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Live Room G is a fabulous tool forcrafting a huge range of guitar sounds. Ittames Custom 59s distortion, and alsoworks wonders all by itself, or with asingle distortion or overdrive pedal.

W

Pointing to the left edge of a plug- in slot

gives you a move hand that lets you

reposition one or more plug-ins into

lower or higher slots. Here the selected

Analog Chorus and MW Equalizer plug-

ins are being placed first in the

processing chain.

Saturday 2nd October 2010

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Digital Performer 7: Guitar HeroesDigital Performer Notes & Techniques

Technique : Digital Performer Notes

DP7s new guitar plug-ins offer a fresh set oftones, and a contrasting approach to third-party alternatives.

Robin Bigwood

hats immediately apparent when you use DP7s new

guitar plug-ins is how different they feel compared tothird-partypackages such as NIs Guitar Rig and

Waves GTR. The all-in-one designs of the latter two allow you to

call up chains of effects and choose an amplifier model and

speaker cabinet within the confines of a single plug-in window.

DP7 uses a different approach, with all of its guitar processors

appearing as individual plug-ins. There are advantages to doing it

in this way: you can use the Live Room G speaker-cabinet

emulator on a Hammond organ track, for example, without being

saddled with a bunch of other guitar features you dont need.But

there are clear disadvantages, too. One is the challenge of co-

ordinating the many individual plug-ins you might need to achieve

your desired tone, and another is the lack of a formal preset

system for groupsof plug-ins. However, there are ways to dealwith

both.

Chain Reaction

Lets deal with that first point, to begin with. In DP, you assemble processing chains by placing your plug-ins

in order, from top to bottom of the plug-in slots in a Mixing Board channel. So for a typical chorused sound,

you might choose a chain comprising something like the Analog Chorus pedal, the Custom 59 guitar amp

emulator, then Live Room G.That would appear in your plug-in slots as in the screen on the left.

That seems easy enough, but what if you ever needed more

than five plug-ins, for a more complex chainof effects? Thats also

easy: go to the Mixing Boards mini-menu and choose Set

Number of Effects Inserts. In the dialogue box that appears, you

can specify up to 20 slots, which should deal with even the most

outrageous guitar treatments!

With bigger plug-in chains comes the challenge of using them

efficiently, and here a tinybit of Mixing Board technique is worth

an awful lot. By moving your mouse pointer to the left edgeof an

occupied plug-in slot, you get a move hand. Click and drag a

plug-in like this, and you can move it to another slot, which makes

re-ordering a plug-in within a chain really easy. You can also re-order whole groupsof plug-ins. First, click a

plug-in within an insert slot (this time not at the left edge) to select it, and then shift-click additional plug-ins to

add themto the selection. When youre ready, point to the left edgeof any one of them, and all the plug-ins

you selected can be dragged en masse to a new location.You never need to worry about channel formats

when youre doing this either, as DP does all the behind-the-scenes work in switching the plug-in youre

moving, or those in neighbouring slots, to maintain the appropriate mono or stereo signal flow. Sweet!

Here are some other ideas. When youre dragging a plug-in (or

plug-ins), holding down the Alt key will duplicate rather than move

them which is reallyhandy for copying whole chains from one

track to another.Holding down Alt while you click a plug-in within

its insert slot toggles it on and off, just the same as clicking its

bypass button if its window were open. Bypassed plug-ins are

shownwith their names in italics. And if youre getting

overwhelmed with plug-in windows while tweaking a long chain of

effects, try closing all but one, and then using that ones insert

view pop-up menu to switch to another plug-in in the same

window.

Total Recall

Youve perfected a plug-in processing chain for your guitar sound.

How do you go about using it in another DP project? The answer is

with Clippings.

1. In the Project menu, chooseClippings, then New Digital

Performer Clipping Window.

2. Name the window that appears. For the sakeof illustration, Ill

call it My Guitar FX.

