Last Friday's gig

[Gert van Santen]

Op 14-10-2010 17:35, Tony Hardie-Bick schreef:
> 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.

Now this is what I call elaboration - thanks Tony!

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gert van santen
www.gertvansanten.nl