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Ifyoure a guitarist, DP7 will make you feellike all your Christmases have come at
once!
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Digital Performer 7: Guitar Greats : December 2009
Digital Performer 7: Guitar GreatsDigital Performer Notes & Techniques
Technique : Digital Performer Notes
DP7 includes enticing new features ideal forguitarists. Heres a quick-start guide to the
best of them.Robin Bigwood
ndoubtedly, DP7s most glitzy addition is a clutch of new
audio plug-ins. These include guitar -pedal emulations, the
Custom 59 guitar combo modeller, and Live Room G,
which lets you achieve that miked through an amp sound on any
audio track. All have nice friendly graphical interfaces, and theyre
conceptually very straightforward. But whats maybe less obvious
is how you can best make use of them (or any other guitar-
oriented plug-ins) while tracking and mixing.
Making It Work
First, how do you use the amp and all those pedals during
recording? Unlike many other effects types, guitar distortion/
overdrive isnt usually something you add at mixdown to an audio
track that was recorded clean. Instead, you need to be able to
monitor the guitar tone as youre jamming and recording to an
audio track. Follow these steps to achieve that:
1. In DP, mouse to the Setup menu / Configure Audio System /
Input Monitoring Mode, and choose to Monitor Record-enabled Tracks Through Effects.
2. Disable any zero-latency monitoring scheme you may have running on an external audio interface or
hardware mixer.
3. Create a mono audio track and choose for its input the hardware input to which your guitar is connected.
Then turn on input monitoring: this is the input button in the Mixing Board, the blue icon in the Mon
column in the Tracks window, or a tracks little loudspeaker button in the Sequence Editor.
4. Hopefully, youre now hearing your guitar. If not, check your monitoring signal chain, and ensure that
youve assigned an appropriate output to the audio track. Also check Studio menu / Audio Patch Thru, and
choose Auto or Blend, the two most useful modes for this sort of software monitoring.
5. Now for the fun bit. On the audio track, instantiate your favourite stomp-box emulations, or dial in some
tones on the Custom 57 amp simulator. If latency is an issue, go to Setup menu / Configure Audio System /
Configure Hardware Driver and reduce the Buffer Size: 128 or 256 should do the trick .
6. When youre ready, record-enable your track and hit record.
What Im describing here, of course, is straightforward through-effects monitoring, where your guitar signal
passes into the computer, through DPs mixer and effects plug-ins, and back out again. But interestingly,
because of DPs signal flow, although youre monitoring the signal with effects, youre actually recording it
without them. To check this out, try disabling the plug -ins on the track you just recorded (by Alt-clicking them
in the Mixing Board). Lo and behold, you should hear a dry guitar signal. This means that you can continue to
tweak your guitar tone after recording, should you want to or perhaps duplicate the audio track (by
selecting its name in the Tracks window, then choosing Duplicate Tracks from the Project menu) and dial in
different amp and stomp-box settings, to get a tight, multi-layered effect.
This Means Wah!
First up is DP7s Wah Pedal plug-in. You cant beat a good wah, and this one emulates a couple of
classics. But what good is it if you cant operate it with your foot? Well, you can, assuming youve got some
sort of MIDI-enabled pedal. This could be a dedicated guitar MIDI pedalboard controller, or an expression
pedal for a keyboard or synth. Either way, the pedal (or the synth its connected to) will need to show up as
an input in OS X s Audio MIDI Setup application so that DP knows about it . Assuming it does, the MIDI data
comes into DP and gets routed to the plug-in, which has special MIDI input capabilities. To get all this
happening, the best approach is to take advantage of one of DPs most under-used features, Consoles.
1. Load an instance of Wah Pedal on an audio track to which your guitar is routed, and which youre
monitoring through software.
2. In the Project menu, choose Consoles / New Console. A blank window appears, along with a little palette.
3. From the palette, drag a knob or slider (doesn t matter which) into the blank console window, and drop. A
Control Assignment dialogue box appears .