3. In the Mixing Board, click (and shift-click) all plug-ins in your

chain, to select them.

4. In the Edit menu, chooseCopy to Clippings Window / Copy to

My Guitar FX.

Chain Reaction

Total Recall

Dialling Tones

Clippings & YourMac


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Use a plug-in windows insert view pop-

up menu to view all your plug-ins without

drowning in windows.

837185

Clipping windows in DP are great forstoring presets of plug-in chains.Theyre views of actual folders on yourMac.

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5. If the little Clippings Windows you created in step two is no

longer visible, select it by name from the bottomsection of the

Window menu. Then Alt-click the Clipping name to rename it as

something more useful. Ive chosen Crunchy Drive 1.

Having saved your plug-in chain, with all its settings, you can close

your project and open the one in which you want to use this same

processing chain. In the Project menu, chooseClippings / My

Guitar FX, and then, from the window that appears (look familiar?),

drag Crunchy Drive 1 onto your guitar tracks insert slots in the

Mixing Board.

Using this same technique, you can build up whole libraries of

plug-in settings and chains for yourself. Or try some that MOTU

have made for you: go to www.motu.com/newsitems/new-guitar-

tones-for-dp7 and download some of the Clippings there.You can

then drag the Clippings files directly from the OS X Finder into

plug-in slots in DP.

Dialling Tones

On the face of it, DP7s guitar plug-ins seem straightforward: you

get a bunch of different distortions,a chorus, a noisegate and

wah, an amp simulator,and a room simulator. However, theres

more subtlety and flexibility here than you might initially realise.

First of all, its important to understand that Custom 59 is just an

amp head, not a speaker cabinet as well. If you use it byitself...

well, just dont! Not unless you like really hissy, sharp-edged

distortion, that is. Its really designed to be used in the signal flow

ahead of Live Room G, which adds the speaker emulation that

smooths everything out and thickens it up.

The next thing about Custom 59 is that it just doesnt overdrive and distort in the aggressive way that

some more modern amps do. Maybethe clue is in the name, because MOTU apparently aimed it at the

production of predominantly clean and light blues tones, with the possibilityof a bit of crunch emerging in

response to a more active playingstyle. So the bottom line is that you need to work with what it was designed

to do, and dont expect it to replicate every amp on the planet. Having said that, you can massivelyexpand its

range by preceding it with one of the new distortion plug-ins, or just a humble Trim plug-in, set to drive the

input with, say,an additional 30dB of gain.

Also, take a closer look at Live Room G (see screen opposite). It actually has its own drive stage, controlled

by the Cabinet Drive knob at top left. You can use this to increase Custom 59s scope whenits feeding into

Live Room G. However,some of the best heavier tones available in DP7, I think, are those achieved by

missing out Custom 59 altogether, and just running a distortion plug-in into Live Room G.

Finally for this month, lets talk about reverb. Plenty of hardware guitar amps have it built in, but DPs dont,

so what should you use and where? My suggestion is to look at the excellent Plate plug-in (and dont forget to

click its expand toggle to get the full range of options). You can also check out the many varied Plate presets

in ProVerb,or even import a spring reverb impulse response from the web: try www.xs4all.nl/~fokkie/IR.htm

for some classics. Place the reverb plug-in before Live Room G, for an authentic amp-based sound, or at the

end of your processing chain for more expansive treatments.

Clippings & Your Mac

Clippings in DP are no more than little views of folders in specificplaces on your Mac. You can find out where by Command-clicking a Clippings title bar, and even open the correspondingfolder in the Finder bychoosing a parent folder from the pop-upmenu that appears.Viewing your Clippings in this way opensupthe possibilityof emailing your favourites to collaborators, forexample.

And the differencebetween a project Clipping Window and aDigital Performer Clipping Window? The former is stored inproject folders, and available only to that project. The latter isavailable to all projects, existingor newly created. Choosewhichever typebest suits your needs.

Published in SOS February 2010

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