Horns and percussion:

Below are the pedal settings I used for the video “Fanfare for the Uncommon Pedal.”

I have always been moved by the music of Aaron Copland. “Fanfare for the Common Man” is a favorite of mine. I thought it would be great to be able to play some these sounds on my guitar.

Timpani Drums:
To capture this sound I used a Ring Thing as a pitch shifter, a Big Muff for a slight distortion and filtering followed by a Cathedral reverb for a big ambient reverb.

To start, I slightly muted the lower stings on the guitar using my left hand index finger at the first fret.

Lightly touching the string without pressing down on the fret produced a soft high harmonic when the strings were stuck hard with my thumb. I lowered the pitch of this harmonic down one octave with the Ring Thing. This produced the timpani drum note or pitch.

The Big Muff added harmonics to the note. I used its tone control to remove some of the very high frequencies.

For reverb I used the Cathedral Pedal in the Accu Spring mode. This produced a very smooth, long reverb.

I used a small amount of pre-delay. Pre-delay helps a percussive attack stand out in the mix as it separates the start of the sound from the reverb. In other words, it delays the reverb from being heard till after the initial attack.

Below are the timpani settings:

Horns:
The sound I chose for the horns is a combination of a trumpet and a French horn. For this sound I used a HOG for filtering, a Riddle for a brass envelope and a Cathedral for a concert hall reverb.

A POG2 pedal can be used in place of the HOG.

The sound of the horns can be changed by altering the start and stop controls of the Riddle pedal. Brighter will produce a trumpet sound and darker will sound more like a French horn or trombone.

Last in line was a Cathedral pedal using the hall setting.

Below are the settings I used for the horn sound:

Optional

Thanks for watching,
Bill Ruppert

Nice job once again. I’ve really been enjoying going through the Effectology series. I especially like the atmospheric effects you’ve put together.

I have a couple of questions, and please forgive me if you’ve already covered them. First, how do you get such a clean signal with some of the longer signal chains you put together? I have been using a chain of a volume pedal, a HOG, and a Stereo Memory Man through a rackmounted stereo preamp/power amp. Recently, I added a Cathedral pedal and, occasionally, I will use some kind of modulation. It seems that no matter what amp I use there is an horrendous amount of hiss.

Also, I was wondering what you use for going direct. Do you use any kind of speaker simulator?

Thanks for sharing all the brilliant sounds. I look forward to more installments.

very cool, i think it was a bit short though.

next suggestion is Effectology 16: Full Orchestra Band with Brass Section

Thaks Narada.
What I do to keep things quiet is to run part of the chain before the preamp and the second half of the chain after the preamp and before the power amp.
Pedals like compression, distortion POG and HOG most often go in front of the preamp.
The volume pedal will be the LAST thing in that chain as it can silence any sound right before the pre amp.
Ambient effects like the Stereo Memory Man and Cathedral go in between the preamp and power amp.
This lets you distort the preamp if needed and still have a undistorted reverb.
That said you can change the entire chain up for certain effects, but this is what i start out with.

I do record direct.
For the entire Effectology series I have used a very clean fender Twin simulation and the amp.
Sort of a neutral sound.
You can hear what the amp sim sounds like by itself in the reverb show I did.
Its the first clip heard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAiUMx1Dsm4
.32 seconds in.
I like the Roland or Boss Fender amp sim.
Almost any unit out there has a Clean amp simulator.
Its just a very clean sound with nothing going on.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for watching!
Bill

Bill! Great video as always. Thank you so much for these. I learn a lot about the effects. Sometimes I find these videos better than the conventional demos.

What are the effects used from 0.35 – 0.56 in the video? Is this just the Cathedral Reverb Infinite mode?

Thank you.

Thanks again Bill! Much appreciated.

Yeah I love the SMMW/H in Mod Delay setting too. Definitely one of my favourite pedals. Looks like I’ll have to buy a HOG though. Been wanting one of those for a while now. Look forward to the next awesome Effectology video.
Cheers!