustain disappears, and the noise from all that gain is still with you.
Both of these approaches are like shoveling sand against the tide. They do nothing about the string's energy leaking out. To get really long sustains without the noisy falling-off-the-cliff, you have to concoct some way to pump energy back into the vibrating string. All of these are feedback drivers of one kind or another.
The ebow and its ilk drive the string directly and electromagnetically. Standing in front of a cranked up amp drives the strings acoustically from the sheer air vibrations. You can also drive the mounting points of the string with a speaker coil or some transducer to shake the string mounts mechanically. These are the only ones which promise low hiss. They cooperate in the conservation of energy by feeding a supporting energy back into the string to make up for what it loses.
Quote from: DavenPaget on November 02, 2011, 02:12:39 PM
Quote from: Ben N on November 02, 2011, 02:02:21 PM
There's always the old-fashioned way--with a singing, saturated 100 watt amp moving lots of air in close proximity to your guitar strings!
Of course what you mean is , FEEDBACK !
True, but, as noted by several people above, it can be controlled and used very effectively. Part of this is done through equipment--eliminating stray resonances and microphonics, setting eq and tone controls correctly. Part of it is a function of practice, and part is just putting in the extra time and effort at a sound check to get your positions and levels right.
Quote from: seedlings on November 02, 2011, 01:20:41 PM
Quote from: Paul Marossy on November 02, 2011, 12:28:41 PM
Put a "sustainiac" pickup system in your guitar. :icon_wink:
Not sure I want to do that to the Fly Deluxe. :icon_confused:
With the freeze or the distortion sustain you have to hold the pedal each note. I may as well practice more with the ebow.
CHAD
Oh you've got a Fly Deluxe?! Cool. I have a '95 Deluxe that I got not too long ago. On most guitars a Sustainiac system is not too hard to do, but the Fly is a challenge. It can be done, though. Jason Davis had a "signature Fly" that had one in it. His guitar is pretty much what I would like as far as a dream Fly goes, but I think that will have to stay a pipe dream. There's a thread about the guitar here, but the pictures are gone now: http://forums.parkerguitars.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4211
Quote from: R.G. on November 02, 2011, 11:32:27 PMThe ebow and its ilk drive the string directly and electromagnetically. Standing in front of a cranked up amp drives the strings acoustically from the sheer air vibrations.
For soaring violin like single note stuff, I used to get pretty good results by using a Metal Zone EQ'd nicely and letting the amp feedback in a controlled manner. I used to be able to hit a note and let it sustain as long as I wanted it to by wavering the whammy bar a little bit or giving it some vibrato with my finger. There's a zone you can get into where the feedback is quite controllable (you have to coax it a little bit to get it going) and it acts much like a sustainer pickup, but it's working on a different principle. It's not the kind of sustain that gets crazy and where you can't control the frequency, it just sustains the note you are playing. Used to be something in my bag of tricks, when I was able to use it.
See, I'm at church playing through an isolation cabinet. Natural feedback is non-existent.
CHAD
Quote from: seedlings on November 03, 2011, 12:14:13 PM
See, I'm at church playing through an isolation cabinet. Natural feedback is non-existent.
CHAD
Oh, I feel sorry for you LOL. I hate those things. We had them for a while, but we eventually got rid of them and just mic the amps - it sounds a lot better. We don't play THAT loud anyway. The leadership is happy if the stage level is at 95dB or less. It used to be WAY louder than that before we went to the in-ear monitors.
I don't know how to get that sustain without an eBow or a Sustaniac type system or electroacoustically like I used to do. I HATE compressor/"sustainer" pedals, I don't use them at all in any situation. I control my right hand technique instead and use a volume pedal.
I'm in the same boat with the iso cabs. On the other hand it's cool to be able to bring in a big amp and crank it without hurting anybody. The closest I've come to what you're looking for is an eBow but as you say, there is a learning curve and skipping strings is a bitch. If you've ever heard anyone that is really good at one of these things it's mind bending. I haven't tried a sustainiac pickup but would like to. It's the opposite of an eBow, you have to mute the strings that you don't want to go bonkers.
I've also had reasonable results using a high gain distortion into a cranked Lab Series L5. The Labs were unique in that they have a compressor on the power amp (for all intensive purposes) so you can crank the volume and set the compressor for the peak level. Using the iso cab defeats most of the mechanical feedback however and the church I'm playing at also uses in-ear monitors but it's relatively quiet in terms of background hash.
Quote from: Gordo on November 03, 2011, 01:00:00 PM
I haven't tried a sustainiac pickup but would like to. It's the opposite of an eBow, you have to mute the strings that you don't want to go bonkers.
Before I stuck one in one of my older guitars, I used to think the same thing. But in practice, you have to coax the strings into sustaining when you're doing single note stuff, a little vibrato and it goes. At least it's that way it is with the sensitivity as I have it currently set. But all the strings aren't going if you're not playing something, they stay quiet.
Quote from: seedlings on November 03, 2011, 12:14:13 PM
See, I'm at church playing through an isolation cabinet. Natural feedback is non-existent.
