Check out some free stuff from Ableton Live from the Covert Operators. Their Espionage pack contains a selection of presets and patches. Definitely worth checking out if your into Ableton Live.

The secret behind the Killswitch Engage guitar tone

Here is an old signal flow diagram for Adam D’s rig. In case you don’t know him, Adam D plays guitar for Killswitch Engage and his a all round swinging dude. As you can see when you check out his rig, he’s a big fan of the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid).

Effects are used sparingly. One of the major benefits of this approach being that there is less to go wrong, and less switching involved, giving him more time to concentrate on rocking rather than tap dancing.

There are relatively few few effects in his signal chain, with the Maxon OD9 his pedal of choice.

Puremagnetik has just released TEST RUN - a free "Live Ready" pack with over 100MB of sound content. TEST RUN contains a collection of the best sounds from past Puremagnetik packs and is available for immediate download here.

Test Run is compatible with Ableton Live 6.0.5 and higher. Puremagnetik is a subscription service for Ableton Live 6 users that delivers high-quality, Live-ready "Micropacks" to its subscribers on a monthly basis.

For more information, visit their web site at www.puremagnetik.com.

I remember saving this image a year or two ago. I believe it was posted in one of the Harmony-Central forums. The original 'poster' purported it to be a picture of Page Hamilton's rack.

To be perfectly blunt, I'm not sure of the accuracy of this claim, as it doesn't seem to match the gear listed on guitargeek. The guitar geek rig was from the '94 Helmet era, so perhaps this picture was from later on? In any case, I'm a gear geek, so I like checking out gear photo's.

If anyone has any information on this picture or can verify its accuracy, please leave a comment.

Here's a link to an interesting article posted on the Age website today. It discusses home recording and the effect it has had on the music industry.

I was reading through some old Guitar World magazines the other day and found an article/interviews with Trent Reznor, following the release of the Fragile. Here is a brief excerpt.

Plugging into Trent Reznor's Digital World
Excerpt from Guitar World
June 2000
By Alan di Perna

"The training I've had on piano sometimes gets in the way," Trent Reznor muses. "On guitar, I don't have that problem, 'cause I suck."

Whatever Reznor lacks in technical facility he more than makes up for in the way of sheer creativity. In recording The Fragile, he plugged his guitar into the vast technological resources of Nothing Studios and used the whole damn place as his stomp box.

"The first question was always, 'Do we want it to sound like a guitar or something else?'" he says. Either way, Reznor and co-producer Alan Moulder would generally start by plugging a guitar into a row of effects pedals gleaned from Reznor's impressive collection. Favourites included a Swollen Pickle by Way Huge Electronics and, on the vintage front, a Univox Uni-Fuzz, Fender Blender, Foxx Tone Machine, an original DigiTech Whammy Pedal and a mysterious Trent bought for 20 dollars in an L.A. keyboard shop. There's no brand name or model number on it. Just the words "tone control," and knobs for lo, hi, mid and a sweepable resonance filter. "It's the most brutal kind of eq, but with intense distortion," Trent marvels.

Whereas Reznor has almost always recorded guitars direct in the past, he did go for some miked cabinet sounds this time, at Moulder's encouragement. On the direct front, Reznor generally used Amp Farm (an amp-modeling plug-in card for Pro Tools) or a Zoom speaker simulator. A DigiTech 2120 was also in favour for a while. Typically Reznor would record multiple takes of any given guitar track into Pro Tools, often working in loop recording mode. He generally sat at the control room console playing guitar while Alan Moulder manipulated effects controls in real time and programmer Keith Hillibrandt wrote down the bar numbers where things started sounding cool. The multiple guitar takes were then layered up using Pro-Tools' cut-and-paste facilities. That, for example, is how the distressed power chording on "The Day the World Went Away" was achieved.

Many guitar tracks went through another processing stage after being recorded and layered. For this Reznor often used devices like Virus, by Music Access Electronics," and the Mutronics Mutator, both of which allow any audio signal to be passed through a bank of analog synth-style filters. The one-note drone heard in the verses to "the Day the World Went Away" sounds like an analog synth with bad case of oscillator drift. But it's actually layered guitars processed through the Mutator. An old Roland Chorus Echo with a broken motor was another prime source of strange, wobbly tones.

"I'd say 80 percent of the guitar parts on the record were done with a Parker guitar," Reznor adds. "I used the piezo pickup on the Parker quite a bit. One of the tricks we'd use on this record was tuning all the guitar strings to the same pitch: two low octave, two middle and two high. Then I'd strum as fast as I could, playing a melody with one finger up and down the neck. We'd run that through a [Yamaha] SPX1000 with early reflection reverb on. You're not hearing the strings, but you're hearing the pitch, and it has an infinite reverb type sound, but it's not sustaining like a room reverb."

The job of recreating all this madness on the concert stage fell to longtime Reznor cohorts Robin Finck and Danny Lohner. "Danny and I will go through the 25 guitar tracks on the record and break it down to the most essential parts," says Finck, who has been using an assortment of Godin guitars on the Fragility tour, employing their piezo pickups to reproduce some of Reznor's Parker ones. For meatier stuff, Finck plays a Les Paul. He's using a Marshall JMP-1 preamp and a Bradshaw switching system with a TC Electronic G-Force and a Voodoo Valve as featured effects.

