Digital Performer 7: Guitar Heroes

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Digital Performer 7: Guitar Heroes In this article:

Chain Reaction Total Recall Dialling Tones Clippings & Your Mac

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Saturday 2nd October 2010

Digital Performer 7: Guitar Heroes

Digital Performer Notes & Techniques
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Published in SOS February 2010 Printer-friendly version

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DP7s new guitar plug-ins offer a fresh set of tones, and a contrasting approach to thirdparty alternatives.
Robin Bigwood

hats immediately apparent when you use DP7s new guitar plug-ins is how different they feel compared to third-party packages such as NIs Guitar Rig and Waves GTR. The all-in-one designs of the latter two allow you to call up chains of effects and choose an amplifier model and speaker cabinet within the confines of a single plug-in window. DP7 uses a different approach, with all of its guitar processors appearing as individual plug-ins. There are advantages to doing it in this way: you can use the Live Room G speaker-cabinet emulator on a Hammond organ track, for example, without being saddled with a bunch of other guitar features you dont need. But there are clear disadvantages, too. One is the challenge of coordinating the many individual plug-ins you might need to achieve your desired tone, and another is the lack of a formal preset system for groups of plug-ins. However, there are ways to deal with both.

Live Room G is a fabulous tool for crafting a huge range of guitar sounds. It tames Custom 59s distortion, and also works wonders all by itself, or with a single distortion or overdrive pedal.

Chain Reaction
Lets deal with that first point, to begin with. In DP, you assemble processing chains by placing your plug-ins in order, from top to bottom of the plug-in slots in a Mixing Board channel. So for a typical chorused sound, you might choose a chain comprising something like the Analog Chorus pedal, the Custom 59 guitar amp emulator, then Live Room G. That would appear in your plug-in slots as in the screen on the left. That seems easy enough, but what if you ever needed more than five plug-ins, for a more complex chain of effects? Thats also easy: go to the Mixing Boards mini-menu and choose Set Number of Effects Inserts. In the dialogue box that appears, you can specify up to 20 slots, which should deal with even the most outrageous guitar treatments! With bigger plug-in chains comes the challenge of using them efficiently, and here a tiny bit of Mixing Board technique is worth an awful lot. By moving your mouse pointer to the left edge of an occupied plug-in slot, you get a move hand. Click and drag a plug-in like this, and you can move it to another slot, which makes re-ordering a plug-in within a chain really easy. You can also re-order whole groups of plug-ins. First, click a plug-in within an insert slot (this time not at the left edge) to select it, and then shift-click additional plug-ins to add them to the selection. When youre ready, point to the left edge of any one of them, and all the plug-ins you selected can be dragged en masse to a new location. You never need to worry about channel formats when youre doing this either, as DP does all the behind-the-scenes work in switching the plug-in youre moving, or those in neighbouring slots, to maintain the appropriate mono or stereo signal flow. Sweet! Here are some other ideas. When youre dragging a plug-in (or plug-ins), holding down the Alt key will duplicate rather than move them which is really handy for copying whole chains from one track to another. Holding down Alt while you click a plug-in within its insert slot toggles it on and off, just the same as clicking its bypass button if its window were open. Bypassed plug-ins are shown with their names in italics. And if youre getting overwhelmed with plug-in windows while tweaking a long chain of effects, try closing all but one, and then using that ones insert view pop-up menu to switch to another plug-in in the same window.

Total Recall
GLOSSARY: Tech Terms explained Get help in our Discussion Forums SOS News Headlines IBC 2010: Azden (Video) IBC 2010: Sony NEXVG10 (Video) IBC 2010: Sonodyne BMS 205 (Video) Keycontrol 25 XT IBC 2010: Rotolight RL48A (Video) More...

Youve perfected a plug-in processing chain for your guitar sound. How do you go about using it in another DP project? The answer is with Clippings. 1. In the Project menu, choose Clippings, then New Digital Performer Clipping Window. 2. Name the window that appears. For the sake of illustration, Ill call it My Guitar FX. 3. In the Mixing Board, click (and shift-click) all plug-ins in your chain, to select them. 4. In the Edit menu, choose Copy to Clippings Window / Copy to My Guitar FX.

