player
July 3rd, 2011, 09:49 AM
Here is one, although I have known about it for a long time.
Since I have no idea if this technique is known by a name, I will named it based on what it is: I will call it "Pre-attack rake" or "PAR".
You have heard guitar players use this effect even if you didn't catch what it was, how it was done, what it does, or why it works.
There are some things one needs to understand before grasping the mechanical and auditory reasons for this effect - I'll walk through those things first, then describe how the effect is produced, and the result on the sound.
The first thing is to know what "attack" means in music and sound. When a note is played, the volume level or power level of the note changes during the duration of the note. The typical parts of that duration are called:
Attack - the fast spike at the beginning
Sustain - the steady tone
Decay - the long tail as it dies away
Release - the end of the tone
Because of the tight strings and the plucking nature of making them sound, the guitar has a fast attack. It is the first fraction of a second during which the volume "pops up" to a peak.
This PAR technique creates an audible illusion that this peak attack is missing...
Now it may help to know something about how the ear works and how we hear. The ear has a small muscle fiber (the smallest muscle in the body) that attaches to the three little bones that conduct vibration from the ear drum to the cochlea (through a small membrane in its outer surface called a "window"). The purpose of this muscle is to protect the ear from loud sounds by tightening up this bone connection when the sound level jumps up. It is extremely fast.
The other thing it may help to know is how the attack part of a note is influenced by overdrive or distortion in the amplifier signal chain - it gets reduced. If the gain is high enough the attack is almost totally compressed out flat to the level of the sustain part of the note to follow. This is a frequently desired sound when playing over-driven or distorted because it smooths out the front end of the note.
Two things are going on here - one is that the front of the note is being peak limited when distorted, the second is that the ear has a peak detection and limiting protection mechanism to reduce excessive peak spikes from passing through.
The way this PAR technique works is that it fools the ear into clamping down the muscle on the little bones just in advance of passing a tone so that the attack peak sounds like it has been cut off. Basically it makes the note sound over-driven when in reality it is not. If the note IS really already over-driven or distorted, it makes it sound even more extremely over-driven, even though it is not.
Here is how to do it, and make it work. You have a target note on a particular string that you want to play. Instead of just picking that note you add a hard rake of the damped strings next to it has you move to pick it - the rake and the pick stroke are all one hard motion.
For example, I want to play a bent note on the high E string that just screams more saturation than the rest. As I move the pick to the E string I have the G and B strings held damped and rake the pick hard over those as I hit the E string and sound the bent note. Hitting the damped strings on the same stroke means that the overall profile of the sound have two parts:
Non-tonal hard raking sound on the damped strings
and
Sounding of the high E bent string
Normally playing just the high E string would provide an attack at the onset of the note. By putting the rake in front of it, the attack is taken out of the subsequent note - by the ear itself!
What happens is that the sound of the rake makes the little muscle tighten instantly to prepare for a loud attack (making the ear much less sensitive to the peak of the attack). By the time the actual note sounds, the ear is set up to not allow the note's peak attack to come through. The result is the illusion that the note does not have an attack, which is interpreted by the ear as the sound of huge gain, overdrive, totally saturated clipping distortion.
If you understand what I have described you will easily recognize this technique and sound used by many guitarists, especially Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Richie Blackmore, Leslie West, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, etc.
hope this helps other fretters
Since I have no idea if this technique is known by a name, I will named it based on what it is: I will call it "Pre-attack rake" or "PAR".
You have heard guitar players use this effect even if you didn't catch what it was, how it was done, what it does, or why it works.
There are some things one needs to understand before grasping the mechanical and auditory reasons for this effect - I'll walk through those things first, then describe how the effect is produced, and the result on the sound.
The first thing is to know what "attack" means in music and sound. When a note is played, the volume level or power level of the note changes during the duration of the note. The typical parts of that duration are called:
Attack - the fast spike at the beginning
Sustain - the steady tone
Decay - the long tail as it dies away
Release - the end of the tone
Because of the tight strings and the plucking nature of making them sound, the guitar has a fast attack. It is the first fraction of a second during which the volume "pops up" to a peak.
This PAR technique creates an audible illusion that this peak attack is missing...
Now it may help to know something about how the ear works and how we hear. The ear has a small muscle fiber (the smallest muscle in the body) that attaches to the three little bones that conduct vibration from the ear drum to the cochlea (through a small membrane in its outer surface called a "window"). The purpose of this muscle is to protect the ear from loud sounds by tightening up this bone connection when the sound level jumps up. It is extremely fast.
The other thing it may help to know is how the attack part of a note is influenced by overdrive or distortion in the amplifier signal chain - it gets reduced. If the gain is high enough the attack is almost totally compressed out flat to the level of the sustain part of the note to follow. This is a frequently desired sound when playing over-driven or distorted because it smooths out the front end of the note.
Two things are going on here - one is that the front of the note is being peak limited when distorted, the second is that the ear has a peak detection and limiting protection mechanism to reduce excessive peak spikes from passing through.
The way this PAR technique works is that it fools the ear into clamping down the muscle on the little bones just in advance of passing a tone so that the attack peak sounds like it has been cut off. Basically it makes the note sound over-driven when in reality it is not. If the note IS really already over-driven or distorted, it makes it sound even more extremely over-driven, even though it is not.
Here is how to do it, and make it work. You have a target note on a particular string that you want to play. Instead of just picking that note you add a hard rake of the damped strings next to it has you move to pick it - the rake and the pick stroke are all one hard motion.
For example, I want to play a bent note on the high E string that just screams more saturation than the rest. As I move the pick to the E string I have the G and B strings held damped and rake the pick hard over those as I hit the E string and sound the bent note. Hitting the damped strings on the same stroke means that the overall profile of the sound have two parts:
Non-tonal hard raking sound on the damped strings
and
Sounding of the high E bent string
Normally playing just the high E string would provide an attack at the onset of the note. By putting the rake in front of it, the attack is taken out of the subsequent note - by the ear itself!
What happens is that the sound of the rake makes the little muscle tighten instantly to prepare for a loud attack (making the ear much less sensitive to the peak of the attack). By the time the actual note sounds, the ear is set up to not allow the note's peak attack to come through. The result is the illusion that the note does not have an attack, which is interpreted by the ear as the sound of huge gain, overdrive, totally saturated clipping distortion.
If you understand what I have described you will easily recognize this technique and sound used by many guitarists, especially Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Richie Blackmore, Leslie West, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, etc.
hope this helps other fretters