MODX, Ratt, guitar tone

This post is a welcome escape from the mental anguish of cleaning, packing, moving, etc.

A member of the YamahaSynth.com MODX forum asked for help in obtaining a particular guitar tone for Rock/Metal. I confess that Metal is not a genre that I dip into and I was somewhat at a loss to help out. Fortunately, the chap posted a link to a video with an example of the kind of tone he was looking for:

Ratt — Lay It Down

He noted the smoothness of the distorted tone. His attempts to achieve this tone on MODX led to “waves” that were “almost like the strings are not perfectly in tune”, for example, when hitting a power chord.

I passed along links to my two articles about guitar waveforms and effects on MODX (Montage) and Genos:

Single Coil, Double Coil
Which Guitar Is Which?

I wrote these articles when I was trying to achieve Ian Bairnson’s tone during his 1970s Alan Parsons era. Maybe the info would help out.

Folks on the YamahaSynth thread suggested the Telecaster (TC) waves, but I wasn’t so sure. A Telecaster is a single coil guitar and is not used all that frequently in Metal or Heavy Rock — a dual coil (humbucker) is more likely. The typical examples of type are the Gibson Les Paul and SG models (P90 pick-ups). Of course, it still comes down to the MODX factory waveforms and whatever works in a given situation without regard for the actual source instrument.

Well, not being familiar with Ratt meant a little Internet digging. The two guitarists in Ratt of the “Lay It Down” era were Warren DeMartini and Robbin Crosby. Thankfully, guitarists are obsessive about gear and tone, and it was relatively easy to find information about DeMartini’s kit. Demartini is well-known for his smooth tone, so I dug into his gear. I’ll leave Robbin Crosby as an exercise for the reader. 🙂

DeMartini was fond of playing a Charvel superstrat with a Floyd Rose bridge and Seymour Duncan JB humbucker (dual coil) pick-ups. “Superstrat” in this context does not necessarily mean “Fender.” “Superstrat” is used somewhat generically to mean a guitar which is similar to a Stratocaster, but customized in one or more significant ways. Standard Stratocasters typically employ single coil pick-ups, so humbuckers are already a major departure from the original design.

In later days, DeMartini used Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder and DeMartini Custom Signature RTM (dual coil) pick-ups. All of these pick-ups have big magnets that interact with the strings as well as pick-up vibrations. Those big magnets mechanically damp the strings. Thus, the Custom Signature RTM pick-up “compresses to make evey note smooth and balanced.”

The whole sampling business raises an even larger question. Customizations aside, a multi pick-up guitar can be configured in a nearly infinite number of ways. What pick-ups are switched in or out? How is the tone knob set? Where are the strings plucked? (Near the bridge? The neck? Somewhere in between?) Does the player employ any special technique?

A sampled waveform is just one configuration of all these factors and more! Thus, the MODX waveforms cover an extremely small corner of a very large sound space.

Moving on from the instrument, DeMartini preferred Marshall amplifiers (heads) and cabinets. Marshall heads include JCM800/900, Plexi and JCM2000. He preferred 1960AX (4×12) cabinets: two with Celestion Vintage 30 speakers and two with 25W Celestion Greenbacks. Thus, I would look to the BRITISH LEAD or BRITISH LEGEND DSP effect algorithms and dial in the BS 4×12 speaker type as a starting point. One Web article mentioned that DeMartini often turned down the bass drastically and that might be worth a try, too.

When you need a particular guitar tone, I recommend a little bit of Internet research for inspiration.

Copyright © 2019 Paul J. Drongowski

Which guitar is which?

I hope my recent post about single coil and double coil guitar tone and amp simulators was helpful. Today, I want to further reduce theory to practice.

A quick recap

Guitar pickups are important to overall guitar tone. There are two main types of pickup: single coil and double coil. Players generally describe the sound of a single coil pickup as bright or thin and describe the sound of a double coil pickup as warm or heavy. Double coil pickups are also called “humbuckers” because the design mitigates pickup noise and hum. Pickup tone tends to favor certain styles of music:

  • Single coil: Blues, funk, soul, pop, surf, light rock and country styles
  • Double coil (Humbucker): Hard rock, metal, punk, blues and jazz styles

Of course, there are no hard and fast rules and exceptions abound!