Pointing to the left edge of a plug-in slot gives you a move hand that lets you reposition one or more plug-ins into lower or higher slots. Here the selected Analog Chorus and MW Equalizer plugins are being placed first in the processing chain. O c to b e r 2 0 1 0 On sale now at main newsagents and bookstores (or buy direct from the SOS Web Shop) Digital Performer Courses More info...

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Digital Performer 7: Guitar Heroes

5. If the little Clippings Windows you created in step two is no longer visible, select it by name from the bottom section of the Window menu. Then Alt-click the Clipping name to rename it as something more useful. Ive chosen Crunchy Drive 1. Having saved your plug-in chain, with all its settings, you can close your project and open the one in which you want to use this same processing chain. In the Project menu, choose Clippings / My Guitar FX, and then, from the window that appears (look familiar?), drag Crunchy Drive 1 onto your guitar tracks insert slots in the Mixing Board. Using this same technique, you can build up whole libraries of plug-in settings and chains for yourself. Or try some that MOTU have made for you: go to www.motu.com/newsitems/new-guitartones-for-dp7 and download some of the Clippings there. You can then drag the Clippings files directly from the OS X Finder into plug-in slots in DP.

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Dialling Tones
On the face of it, DP7s guitar plug-ins seem straightforward: you get a bunch of different distortions, a chorus, a noise gate and wah, an amp simulator, and a room simulator. However, theres more subtlety and flexibility here than you might initially realise. First of all, its important to understand that Custom 59 is just an amp head, not a speaker cabinet as well. If you use it by itself... well, just dont! Not unless you like really hissy, sharp-edged distortion, that is. Its really designed to be used in the signal flow ahead of Live Room G, which adds the speaker emulation that smooths everything out and thickens it up.
Use a plug-in windows insert view popup menu to view all your plug-ins without drowning in windows.

The next thing about Custom 59 is that it just doesnt overdrive and distort in the aggressive way that some more modern amps do. Maybe the clue is in the name, because MOTU apparently aimed it at the production of predominantly clean and light blues tones, with the possibility of a bit of crunch emerging in response to a more active playing style. So the bottom line is that you need to work with what it was designed to do, and dont expect it to replicate every amp on the planet. Having said that, you can massively expand its range by preceding it with one of the new distortion plug-ins, or just a humble Trim plug-in, set to drive the input with, say, an additional 30dB of gain. Also, take a closer look at Live Room G (see screen opposite). It actually has its own drive stage, controlled by the Cabinet Drive knob at top left. You can use this to increase Custom 59s scope when its feeding into Live Room G. However, some of the best heavier tones available in DP7, I think, are those achieved by missing out Custom 59 altogether, and just running a distortion plug-in into Live Room G. Finally for this month, lets talk about reverb. Plenty of hardware guitar amps have it built in, but DPs dont, so what should you use and where? My suggestion is to look at the excellent Plate plug-in (and dont forget to click its expand toggle to get the full range of options). You can also check out the many varied Plate presets in ProVerb, or even import a spring reverb impulse response from the web: try www.xs4all.nl/~fokkie/IR.htm for some classics. Place the reverb plug-in before Live Room G, for an authentic amp-based sound, or at the end of your processing chain for more expansive treatments.
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Clippings & Your Mac Clippings in DP are no more than little views of folders in specific places on your Mac. You can find out where by Commandclicking a Clippings title bar, and even open the corresponding folder in the Finder by choosing a parent folder from the pop-up menu that appears. Viewing your Clippings in this way opens up the possibility of emailing your favourites to collaborators, for example. And the difference between a project Clipping Window and a Digital Performer Clipping Window? The former is stored in project folders, and available only to that project. The latter is available to all projects, existing or newly created. Choose whichever type best suits your needs.
Clipping windows in DP are great for storing presets of plug-in chains. Theyre views of actual folders on your Mac.

Published in SOS February 2010

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Digital Performer 7: Guitar Heroes

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