New Website for GuitarRig Banks

Hey everyone,

I just added a section to my website to help share banks and presets for guitar rig. Basically the idea is that I will post a challenge every once in a while of 10 songs for everyone to try and emulate. Everytime someone submits a preset that is more convincing and true to the original song it will be added to a growing bank for everyone to download.

For this to succeed we'll need alot of people to participate in trying to create better presets all the time. No preset will ever be considered final so revisions would always be welcome.

So who is going to decide which submitted banks sound best? Again this will be up to everyone that wants to take the challenge, each time I put up a new challenge list I will collect peoples presets for a week or so, put them all together in one bank, and let everyone test them out and vote for which preset is the best for the it's song.

Anyway, I put up the first list and even started the master bank with an attempt at a few of the songs myself. Goto: www.andrewjnuttall.com and click on the Guitar section on the right.

Lastly, keep in mind that everyone is using a different setup, even just the different guitars (not including input boxes, speakers, soundcars, etc...) make a huge different on the accurracy of tone compared to the original, so we'll go for the tones that seem to work best for EVERYONE, so don't worry if your preset sounds more accurate for your setup but we choose a different one as a group. The goal is to get everyone as close as possible so that they can tweak it to their rig to get that sweet sound.

Drop my a line guitarrigger@andrewjnuttall.com

 

Hey guys I see alot of people have checked out this post but I'm getting no responses. Let me know if you like the idea, if there are things you'd want to change/add, or if you like the NI one too much and dont think I should bother with my site. If you do like the idea then start sending in the presets, they dont have to be great to start with, just get them on the right track so others can have a listen and tweeking.

 

I think what you are trying to do is noble however there is already the NI site and the Yahoo users group site. My guess is that most people would prefer to go there. Not sure that people would care about a third site.

Just a thought

Best regards

 

Just my .02 since you asked why no one replied.

I don't care or even try to duplicate a sound on a record.

I would rather be playing and creating my own sound.

I heard a guy the other day that had clips of Edie Van Halen songs he recorded using real tube amps. He spends all his time trying to play and sound like EVH. He was pretty much a dead knock off of the early EVH sound. he is very good at what he does but he even sounds like EVH on a blues tune he recorded. Click link and listen to a few.
http://www.jasonjosephphotography.com/soundclips.html

What for, so you can be a EVH clone?
Maybe he can go on the road with an Elvis impersonator?

Experienced players develope their own sound and hopefully they do not end up sounding like someone else.

 

Personally, I just don't use presets. When I open GR, the default is just a few of the units that I use the most chained together, and I only start tweaking the knobs and adding more FX right before I start recording. It's just easier for me to start from scratch and try to make my tone fit with the particular drum/bass sounds of the song, rather than wasting time trying to modify something pre-made so that it fits.
However, I do like this idea, I just happen to agree that everybody's different hardware setups might render this an excercise in futility. A Metallica tone that was created using an ESP will sound totally different on a PRS, if you dig.

I think a better idea would be to actually post a well-recorded clip of a totally dry guitar signal (DI'd) playing whatever riff that you're going for, and then we can import those into our sequencers, loop it, and tweak. That way, everyone will get the same tone, so it would be a better way to judge how close it is to the real deal. I, for one, would get involved with this. Especially if set 2 would be more metal-centric, which could prove once and for all how GR fares with the metal.

 

EL34xyz, believe it or not I agree with you almost completely. Almost. While any experienced musician will tell you that creating your own sound and style is more important than anything else, there is still a huge value as far as learning the craft of playing guitar goes, in emulating the bands and guitarists that have defined what makes up guitar techinique today. Also part of the joy of learning guitar for beginners and even professionals is to be able to play along with the songs that got you interested in the first place. Part of creating your own tone should be drawing inspiration from the songs and tones that capture your attention. What is it that makes Little Wing so commanding? Is it just the notes? Or maybe it's also in part due to the bright sensual tone of hit guitar/amp setup. Being an artist(not musician) by trade, you learn that anyone can paint a Monet if given a paint by number, but it's when you try to emulate and understand why they chose what they did, that creates a deeper understanding and creative sense to the artist's work. Much of the same applies to music I believe.