Fender guitars frequently use single coil pickups while Gibson favors double coil. Three guitar models are favorites and are in wide use:

  • Fender Telecaster (Usually 2 single coil pick-ups): Bright, banjo-like tone, twangy.
  • Fender Stratocaster (3 single coil pick-ups): Bright, cutting tone.
  • Gibson Les Paul (2 humbucker, dual coil pick-ups) Warm tone with sustain.

The Telecaster was originally developed in 1951 for country swing music. It was quickly adopted by early rock and rollers. The Stratocaster appeared in 1954, but is usually associated with 60s rock. It is often used in rock, blues, soul, surf and country music. The darker tone and sustain of the Les Paul make it suitable for hard rock, metal, blues and jazz styles.

These aren’t the only (in)famous guitars around. The Rickenbacker solid and semi-acoustic models are also classic. Think about the chime-y Beatles and Byrds radio hits from the 1960s. Single coil Ricks are not uncommon.

If you would like to hear the difference in raw tone between Fender Telecaster (single coil), Fender Stratocaster (single coil) and Gibson Les Paul (double coil humbucker), cruise over to this comparison video. The demonstrator compares raw tone starting at roughly 7 minutes into the video, ending at about 11 minutes. The first part of the video is the usual yacking and the last part of the video puts the guitars through an overdrive effect with the demonstrator playing over a backing track. The last part is less informative because our ears need to sort out the guitar from the backing track. Plus, once you put a guitar into a distortion effect, all bets are off. Are you hearing the true guitar tone or just an effected, synthesized tone?

Method to the madness

My ultimate goal is to identify and classify synth and arranger guitar voices, single coil vs. double coil, in order to quickly chose an appropriate guitar voice (patch) for MIDI sequencing. I work with Yamaha gear (Genos workstation, PSR-S950 arranger, and MOX6 synthesizer), so the following discussion will focus on Yamaha. However, you should be able to apply the same method (and guesswork about names!) to Korg, Nord, whoever.

Yamaha provides some major clues as to the origin of its guitar samples, but they are quite reticent to use brand names. Arranger (Genos and S950) voice names are especially opaque. Therefore, the best we can do is to use the clues when possible and to always, always use our ears.

Fortunately, the deep voice editing of the MOX6 lets me dive into the guts of a guitar patch to find the base waveform information including waveform name. In order to get the analysis started, I went into the Mega Voice patches to find the underlying waveforms. When Yamaha sample a guitar, they sample multiple articulations (open string, slap, slide, hammer on, etc.). The waveforms for a particular instrument are a family and share the same root name like “60s Clean.” Given the base waveforms, I then can identify regular synth voices which use the same waveforms. The regular voices are more easily played on the keyboard than Mega Voices, making it easier to perform A/B testing.

Mega Voices are a good entry point for analysis because the MOX, Motif and Montage family have roughly equivalent Mega Voices as the S950, Tyros and Genos product family. This allows A/B testing across and within product lines.

Development history is important, too. I took note of new Mega Voices added to each product generation. Each new Mega Voice is a new waveform family. Given a Mega Voice, I look for new Super Articulation (SArt) voices which were also added at the same time and try to find the SArt voices which are based on the Mega Voice. The chosen SArt voices become reference sounds for further A/B testing and starting points for voice selection when sequencing a song.

When A/B testing, all EQ, filter and DSP effects (including reverb and chorus) must be turned OFF. We need to reveal the sound of the underlying raw waveforms (samples). Even so, there may still be sonic differences due to VCF and VCA programming. I found that this kind of critical listening is quite tiring and it’s better to work for 30 minutes, walk away and come back later with fresh ears. Otherwise, everything starts to sound the same!

Breakdown

Enough faffing around, get to the bottom line.

First up is a correspondence table between Montage (Motif, MOX) Mega Voice guiters and Genos (Tyros, PSR S-series) Mega Voice guitars.

