I'm starting to setup a basic effects rig, hoping to get some suggestions on what to use…

I'm doing all processing on my laptop, so I don't need any specific gear suggestions, just wondering what might be good strategies for types of effects to use on bass/melody/both, what effects to run in parallel or in series, etc. What are some good basic (or not so basic) effects for a Stick? I'm just looking for a starting point with some different things I can switch between.

I'm using Ableton Live, if anyone has suggestions specific to that.

Thanks!

Hey Claire.
I am a bit of a caveman and like to keep things simple. I run reverb all the time on both sides of the stick. Chorus is always nice on both sides too. Flanger and phaser are other effects I use as well, sometimes in combo with chorus. I dont use distortion very much but that effect can be very cool (gregs Tomorrow Never Knows).
I am a newborn with the stick so I dont colour it excessively.

Expect some advice from the effects mavens on this site and good luck.

cheers,
kev

Stay away from compression if you want to develop a good touch and proper dynamic range.

I don't agree with Kevin on chorus. IMHO, it's flattering because it thickens the sound but you can achieve natural and much better sounding chorus just with your hands.

A tad of reverb on both sides (less on the bass side) is lovely. A pinch of delay on the melody side always come tasty.

Practicing without any effects is also highly recommendable.

Just my 2 centimes

Have fun

Olivier

Hi Claire,

Because of the high dynamic range of The Stick, and because it's got such a full frequency range, I've always found this basic setup really helpful for both bass and melody

basic tone eq (for this stage I prefer an analog preamp) -> limiter -> reverb

The limiter is especially nice because it allows me to really play aggressively when I want to, without having to back the instrument's output down so much that I end up with noise issues. I set a high threshold so that it only kicks in when things get really energetic, thereby retaining the Stick's natural dynamics as much as possible.

For more sophistication in how the limiter acts, you can also place an eq after the limiter.

When dealing with programmable effects this is a great way to have a 'basic sound" that becomes your foundation, which you can then alter for different "sounds"

So you could have a "bass patch" that rolls off the attack frequencies of The Stick and boosts the 1st octave harmonic range, an "acoustic guitar patch" that cuts some of the bass frequencies and has a slight high shelf boost, and "electric guitar" sound, with highs and lows cut and a mid-range boost, etc. These are just some examples of aping conventional sounds, new sounds abound, of course.

Putting the programmable eq after the limiter means you have to be sensitive to the gain structure as you add gain to various frequency ranges, particularly the bass range. For every dB you add in the eq, you will want to program a portion of that as a cut in the limiter output level, maybe 75%.

Hi Claire,

I've been using a laptop based rig for almost a decade now. In the beginning with additional hardware boxes but since the Intel processors got so powerful about four years back I now do it all "in the box". When deciding on using software plugins it is important to use only plugins that manage to perform all processing within the plugin buffer assigned by the host application. Adding just one "bad" plugin to an effect chain will delay the signal and give you the same dreadful feeling as playing on a too big stage with your amp/speaker placed too far away from you.

As for Stick processing I normally don't use much. Plain Stick pickup sound directly input to the audio interface (in my case an RME Fireface400). I just add a little compressor. The best compressor for Stick (and guitar) that I have found is the Sonalksis SV315Mk2. Next best is the compressor that is part of the Logic/Mainstage application and I also got almost that good result from the compressor in Ableton Live.

For reverb I'm finding a good balance between awesome sound and CPU economy with the 2C-Audio Breeze. For delay I use EchoBoy from SoundToys. It is a tape delay simulating plugin and has all that tape wobble stuff that makes tape delays seem to add a "3-D layer of multiple universes" behind the music. This plugin stands out in a mix, if playing just one sound through it you may not discover that it sounds better than many other delay plugins. I can get a similar "3-D feel" from the Tape Delay plugin of Logic/Mainstage, but differently sounding.

In laptops there are two alternative approaches to add live input effects: either you go with the stompbox approach or you go with patch switching. At the moment I combine these two in this way: first effect on each Stick side input is the Sonlaksis compressor (not much, just enough to give a musical enhancement of the String's natural attack envelop). Then follows a "stompbox" for a ring modulator (only the melody side). The a second "stompbox" for "distortion". On the melody side I use a virtaul dist stompbox that actually splits the signal into two, pan left-right, and these two passes through two different fuzz box plugins (all back to the early eighties, when I mostly played guitar, I have liked to split the instrument output into two parallel amps). With the Stick (PASV-4 pickup) I never use any virtual amp simulation, it just degrades the Stick sound. But some harsch fuzz sound (like the classic Vox Fuzz or the Octavia) sounds nice to my ears with the Stick. On the bass side I use a plugin called Oomingmac from Expert Sleepers. It is not a fuzz simulation but a rather simple audio to synth wave converter plugin. But I have found that for low bass notes I can get a fat, warm and earth-shaking sound with this plugin. Due to the rich overtones it creates one low bass note through Oomingmac can fill up efficiently behind melody playing.