Danny Lohner, who also contributed some guitar tracks to the album, plays both bass and guitar live, performing on Fernandes and PRS guitars and an Ernie Ball Music Man bass through a SansAmp PSA-1. His guitar rig includes a DigiTech 2120 and Whammy Wah and a Piercing Moose octave distortion pedal by Way Huge Electronics. A Ground Control MIDI Switcher keeps all this in order.

Onstage, Reznor chimes in on Gibson Les Paul Standard and ESP Les Paul models through a Line 6 Pod. All guitars are direct-injected into the house P.A. - a necessity given Nine Inch Nails' ultra-violent stage show. "We used to have mikes in cabinets," says Lohner. "But they'd get kicked around and you'd go two songs not knowing your guitar wasn't being heard in the house."

Sound engineers will tell you that generally it’s best to compress the signal at the point where the least amount of bass is present (at least that’s what I’ve heard). Think of a thumping bass line. The bass frequencies carry a lot of energy, and a compressor responds to changes in the level of the bass frequencies.

This can cause the high-frequency instruments to seem to stand out in the overall mix. By adding compression where there is the least amount of bass, you can keep the compressor from drawing out too much of the high frequencies. To the ear, this will keep the levels a little more stable and prevent high frequency instruments from sounding louder than you intended. This is a good time to start automating plug-ins, getting your compressor to kick on when and where you want it to.

Figuring out how to order effects can be a little on the tricky side. Generally I’d say that there are no rules in this area, just guidelines to get you started.

Two effects most commonly used in the mixing process are EQ and compression. In a perfect world, if everything is recorded properly, EQ and compression aren’t really necessary, but, unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. So, rambling aside, what should go first, compression or EQ? Maybe I should roll out the traditional line about how you should “trust your ears” and “do what sounds best to you”. Sometimes, that advice isn’t all that helpful, so here are a couple of points/ideas to use as a starting point.

If you're boosting high and mid frequencies, insert the compressor after the EQ.

If you are boosting lower frequencies, or cutting the high or mid frequencies, insert the compression first, and then EQ.

But yes, the old saying is true, trust your ears!

A common question people have in regard to using Reason in Rewire mode is, how do you automate controls within a Reason instrument/rack from your host/master software (eg. ProTools)? If you’ve asked this question, but never figured out the answer, this is for you! That’s the good news. The bad news, it’s quite a painful process!

The following instructions came from the Propellerhead website and guide you through the whole thing.

When you record automation for the Reason devices proceed as follows:

1. Create a MIDI track in the mixer application and make it ready for recording.

2. Open the menu or dialog where you select a MIDI input for the track.

You should find the current Reason devices listed among the MIDI inputs as well.

3. Select the device you want to automate.

4. Now you have set things up so that the MIDI track in the mixer application receives data from the Reason device.

5. Start recording in the mixer application and switch to Reason.

6. Move the appropriate parameters on the device panel in Reason.

7. When you're done, stop recording and check the MIDI track in the mixer application - your parameter changes have now been recorded as MIDI controller data.

8. Route the MIDI track to the device and play back the track - the parameters will change according to the recorded automation.

There is a workaround though, that can greatly simplify this process.

1. Create your MIDI track and Rewire Reason into your host application.

2. Go to the Reason screen and create your instrument. If you want to automate the faders, knobs, and sliders as you perform the track, go ahead and create a sequencer track as well. If you prefer to write the automation after you've performed the track, simply wait to create the sequencer track.

3. Arm Reason for recording and record the audio (and automation moves if you want).

4. If you didn't record the automation, you may now create the sequencer track, arm Reason to record again, hit record, and perform the automation moves.

5. Go back to your host application. Set up an Audio track, setting the input of the track to an available bus. Set the output of the MIDI track that has your Reason instrument on it to the same bus as the input of the audio track.

6. Arm your audio track for recording, and start recording. The sounds from the MIDI track will be recorded as audio in your host application with all the accompanying automation moves.

Just make sure before you record the audio version of your MIDI track that you've performed all the automation moves and MIDI edits you want to make. After the MIDI has been rendered as audio, the only way to change anything is to go back to Reason and make note or automation edits, and re-render the MIDI as audio.

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If you’ve never used the automation function in ProTools before it can seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, when you break it down into steps, it’s not all that bad. Once you’ve got a good handle on it, it can make your life a lot easier, not to mention open up some new creative opportunities.

Step 1: Open the plug-in (always good to start with an easy step 1!).

Step 2: Inside the plug-in window, click the "auto" button.

Step 3: A window will now open with a list of parameters that are available to be automated. Obviously the options depend on the plug-in you are attempting to automate.

Step 4: Select the parameters you want and click Add.

Step 5: Whilst in the Edit window, click the Track View Selector, and select the parameters of the plug-in that you want to automate.

Step 6: Draw the automation using the pen toll. Save, and then play it back, tweaking to taste.

There you go, that's all there is to it.