Last Friday's gig

[Tony Hardie-Bick]

Hi Gert,

> Are you using a tube amp? I'm hearing those distorted overtones :-)

Mostly it's just DI from the custom (of course...) circuit I put in the Stick - 
which has zero (I mean ZERO, i.e. <0.003% THD) audible harmonic distortion, so 
what you're hearing is the richness that comes from a slight downward decay 
sweep of a slightly resonant VCF across harmonics above 4kHz (one filter on each 
of melody and bass channels), which I think probably sounds a bit like 
distortion, because it excites the ear by modulating upper harmonic amplitudes. 
The sweeping is actually absent on the first piece, as I mistakenly had the 
sensitivity set to zero (today I hard wired it to the correct level and bypassed 
the pot), although the difference is more of sonic interest than anything one 
can hear directly. In the mix there is also some live sound from the camera, 
which certainly is distorting a bit on the peaks, and contains a limter which I 
assume is analogue, and so full of subtle harmonic distortion... This is around 
20dB down in most places, just to keep some live ambience going, so that could 
be what you're hearing, and also the strings themselves, are full of complex 
sound, and the inductive pickups on any guitar always sound warm to my ears, if 
you can listen to them direct without any pedals, amps etc, which add a lot of 
additional colour that's way less subtle than the beautiful string/pickup 
interaction.

The instrument is plugged directly into a Lexicon MX300 reverb, from which I'm 
taking a digital 24bit 48kHz output and dumping the bit stream (without effect) 
to a portable recorder. I recreated the effect later, when mixing the sound for 
the video - exactly the same as what went into the PA.

Tony (HB)