Ok, the very last "stompbox" on both fretboards is a filter envelope plugin that gives a slow attack from silence but doesn't affect the attack much if playing fast patterns. After these virtual stomp boxes my signal path goes all into "patch swapping mode". This means I can kick a pedal switch to call up a complete effect chain and when using the Stick one such effect patch holds two unique processing chains - one for each fretboard output. However, I use quite little. Mostly just a delay (as mentioned above) or a reverb. I like to sort my alternative effect patches according to how big sound I need; so my patch list typically goes from almost dry tight sound on both sides, through tight bass with bigger melody and all the way to huge Taj Mahal temple stuff. Some patches also offer rhythmically bouncing tape delay. All in all I alternate between twelve patches (except for the three "stomp boxes" mentioned above, that are always available in/before all patches)

With some host applications it is more CPU efficient to open two reverb/delay plugin instances on the both fretboard inputs while with other host applications it might go softer on the CPU to put the effect on an additional (aux, bus) channel and send part of the signal there from the two main paths. This depends on how the host application handles optimization for a multi core CPU. In my case I use a MacBook Pro with just a two core i7 CPU and the only host application that supports dual core optimization for live input audio is Mainstage but for this to work you need to keep signal paths separated. Plogue Bidule also does some multi core optimization for live input but the code seems still not perfected, as we get audio artefacts rather easily. Bidule was my fav host app before Mainstage came around. In fact the Mainstage app is almost a replica of the setup I had built in Bidule but better sounding.

Wow, thanks everyone! A lot of great info here.

I'm generally a music/audio tech geek, but coming from a keyboard background, the whole strings/pickups/effects fun is really new to me…

@Kev - So far I really love phaser on the bass side, not sure what it is about that sound.

@Olivier - I usually practice with just a bit of reverb, definitely trying to work on my technique without relying on effects. I'm hoping to get effects going mostly because it tends to inspire musical ideas. I'm also very inspired by the the improvised effects extravaganzas that Greg and Per do so well, so trying to head in that direction.

@Greg - So having different eq/dynamics presets to feed the specific effect you're using? So far, I don't think I've really got the basic input gain staging right yet. Even with the gain cranked, I don't get very good recording levels (I've tried two different interfaces, active pickups running straight into the instrument inputs.) I have to experiment a bit more.

@Per - I'm probably going to have to read through that a few more times before it sinks in…

In terms of stomp box vs patch paradigms, Live doesn't really do patch changes in its own effects. As far as I know, you have to load a new instance of the plugin and switch to that. Odd since their hot-swap feature for loading presets works so well. I'll probably just have to setup effects chains and do it that way. I've noticed that even when you switch chains, it doesn't turn off the effects on its own, so they still use up CPU. I might have to program my controller to turn off effects within inactive chains as I switch.

One thing I'm also trying to figure out is how to deal with effects where I want to still hear the original signal (like reverb) vs effects where I don't want to hear it (envelope-following or anything that alters the attack). I've been trying to figure out good ways to do this, but I'm not sure I'm there yet.

I'll definitely check out some of the plugins you mention. I'm curious how you're finding out CPU/core optimization. Are you just checking Activity Monitor or do you have some sort of app that looks at that? I'm not too sure about Live's CPU usage meter. It doesn't always correlate with what I see in Activity Monitor. I've done some bad things using Max for Live and seen Live's CPU meter tell me I was using over 13,000% (it promptly crashed). I'm just starting in on a long-term project of building an interactive system, using Live and Max for Live, so CPU efficiency and dealing with latency will be important. I've actually turned off delay compensation (just need to remember to turn it back on when I'm not doing live-input stuff).

Thanks for all the ideas.

That's right. But you can still set up alternative effect chains, to be recalled by an external MIDI CC# value (a pedal), if using "a rack" (read about "rack" in Live's manual). In the rack you may set up what chain to be recalled by which CC# value in the tab called "Chain List". Live doesn't completely offload the chains not currently in use from the CPU, as Bidule or Mainstage do, but I would still say the current version of Live is amazingly CPU effective! My own choice of using Mainstage is for a particular general sound that I like.

If you want to still hear the original signal you can add the effect to a parallel channel and use the orignal channel's FX Send knob to send some signal to the effect channel.

Just open them as "insert effects" on the original channel.

You can do that, but I am mostly simply listening and when the audio starts giving in to drop-outs I know I have reached the limit (whatever any kind of meter happens to say).

Per - thanks again for all the suggestions. For the dry vs wet issue, I was thinking more in terms of a global effect that I can send either or both the bass and melody to. What's making the most sense for me in Live is to create an additional track for each side, with post-fx input and sends-only output, then put the "global" effects on the return track. That way I can choose to have the dry signal with it or not. I'll have to experiment and see...

So how do you like the program's fx? I find them pretty amazing! I have only small problem with its looper, but for fx and all that its sick. I always try to run a dry signal with no latency to the amp too. But then of course turn it off for hyperspace fx. Hope you make a good fx 'scene.