4. You can ignore most of the scary stuff! In the Source section, click the MIDI radio button, and in its pop-
up menu choose the name of the MIDI source that corresponds with your expression pedal. In my example
it s attached to my Roland RD700SX synth.
Making It Work
This Means Wah!
Amp It Up
Channel Strips
DP Workshops OnThe Web
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A Console is an idealway of routing datafrom a MIDI expression pedal to the new
Wah Pedalplug-in.
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5. In the Target section, choose MIDI again, and Wah Pedal in the associated pop-up menu. Then un-tick
Only follow source when selected and tick Echo data from source to target. These options ensure that the
Console can work in the backgroundand that your pedal data-stream passes through the Console without
getting mucked about with by any other settings.
6. Directly underneath, click in the left-hand Ctrl. # field , then move your pedal. DP should hear the MIDI
message it generates and enter the appropriate CC number automatically. Do the same in the right-hand
Ctrl. # field. then click OK.
7. Finally, in the Wah Pedal plug-in, set the Pedal CC #
parameter to the same number as in the fields in step 6.
It may not be all that pretty, but youve just made a little MIDI
router, and now moving your pedal should result in Wah Pedals
virtual pedal moving too. Job done.
Amp It Up
Next, we come to the new Live Room G plug-in. This is a lovelything, making any track its used on sound as though its coming
out of a guitar amp, miked with a variety of appropriate mics at
different positions, in a nice room. Essentially it s very simple, and
the user interface is intuitive. But MOTU missed a trick in not
offering a wet/dry balance control. This is of particular concern to bassists, who often like to blend a clean
DId sound with that of the same signal miked up through an amp. If you place Live Room directly on a DId
bass track, you end up with only the miked sound. But there are some ways around this.
The first is really easy, if youve already recorded a DI part: just duplicate the track (Control-Command-D),
then instantiate Live Room G on the new track and blend to taste using channel faders in the Mixing Board.
The second method is a little more fiddly, but it s a solution if you want to hear the DI/mic blend live, as
you record. Youll need to enable software monitoring, as I described earlier. Then:
1. Create an Aux track, with your bass as its input and an unused bus as its output.
2. Add two new mono audio tracks, and for each of their inputs choose the same bus as in step 1. Make
sure they have suitable outputs, driving your studio monitors.
3. Record -enable both audio tracks. You should hear your input signal, effectively doubled now that its been
split in two.
4. On one audio track, load the Live Room G plug-in. On the other, call up compression or other processing
for the DI signal.
You can now use Mixing Board track faders to achieve your desired DI/mic blend. When you record, the two
tracks will capture the same dry signal, as explained earlier, but this means you keep your options open right
to the end of the mix.
Channel Strips
A very welcome new Digital Performer 7 feature is channel
strips. The idea is that DP can now show you most of the Mixing
Board channel settings for a track youre working on without you
having to leave an editing window. The channel strip appears in the windows Information Bar.
To get channel strips appearing in all your editors information bars , go to the Preferences window
(Digital Performer menu) and click on Information Bar in the left-hand list. Select every grey blob in the
Mixer column. Youll see which editing windows each refers to by looking at the names down the left-hand
side . Now try switching back to the Tracks window, say. Look above the track list, and theres your
channel strip (see the picture below for what it offers in terms of facilities).
The channel strip updates to show settings for whichever track you have selected, whether audio or
MIDI. If you have multiple tracks selected, it shows whichever one was selected first.
DP Workshops On The Web
The Sound On Sound web site offers all the Performer workshops or articles ever written since way back
in April 2001 (including those from when the column was called Performer Notes). But Ive also recently
created a dedicated Performer Notes web site, which gives easy access to those same articles over
100 of them! Theres also lots of extra information, including links to the best third-party developers and
various online DP resources. You can find it at www.performernotes.co. uk.
Published in SOS December 2009
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