       Genos name            Motif/MOX name        Motif/MOX waveform
---------------------------  --------------------  ------------------
8 10 4 60sVintage                                  n/a [Strat]
8 11 4 60sVintageSlap                              n/a [Strat]
8  4 4 50sVintageFinger                            TC Cln Fing *
8  5 4 50sVintageFingerSlap                        TC Cln Fing Slap
8  6 4 50sVintagePick                              TC Cln Pick *
8  7 4 50sVintageSlap                              TC Cln Pick Slap
8  8 4 SlapAmpGuitar       
8  3 4 SingleCoilGuitar      Mega 1coil Old R&R    1Coil *
8  1 4 SolidGuitar1          Mega 60s *            60s Clean *
8  2 4 SolidGuitar2          Mega 60s *            60s Clean *
8  0 4 CleanGuitar           Mega 1coil *          Clean *
8  0 7 JazzGuitar            Mega Jazz Guitar      Jazz *
8  0 5 OverdriveGuitar       Mega Ovdr Fuzz        Overdrive *
8  0 6 DistortionGuitar      Mega Ovdr Distortion  Distortion *

A star (“*”) in the table is a placeholder for all of the voices and variants within a family. Motif/MOX have many variants of “Mega 60s” and “Mega 1coil” voices. They all use the “60s Clean” and “Clean” waveforms in different ways, including different stomp box and amplifier effects. A star in the waveform column denotes a waveform family, i.e., collectively a group of waveforms for all of the articulations sampled from the same instrument.

A few observations. Montage did not add any new guitar Mega Voices. Montage does not have a Stratocaster waveform. [A future upgrade for Montage?] Finally, I couldn’t quite work out where “SlapAmpGuitar” fit into the voice universe.

“Slap,” by the way, is a playing technique borrowed from bass players. The thumb hits a string instead of a pick or finger. Usually the lowest string is slapped because it is the most easily hit by the thumb. The slap may be combined with palm or finger muting to prevent other notes/strings from sounding with the slap.

Beyond Mega Voice

Folks know by now that Mega Voices are for styles and arpeggios. Yamaha never intended them to be played using the keyboard. It’s darn near impossible to play with the kind of precision required to trigger the appropriate articulation (waveform) when needed. They’re good for sequencing (styles, arpeggios) because a sequence can be edited in a DAW with precise control over note velocities.

None the less, musicians wanted to be able to play these great sounding voices and Yamaha responded with Expanded Articulation (Motif XS and later) and Super Articulation (Tyros 2 and later). I won’t dive into Expanded Articulation here. Super Articulation, however, effectively puts a software script in front of a Mega Voice. The script translates each player gesture to one of the several articulation waveforms which comprise a Mega Voice.

This description is notional. I doubt if the software uses an actual Mega Voice as the target. Some gestures like legato technique are handled in the AWM2 engine à la Expanded Articulation.

If you followed my suggestion to audition the Mega Voices without EQ, effects, etc., then you surely know how difficult it is to play a Mega Voice from the keyboard. Should you try this, I recommend setting the touch curve to HARD in order to hit those ultra low key velocities. Or, set RIGHT1, RIGHT2 and RIGHT3 to a fixed velocity. By changing the velocity level, you’ll be able to play a specific waveform within a Mega Voice precisely and reliably. Please refer to the Mega Voice maps in the Data List file to see the correspondence between velocity levels and waveforms.

To audition without Mega Voice and to select Genos (Tyros, S950) voices for sequencing, it’s far easier and fun to play a Super Articulation (SArt) voice. Problem is, with Yamaha’s opaque voice naming, it’s difficult to know the exact waveform family you’re triggering. So, I built a table of SArt reference voices by matching SA voices with their Mega Voice equivalent.

