One Guitar + One Pedal= Multiple Guitar sound?

[MattAnonymous]

Is there a pedal that will make a standard guitar sound like several different guitars played at once.  Possible an electric and an acoustic with one guitar?

[YouAre]

you'd need a synth pickup for that shit, but there is an effect that can create the sound of doubled guitars. Its called a harmonizer, found in digitech whammy's and boss pitch shifters.

[bwanasonic]

Is there a pedal that will make a standard guitar sound like several different guitars played at once.  Possible an electric and an acoustic with one guitar?

There are a number of piezo bridges for electric that allege a usable acoustic tone that can be combined with the regular pickups. Graph-Tech makes one, and there a few others. A stereo rig would optimize any attempts at a multiple guitar sound for sure.

Kerry M

[Travis]

What about Mark Hammer's Woody?
http://hammer.ampage.org/

[Ansil]

if you have two humbuckers and a single yo ucan split thehums and use all three singles to get a groovy acoustic type tone. but not at the same time as something else

[sfr]

I'm a big fan of guitars wired in stereo for this approach, (I wired up my SG with schematics on Rickenbacker's website, each pickup goes to it's own amp now) but even just running your guitar through a booster/splitter, and then EQing, distorting or adding effects to each signal seperately can make a cool bigger sound.  Two amps, or at least a stereo amp helps a lot, to keep things from getting mixed in.

an easy approach be to build a pedal (an acoustic pedal, distortion, whatever) with a booster/splitter in the front end, and run one output from the booster through the effect, and the other straight out,  so coming out of the pedal you have two outputs - one normal, one with the effect - run out to two amps and yr set.  If you must go to one amp, could through a simpler mixer in the box, but some of hte subtleties get lost.

[Bluesgeetar]

This is where I proclaim my love for the BOSS LS-2.  Do the A/B mix and in the loop put a delay pedal and whatever else.  Fine tune it to get your two guitars.  

[Chris R]

I've been thinking of ways to do the same thing.. for the past couple weeks.  It came to me after listening to the Alman Brothers - Whipping Post.  

You could do it with a sampler type pedal.. record one sample... and then play over the top of it.  But this is very limiting on what you can play.. because you will have had to record it first.

Otherwise you can do it with running your guitar in stereo.

I havn't come up with a way to do this in a single pedal.. maybe the big boys could help.  

*Edit*  I assume it would be alot easier to do this with a digital design rather than analog.

C

[R.G.]

Having thought about this for some years now, I think that a second guitarist is the cheapest good solution.

[petemoore]

The boss Circuit there. That one's been on the pedal board for a while now. I don't know what diodes are in it, a 4558 is the active.
 It gets a clean tone on the attack [with gain set sorta low it's quite pronounced] and has a Fuzz Background...very cool...I had no idea...maybe I do something wrong, but it's seeming quite right.
 The Splitter-Blend at ROG is also a good choice for this type of tone.
 I put a treadle pedal on the Splitter Blend's mixer pot...
 Plan: put the SB on top of a metal box with at least 5 Ccts in it hard wired...so the input and output jacks would be the only connectors..the splitter blend requires 6 jacks otherwise.

[B Tremblay]

Pete, people are going to think you're on the 'Groove payroll with the number of times you've praised the Splitter-Blend!  Have you seen the (long overdue) revisions to the circuit?  We've even added perfboard and PCB layouts plus 6 new sound clips.

It's not as in-your-face as a fuzz, but a very handy little box with many possibilities.  It can easily handle the LS-2 with delay that was mentioned above.

http://runoffgroove.com/splitter-blend.html

[maarten]

Why not try a chorus-pedal?

Maarten

[smoguzbenjamin]

Use your favorite acoustic sim pedal and run that in parallel with your dry guitar, but use a short delay in one side, to simulate asynchronous playing. Otherwise you get a different tone, without really getting the simulation of two guitars. Having about 30-50ms of delay will make it sound like two guitars. There's a page on that on my website, it's labelled 'stereo guitar playing' or something similar.

[petemoore]

Any Stereo Stompbox [Boss, Arion etc.]can be used to split input signal, then run two efkt chains off of that, mix them at input [if the amp has that] or run them to two different amps, or run them into a simple mixer, then to an amp.
 I have a Boss RV-3 and Super Chorus, [both are stereo] I use them to split signals this way when needed, with or without the effect bypassed.