As far as posting a clean guitar tone to tweak with, this would not really help to solve the problem, as then when someone wants to play using the preset and their guitar, there would be the same issues that we'd be trying to avoid. Mainly the idea was to try and create the best compromise between the guitars so that beginner and intermediates would have a stronger starting point.

 

I suppose it is fun to play songs with the original tone or close , if you can, but, I just don't have enough time to spend on trying to duplicate someones tones. I am sure there are others that do have the time.

I find that GR can suck huge amounts of time out of your playing time. My time is limited and so when I do pick up a gutar, I like to get right into playing.

I like GR as a quicky substitute for a real tube amp. It let's me play without dragging out amps and it's let's me play at a managable volume level.
However, GR does not come close to a good tube amp. I have several nice hand made and vintage tube amps and they all sound way better than any guitar modelling program.

There are pluses and minuses for GR and real amps. Gr is fun for what it is.

 

Ah, I see your point. I was proposing a more scientific method using a sort of "control" tone, to which all other tones can be accurately compared to. I was sort of thinking that people could download the preset, and on their particular setup, they may say "Hey, this sounds nothing like that song!". However, checking against the "control" sound clip through guitar Rig, they could say, "...but when I play the clip through GR, it does. So why?". Then it's simply a matter of asking how their DI tone is different from the "control" DI tone; if theirs has slightly more low freq stuff, then back off the lows in GR. If the "control" DI tone is really bright when compared to the user's DI tone, then maybe some brightness needs to be cut from the amp, or whatever. Just a thought. Perhaps a tone that "works best for everyone" is possible, but I've yet to hear a good preset, and my presets sound like crap when anyone else tries them.
Perhaps presets are like toothbrushes: far too personal to share with everybody. Ok, that was a little abstract, but you get the idea.

 

I think it looks good. Better banks on ur site than those here , but there are too few. upload some mre plz

 

Ok Doppleherz, I see what you mean, that would be a good way to control the differences between different peoples setups, but now we're looking at getting even more steps for people to reach a "good" tone. At this point it may be less work for everyone if i start dividing up the banks into the pickup configurations (s-s-s, h-h, h-s-h, s-s-h) that are most common, this way it'll be a little closer out-of-the-box so to speak. Last issue with the clean tone is that while i feel like i am a competant guitarist, by no means am i good enough to play some solos/riffs well enough to be used for this purpose. If you've got the tallent (and the time and patience) to create some of these tones Dopple then i'd be more than happy to host them on my site to help th process along and see if people prefer that method or not. Let everyone try it the way they want, and see what comes out, that's my philosophy.

Thanks Brandman, I'm glad you like my presets and I will be posting more, as soon as I have some time to work on some more (busy trying to get a real job now that i've graduated college, and i'm busy trying to sell my car so i can get a newer one) But part of the point is for people to send in their presets so others can modify/correct/embelish them.

 

Yeah, I'm no guitar virtuoso myself either, which was my hidden motive for suggesting clean files.
Good points, though; there really is too much variation in setups out there; hopefully some inkling as to what was used will be attached to the presets (i.e; pickups and positions). I'm going to try some of these a shot in the near future, at least the ones from albums that I can reference. Hope it works out!

 