Genos Mega Voice      SArt reference   Waveform
--------------------  ---------------  ------------------------
60sVintage            60sVintageClean  [Strat]
60sVintageSlap        TBD              [Strat]
50sVintageFinger      CleanFingers     TC Cln Fing *
50sVintageFingerSlap  FingerSlapSlide  TC Cln Fing Slap
50sVintagePick        VintageWarm      TC Cln Pick *
50sVintageSlap        TBD              TC Cln Pick Slap
SlapAmpGuitar         TBD              TC Cln Fing Slap Amp/Lin
SingleCoilGuitar      SingleCoilClean  1Coil *
SolidGuitar1          WarmSolid        60s Clean *
SolidGuitar2          WarmSoild        60s Clean *
CleanGuitar           CleanSolid       Clean *
JazzGuitar            JazzClean        Jazz *
OverdriveGuitar       TBD              Overdrive *
DistortionGuitar      HeavyRockGuitar  Distortion *

Single coil vs. double coil? That’s easy. The only double coil guitars are SolidGuitar1, SolidGuitar2, and any SArt voice built on the 60s Clean waveform. All other guitars are single coil.

Hmmm. I’ll bet that a double coil Gibson Les Paul and/or Gibson SG are in the works. Yamaha will eventually fill the gap!

A few entries in the table are TBD, “to be determined.” Definitively identifying slap guitar has eluded me so far. I can hear a difference between non-slap and slap, but finger slap vs. picked slap, my ears aren’t there yet.

All in all, it was a useful exercise to strip away the effects and EQ. It reminds me of the scene in the documentary “It Might Get Loud” in which The Edge demonstrates his effects pedal board. First, the plain tone of the guitar, then the huge sound with all of the effects piled on. Thanks to the tech built into our keyboards, we can be a little bit like The Edge.

Copyright © 2018 Paul J. Drongowski

Single coil, double coil

Today’s exploration is practical even if it is excessively wonk-ish.

Last week, I decided to update MIDI sequences for a few classic tunes by The Alan Parsons Project. Parsons and Eric Woolfson laid down 70s progressive rock tracks with serious groove: “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You,” “What Goes Up”, and “Breakdown”. Classic in their own right are the guitar solos by Ian Bairnson. Bairnson contributed electric guitar (and the occasional saxophone!) to the Parsons/Woolfson wonder duo.

I’m striving for authenticity, so one of the first questions to ask is “What guitars and amplifiers did Bairnson use for the I Robot and Pyramid albums?” Fortunately, Ian has a page dedicated to his gear. Very likely, he played a Les Paul Custom through a Marshall 50 head driving a 4×12 Marshall angle-front cabinet. Thanks for posting this information, Ian!

The next hurdle is searching through the many tens (or hundreds) of synth guitar patches, amp simulators and speaker cabinet sims to find the most authentic audio waveforms and signal processing effects. Bang, we run into a practical and wonk-ish problem: Which of these many digital choices are likely candidates and which choices can we ignore? Unfortunately, manufacturers (at the very least, their attorneys) make the search difficult by avoiding any use of brand names (e.g., Gibson, Fender, Les Paul, etc.) in patch and effect names. Sometimes the patch/effect names are suggestive euphemisms, most times not.

For these kinds of sequencing jobs, I’m arranging on Yamaha gear, either PSR-S950 or Genos. Although I love their sound, it’s seems that Yamaha have deliberately gone out of their way to divorce patch/effect names from their real-world, branded counterparts. The number of candidates is small in organ-land, i.e., “Organ flutes,” as Yamaha calls them, mean Hammond B-3. The number of candidates in guitar-land is much, much larger and harder to discern.

Here’s some info that might help you out. Kind of decoder for guitar instrument and amp/cabinet sim names. Even though I looked to authoritative sources, there’s still guesswork involved. So, apologies up front if I’ve led anyone astray.

Single vs. double coil

This is a biggy. Guitarists are ever in pursuit of “tone.” Of course, a big part of tone is the electric guitar at the front-end of the signal chain. In this analysis, I’m concentrating mainly on solid body guitars and I’m ignoring acoustic, hollow-body and semi-hollow instruments.