CHAD
I've been playing a lot with my windsor amp that I modified the preamp to an ax84 "uber preamp". Think soldano or 5150, it's that kind of high gain that is developed in the preamp. I can get the "endless sustain" at very low volume levels due to the high amt of gain available. I would think any kind of high gain preamp/pedal could do it for you. The key is to eq, lots of mids can keep it smooth and add the resonance for sustain. The rest is your playing technique.
Quote from: DougH on November 03, 2011, 01:48:52 PM
I've been playing a lot with my windsor amp that I modified the preamp to an ax84 "uber preamp". Think soldano or 5150, it's that kind of high gain that is developed in the preamp. I can get the "endless sustain" at very low volume levels due to the high amt of gain available. I would think any kind of high gain preamp/pedal could do it for you. The key is to eq, lots of mids can keep it smooth and add the resonance for sustain. The rest is your playing technique.
I can do that with my Zoom 9030 in the studio, with a preset I made from scratch and tweaked over the years. I've never miked one amp for any of the tunes I've slapped out, ever.
Yes, you can get a surprising amt of sustain through just a low power pair of studio monitors with the gain and eq set up right.
I don't even have studio monitors, just headphones...
Doug, you did that nice demo with a cheapo piezo transducer just hotglued to your headstock as a sustainer, right? There must be a way to get one of those onto a Fly without excessive butchery.
Look into the Pigtronix Philosopher King and then research the EH Attack Decay, which I believe was the seed that spawned the Pigtronix. The Attack Decay has a really over the top way of infinite sustain which the Pigtronix folk have really exploited. It has 2 3080s in it and with those, it clamps down something fierce on your signal for a great singing sustain, but it's kept quiet when you're not playing by its attack and decay functions.
Look into it and you might get some ideas.
I also just remembered that Pigtronix makes the Philosopher's Tone, which I haven't heard, but my guess is that it does exactly what you want without the attack/decay envelope effect of the King (and their original Attack Sustain pedal)
Roger
Yup. The Philosopher's Tone is what you want:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uWPLadlNA0&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Quote from: Rodgre on November 03, 2011, 08:22:46 PM
Yup. The Philosopher's Tone is what you want:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uWPLadlNA0&feature=youtube_gdata_player
That's an interesting pedal. But quite different than what I am used to in the sustain department...
I'm a little confused about what the OP really wants. Hearing an example of the music he wants to play would help.
Sustainer vs gain pedal vs natural vol feedback (he said his vol was restricted with iso cab so I figured that was the issue). Trying not to overthink it but need to hear an example of what he's trying to do.
Quote from: DougH on November 04, 2011, 08:38:10 AM
I'm a little confused about what the OP really wants. Hearing an example of the music he wants to play would help.
Sustainer vs gain pedal vs natural vol feedback (he said his vol was restricted with iso cab so I figured that was the issue). Trying not to overthink it but need to hear an example of what he's trying to do.
Basically we're very hit and miss on the keys. We have a few songs that need a pad or cello or something hanging in the background and I'm the texture guy. What I have now will kind of do that, I use pedal swells with distortion and delay, but often can't make it ring for 4 bars. I just strike another note and no one but me really knows or cares... was just looking to build something that worked a little better. If I can- great. If not- it's not a huge deal.
CHAD
Quote from: Rodgre on November 03, 2011, 08:22:46 PM
Yup. The Philosopher's Tone is what you want:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uWPLadlNA0&feature=youtube_gdata_player
That's nice. What makes it 'quieter' than other compressors?
CHAD
Quote from: seedlings on November 04, 2011, 09:29:12 AM
That's nice. What makes it 'quieter' than other compressors?
All it has to do is NOT use a CA3080 and that's half the battle! :icon_wink:
I'm guessing there may be an SSM2166 or similar chip in there, because the 2166's downward expansion capabilities make for an extremely quiet compressor. The challenge for virtually any compressor is not so much decreasing internally generated noise within its circuitry, but rather avoiding the boosting of
externally supplied noise. The downward expansion of the 2166 directs it to effectively
ignore any residual hiss when you stop playing, rather than boost the daylights out of it like a "softer passage" as most stompbox compressor designs will. Makes a
huge difference in resulting noise levels.
Again, I do not know this is what the PT does/uses. I'm simply saying it's a damn good candidate for that because of its demonstrated effectiveness.
Quote from: seedlings on November 04, 2011, 09:18:54 AM
Quote from: DougH on November 04, 2011, 08:38:10 AM
I'm a little confused about what the OP really wants. Hearing an example of the music he wants to play would help.
Sustainer vs gain pedal vs natural vol feedback (he said his vol was restricted with iso cab so I figured that was the issue). Trying not to overthink it but need to hear an example of what he's trying to do.
Basically we're very hit and miss on the keys. We have a few songs that need a pad or cello or something hanging in the background and I'm the texture guy. What I have now will kind of do that, I use pedal swells with distortion and delay, but often can't make it ring for 4 bars. I just strike another note and no one but me really knows or cares... was just looking to build something that worked a little better. If I can- great. If not- it's not a huge deal.
CHAD
I know you said "no" in your first post, but really, Mr Freeze or pog/hog are really your best friends for that sort of thing. For ambient sustain check out some good reverbs- ehx has one or line6 verbzilla for example.
Thanks everyone. I have all the info I need- basically for the Benjamin investment necessary I'll just keep what I have and probably change one of the Jamman delay patches to help me out.
CHAD