[Mark Hammer]

Sounding like several instruments at once is not the same thing as a single instrument with a bunch of tone tweaking.

Ever stared at those "magic eye" pictures?  The ones where it looks like a simple 2-d nonsense pattern, and then after staring and staring, a 3-d pattern emerges in which some objects appear to be distinct from their background?

What you are asking for is a means of having one constellation of audio information be mentally dissociable from another constellation.

I wouldn't say it *can't* be done, but it isn't easy to do.  One way, of course, is stereo.  If the information reaching one ear is different enough from the other ear in the right ways, you'll hear it as two things.  My old cognitive psych prof studied perception of musical patterns, and he'd feed computer-generated tone sequences in via headphones and examine how people classified the spatial location of sounds.  If something you heard in your left ear "fit" the sequence of things presented in your right ear, you would psychologicall hear the sound as having come from the right ear.  So the coherence or pattern, and the distinctiveness of that information lets us treat a sound field as a bunch of different sources,  the same way that I can tell the difference between the roar of one part of the ventilation system, the hum of the flourescent lights, the hiss of another part of the ventilation system, and the tappa-tappa-tappa of the keyboard at the moment.

Separating things in space easily distinguishes two sources.  If I have a sheet of blue and red polka-dots, you can force yourself to notice only the blue or only the red and see them as two.  If I stick them each on separate sheets, it's a whole lot easier.  So, if you want two sounds at once, feeding them to separate amps helps.  Part of what makes the chorus on a JC-120 so rich sounding is that each of the speakers has its own power amp and carries a different signal.

Since light travels so fast, obviously the operative factor is spatial, with timing of information playing little role in helping mentally partition sources.  With sound, however, time matters.  Sounds that appear to be internally coherent are perceived as separate sources if separated in time by only a little bit.  This is part of why some of the time-based sonic-imaging devices for music-listening create such striking 3-D effects - they apply time differences to allow the listener to better mentally segregate a "mere" two-channel sound-field.  If you have a Dobly 5.1 setup at home for your games or home theatre, part of what gets done to make rear channel information *feel* like a separate source is the application of time delay.

It doesn't take a whole lot of time difference to enhance the sense of separate sources, just a few milliseconds.  So, if you had a normal mag pickup feeding a fuzz, and a bridge piezo pickup being preamped as cleanly as humanly possible, separating them by as little as 2milliseconds would help in making them sound like two *different* sources rather than one acoustic guitar that sounds way too fuzzy.  Naturally, that is a delay applied to only one of the parallel paths.

[bwanasonic]

It came to me after listening to the Alman Brothers - Whipping Post.

More often than not, those two guitars were playing harmony parts. A lot more complicated than just splitting the signal there. As RG says, a second guitarist is probably the best bet. Preferably one of you can play slide too!

Kerry M

[Bluesgeetar]

http://www.roland.com/products/en/LS-2/

Go check it out!!!!!!!!!!!!  Read the info on what it can do.

[YouAre]

Get a fishman powerbridge, and add a second output jack to your guitar, then get a pan pedal. So you can pan between inputs and stuff. YOu can pan between your acoustic sound or your electric sound. Add a bit of delay to the input for teh electric and bam, harmony baby.

[travissk]

I'd bet some pretty heavy DSP could do a nice job of such a thing. No clue on the algorithm, but with enough processing power...

Sorry, I know that's not the answer you're looking for I agree with the separation to two amps, or at least two signal chains and back again. Different amounts of reverb and even slight delays and detuning could be what you're looking for. As for doing this all in one stompbox that's already out there, I'd say the closest you could come is chorus, or a pitchshifter.

Enhancers/Sonic Maximizer clones play around with (bass) frequencies to get them to line up perfectly and sound better; I'm just musing, but perhaps if you went the other way and intentionally made frequencies arrive at different times (with a wet/dry blend), an interesting base for an effect could be had. If you went too far you'd get some really weird frequency bin-based delay effects like you can play with in freqtweak, which sounds nothing like what you're after, but I'm not sure what would happen on a more subtle level.

[StephenGiles]

I think the only way round this is to grow another arm or two!