Hi all

Sorry for my english

This is interesting thread for me because I tryed to emulate my favoritest hard rock guit sounds from 1980... Now it's toooo tempting to experiment without wires and soldering pen.
My big semiconductor guitar box is still alive but I "copied" it in Reactor and Quantum FX. Now I added the midi guitar convertor and create my new mixed midi+guit sounds in Reaktor, sometimes feels absol. fantastic.
As for emulation of famous sounds there is actual sense for me still. Some of them seems really inimitable, and if there is the job like "guitar-sound-engineering" - that could be very something that some could learn from. I want to talk about though couple of examples.
Rush - "Fly by Night" 1974. guitar sound is tipical heavy metal, (was the inspirator for ACDC and who knows for how many others). This sound is very difficult to translate to your typical and advanced setup of virtual and non-virtual equipment of our new era. Just listen to last song where cords are sounding without any drums and bass. Try to emulate it and if you dare to do this, you will notice there is something else in that sound except of good amps, overdrive and EQs. There probably more complex setup is hidden. Again, most guitar of Rush is vvvvery difficult to emulate (The Big Money 1985).
I think personally, that 80-s was full of guitars that was undeservedly dripped away in nonexistence. They was not so many but they was exellent. Guitars of Yes, Saga, Queen...Robert Plant albums are the typical that I mean.
Please find the first song of "Manic Nirvana" of Plant and try to repeat that sound. I was agonize with it for 3 days but with measly resemblance. I could achieve the very similar tone shaping but his sound has something soooo transparent "inside" and at the same time very saturated character. The Scratchy transparence inherent to this... this directs on thoughts about something non-usual that they use. I found no info of Doug Boyle gear. But I recalled from my mind some old articles about paralleled overdrives and I tryed to check it out inside Reaktor. I made 15 of BP4 filter paralleled tuned on each of 12 notes plus 3 for addition, each drives its Saturations unites in light-asymmetry mode. And wow! I here is the sound that seemed I was looking for so much. It's worth to try, it has an evident snarl and a wide-dimentional nature, with very reach of high spectrum. It has an attack nature like cannon shot due to asymmetry settings of overdrives, and after day of plaing with it, I wanted to forget to use 1-channel processing any more.
So, what can somebody say about this multi-drive stuff here?
BTW, at the Rush site there is info of guitar gear and if I'm not mistaken, there is the hint on multi-band-drive setup. He uses 4 of Effects Processor G-Force and some... splitter. Does that mean what I mean?

 

Here is a link to the most current setup of Rush I could find.
http://onstagemag.com/ar/performance_rush_rolls_again/

It seams that the awsome sound being produced is from 3 digital palmer emulation units which are basically like super high end versions of GuitarRig put in a rack unit. Tried to find one of these for sale and only came up with one site in Germany selling this unit, and they were asking 365,000 euro, or about 455k US dollars. Think I'll stick with guitar rig for now

On another note it seams that another part of this sound may be modding your guitar, more specifically adding a piezo pickup to the body of your guitar. This lets you mix the sounds so that you get the crunch of humbuckers, with the light sound of an acoustic, creating some amazing sounds. This is on my list of things todo to my other guitar right now (it's a bit of a hand made frankenstein already and has a scalloped neck) but until I sell my car I can't get much of anything.

Also I have been looking into using parallel setups in guitar rig (use 2 channel split and setup 2 independent rigs, repeat as many times as your comp can handle) and have been getting some excellent results.

 

I love the idea of adding piezo too. But I plane to get VG88 for my hex pickup additionaly.
I wonder... Rush's sound became poorer since middle of 90 and ecpecially if to mention Vapour Trails. Seems they "adapt" to nowadays mode of rough dirty guitar sound.

 

For a little while Rush had switched it's equipment over to solid state amps (as opposed to tube) but they since then switched back to tube martial's and the fore mentioned digital units.

 

Thanks for info. I've sent you some bank now.

 

Awsome presets man, glad I could be of some help! I attached them to my master bank and will be updating my site sometime today. I love the work you did with the EQ's, where did you come up with that? Or were you just listening by ear to hear the pre and post amp EQ's?

 

damn I crashed my strings yesterday and I really want to play with the new patcehs!!! buuhhu bu , I have to wait untill tomorrow or saturday, they seems really good and I like new patches couse I'm to n00b to do my own

 

Thanks for a nice estimation, Andrew.
I found this "second page" with your post just later after I answered on your mail. So, if you appreciate my presets, I can do much more for sharing later.
I base my preset work on my own hand-made hardware old devices principles, where I used mainly filters and... filters again to achieve what I hear. Yes, some pre, some post "distortion" in heavy sound and when the share of distortion isn't too high, I can guess with ear what piece of the frequency range is changed and in what direction, but very aproximately of course.

Later.