Some might argue that player style, articulations and dynamics are the true front-end. If you want to argue that point, please go to a guitar forum. 🙂

For solid body, the choice of pick-up is important. If you’re not familiar with electric guitars, the pick-up is the set of wire coils beneath the guitar strings that sense vibrating strings and convert mechanical vibration to electrical vibration. The electrical signal is sent to a volume/tone circuit and then on to a guitar amplifier. A guitar may have more than one pick-up, say, one pick-up by the neck, one under the bridge and one in the middle between the two. The pick-ups may be switched into alternative combinations. Along with the volume/tone controls, the tonal possibilities are nearly endless.

Seems kind of pathetic to rely on only one or a few guitar waveforms (samples), doesn’t it?

There are two main kinds of pick-up: single coil and double coil (humbucker). The humbucker was invented and patented by Gibson as a means of mitigating the noise (hum) present produced by a single coil pickup. The sound of a single coil pick-up is often described with terms like “bright,” “crisp,” “bite,” “attack.” Double coil pick-ups are described as “thick,” “round,” “warm,” “dark,” “heavy.”

Due to parentage, Gibson guitars usually have double coil pick-ups. Fender guitars usually have single coil pick-ups. Naturally, the quest for tone has led to hybrids using both kinds of pick-up, regardless of manufacturer.

Reducing these observations to practice, when Ian Bairnston says he used a Gibson Les Paul Custom for his work with The Alan Parsons Project, we should be looking for samples (waveforms) of a double coil electric guitar, of which the Les Paul is an excellent example. Even if you couldn’t give two wits about synth patch names, use your ears an listen for a thick, round, warm, dark, heavy tone.

Detective work

OK, I’m a wonk and did a little detective work.

Yamaha arranger patch names are obtuse about single vs. double, etc. Worse, the voices are pre-programmed with DSP effects which mask the characteristics of the fundamental waveform. So, step zero is to be aware of the masking and turn off all EQ, DSP, chorus and reverb effects when listening and making comparisons.

Doubly worse is the lack of deep voice editing where we can deep dive a voice and discover the basic waveforms underlying a voice patch, including the waveform names. This is where my trusty Yamaha MOX6 synthesizer comes into play. I use the MOX6 to deep dive its patches and then compare patch elements against candidate voices on the PSR-S950 arranger. This always leads to interesting discoveries.

Although I refer to the MOX specifically, please remember that the MOX is a member of the Motif/MOX family. Comments can be extrapolated to the Motif XS on which the MOX is based, and the Motif XF/MOXF which are a superset of the Motif XS/MOX.

A large number of MOX programs have “Dual Coil” in their name. These programs are based on the “60s Clean” waveforms. Think of “60s Clean” as a family of waveforms with multiple articulations: open strings, slide, slap, FX, etc.

Other MOX programs are “Single Coil”. These programs are based on the “Clean” family of waveforms. If you listen and compare “60s Clean” versus “Clean,” you can hear the difference between single coil and double coil. The voice programming switches between the waveforms depending on key velocity, articulation buttons, and so forth.

The “60s Clean” and “Clean” waveform families make up the “Mega 60s Clean” and “Mega 1coil Clean” MOX megavoices, respectively. Please recall that a MegaVoice uses velocity switching, articulation switches (AF1 and AF2) and note ranges to configure a versatile voice suitable for arpeggio and style sequencing. Given the underlying waveforms, we can conclude that Mega 60s Clean is dual coil and Mega 1coil Clean is single coil.

Mid- and upper-range Yamaha arranger workstations also have MegaVoices, albeit they may have small differences in patch programming. The fundamental waveforms, however, are the same. Yamaha, like all manufacturers, recycle waveforms (samples). It’s not that older waveforms are bad; they provide backward compatibility and legacy support. Ever increasing waveform memory capacity makes it easy and inexpensive to include legacy waveforms and voices.

Given that conceptual basis, I did a little A/B testing between the MOX synth and the S950 arranger. Here is a summary of the correspondence between guitar voices:

    PSR-S950 Voice     MOX6 Voice
    -----------------  ---------------------
    MV CleanGuitar     Mega 1coil Clean

    MV SolidGuitar1    Mega 60s Clean
    MV SolidGuitar2    Mega 60s Clean

    MV SingleCoil      n/a
    MV JazzGuitar      n/a

    MV OverdriveGtr    Mega Ovdr Fuzz
    MV DistortionGtr   Mega Ovdr Distortion

    MV SteelGuitar     Mega Steel
    MV NylonGuitar     Mega Nylon

This is what my ears tell me when all of the EQ, DSP, chorus and reverb effects OFF.

