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How does a 'sustain' pedal work and is it in the buzziverse?

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2019 12:07 am
by onecircles
Hey guys. I'm back at it, buzzing on the daily and closing in on my goal of beginning to perform live in my city with buzz.

Anyways I play a classical guitar with delay and distortion, and for certain sections I would like to find some way to increase the sustain of my instrument. The classical guitar's decay is pretty short.

So I can use delay/reverb, but they I get long tails that make chord changes too messy sounding for what I'm intending.
I am experimenting with running a compressor with a really low threshold so everything is getting clamped and raised up, and I'm having some success with that. Of course there is some increased risk of feedback. My instrument is an acoustic with a piezo, and is susceptible to feedback, so I run it's signal through a parametric EQ and aggressively cut it's feedback frequencies.

Any recommendations?

Re: How does a 'sustain' pedal work and is it in the buzzive

Posted: Sun Nov 17, 2019 4:12 am
by River Cricket
onecircles wrote:Hey guys. I'm back at it, buzzing on the daily and closing in on my goal of beginning to perform live in my city with buzz.

Anyways I play a classical guitar with delay and distortion, and for certain sections I would like to find some way to increase the sustain of my instrument. The classical guitar's decay is pretty short.

So I can use delay/reverb, but they I get long tails that make chord changes too messy sounding for what I'm intending.
I am experimenting with running a compressor with a really low threshold so everything is getting clamped and raised up, and I'm having some success with that. Of course there is some increased risk of feedback. My instrument is an acoustic with a piezo, and is susceptible to feedback, so I run it's signal through a parametric EQ and aggressively cut it's feedback frequencies.

Any recommendations?
You might want to try experimenting with sidechain compression, so it ducks the reverb on chord changes. For Buzz sidechaining, I usually throw a couple of Automaton Compressor mkII machines onto the signal paths. Set the one on your dry feed to "level" and connect it to main - this is a null output, so you'll have to run a second chain bypassing it in order to actually get your dry sound back. Then set the post-reverb Automaton to "audio" and futz with the settings until you hear the reverb audio getting softer when you strum.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words... maybe this picture is worth, I dunno, ten letters or so? :D

Image

You'll obviously want to mess with the levels a bit - maybe a cheapo amp right at the audio in, at about 50% gain, then another cheapo amp in the distortion dry feed, adjusted to taste. Or you can just set the reverb to 100% wet / 0% dry out.