MV SolidGuitar1 and MV SolidGuitar2 are based on the same waveform. The patch programming is different: different EQ, VCF and VCA parameter values. The default DSP effects are different, too.

Naturally, you’re curious about the missing S950 MV SingleCoil and MV JazzGuitar voices in the MOX6 column of the table. The MOX does not have equivalent voices. However, the Motif XF eventually added “Mega 1coil Old R&R” and “Mega Jazz Guitar”, both patches based on new single coil and jazz guitar waveform families. Indeed, the MV SingleCoil is great for that old rock’n’roll twang.

Hey, S950 owners! I’ll bet that you didn’t know that you have a piece of the Motif XF under your fingertips.

[I’m still categorizing SArt voices as single or double coil. Watch this space.]

Amplify this!

That’s it for the front-end of the signal chain. What about amp simulation?

The riddle of amp sim names is difficult to solve. Fortunately, guitarists are positively obsessive about vintage amps and the Web has many informative sites. (Too many, perhaps?) Armed with a few clues from the Yamaha Synth site, I forged out onto the Web and arrived at these educated guesses about amp simulators:

    DSP effect/sim      Real-world
    ------------------  ---------------------------------
    US Combo            Fender (Bassman?)
    Jazz Combo          Roland Jazz Chorus
    US High Gain        Boutique (Mesa Boogie Rectifier?)
    British Lead        Marshall Plexi
    British Combo       Vox (AC30)
    British Legend      Marshall (Bluesbreaker? JCM800?)
    Tweed Guy           Fender 55 Tweed Deluxe
    Boutique DC         Matchless DC30 (Boutique AC30)
    Y-Amp               Yamaha V-Amp
    DISTOMP             Yamaha stomp pedal FX
    80s Small Box       No specific make/model
    Small Stereo Dist   No specific make/model
    MultiFX             No specific make/model

The list compares quite favorably with Guitar World’s 10 most iconic guitar amplifiers:

    Vox AC30 Top Boost (1x12, 2x12)                 1958
    Fender Deluxe (1950s tweed)                     1955-1960
    Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier                      1989
    Marshall JCM800                                 1981
    Marshall 1959 Super Lead 100 Watt Plexi (4x12)  1965
    Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus (2x12)                1975
    Peavey 5150 (2004: 6505)                        1992
    Fender Twin Reverb                              1965-1967
    Fender Bassman (4x10)                           1957-1960
    Hiwatt DR103 (4x12)                             1972

Several of the amp sims include cabinet simulation, too. Here are my guesses:

    DSP Sim  Real-world
    -------  --------------------------------
    BS 4x12  British stack (Marshall)
    AC 2x12  American combo (Fender?)
    AC 1x12  American combo (Fender?)
    AC 4x10  American combo (Fender?)
    BC 2x12  British combo (Vox?)
    AM 4x12  American modern (Mesa Boogie?)
    YC 4x12  Yamaha
    JC 2x12  Roland Jazz Chorus
    OC 2x12  Orange combo
    OC 1x8   Orange combo

The abbreviations “BS” and “AC” are potentially confusing. “AC” suggests the (in)famous AC series of Vox amps. “BS” suggests “Bassman”. However, I don’t recall a Vox AC 4×10, while the Fender 4×10 is iconic. A Yamaha site spelled out “BS” as “British Stack,” so I’m sticking with “A” for American and “B” for “British”.

Back to Bairnson, I’m trying the British Legend amp sim with a BS 4×12 cabinet first, then tweak.

I hope you enjoyed this somewhat wonk-ish walk through synthesizer and simulated guitar-ville. In the end, it’s tone that matters and let the ears decide.

Copyright © 2018 Paul J. Drongowski