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  • December 1, 2010 at 11:17 am #81058
    Carmine
    Participant

    Anyone got any ideas of how to create a sort of sitar sound using EHX pedals?

    -Carmine

    December 1, 2010 at 2:39 pm #112849
    julian
    Moderator

    Probably HOG + Cathedral set fully wet. Dry out of HOG into a Germanium OD with the voltage turned down to get a short buzzy tone.

    Sitar sounds are very hard to get with pedals though. You’ve got three things going on that are sort of hard to imitate:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTPxqUtlLdo

    1. Buzzy jawari bridge. There is a DIY pedal called the Jawari which sort of imitates this, though I think the germanium OD can get similar tones. It sounds kind of crappy though.

    2. Sympathetic Strings. In a sitar there are strings that run through the body and the neck that ring out sympathetically with notes played that. Notice in the video that he’s just plucking individual notes yet you can here a constant pretty chordal drone in the background, those are the sympathetic strings. There really aren’t any pedals that do that. With a HOG and a Cathedral you may be able to get a multitonal reverb, and with freeze gliss half cocked it would add a nice droney sparkle to the notes and make them lag a bit.

    3. Notice how every fret is movable on a sitar? That’s because in India, they don’t use an equal tempered scale, but a just intonated scale. Each note is a distinct harmonic ratio to the root note, and because of this note spacings are not equal. So if you change keys, you have to move the frets. Of course on a fretted guitar it’s impossible to imitate this.

    Some people have gone the route of making their own fretlesses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obP9A3EQnPQ

    Fretlesses also conveniently reduce your sustain time, which gets you closer to the sitar sound.

    Or there’s my simple sitar mimicry style- tune every string to C or D. Learn the melody lines to “Within You Without You.” Strum every string when you play notes. It will sound good.

    Also, this crazy genius made a sympathetic string reverb: http://nicksworldofsynthesizers.com/stringresonator.php

    December 1, 2010 at 3:16 pm #112851
    Carmine
    Participant
    Quote:
    Probably HOG + Cathedral set fully wet. Dry out of HOG into a Germanium OD with the voltage turned down to get a short buzzy tone.

    Or there’s my simple sitar mimicry style- tune every string to C or D. Learn the melody lines to “Within You Without You.” Strum every string when you play notes. It will sound good.

    Also, this crazy genius made a sympathetic string reverb: http://nicksworldofsynthesizers.com/stringresonator.php

    Hey! Thanks for the response!

    I play the Oud which is a fretless Middle Eastern instrument. I’ve had acoustic versions for years but now I picked up an electric which is fantastic as it’s opening me up to using pedals!

    I got some EHX pedals and they are working great. Thankfully I live in NYC and I can run around to stores and try them out first but everything has worked out great.

    The electric oud I have actually has a pretty long sustain time. I listened to your HOG/Sitar demo and it sounds I think close enough for the kind of gigs I do (Mid-East/Fusion) where I just need the sound for a tune or improv.

    Do you remember the settings you had on the Hog?

    December 1, 2010 at 3:40 pm #112852
    julian
    Moderator

    It’s been awhile, I guess I should have put them in the description!!!

    There’s definitely a loop going for the drone on my SMMH, maybe some verb or short delay too. Time to go play with my pedals!

    December 1, 2010 at 4:24 pm #112855
    julian
    Moderator

    Here’s what I think I did.

    I put some of the HOG sliders up, focusing on the original, with a couple harmonics slightly up as well.

    I put it in freeze gliss mode, and rocked the expression pedal so that the notes take on this sort of sublime feel as they get this reverby metallic glissando thing going when you have freeze gliss mode locked into about 3/4 of the way down on the expression pedal.

    I used both the wet and dry outs of the HOG, so that the dry could be heard clearly without any effects on it, and the wet of the HOG could be processed more by other effects.

    So here’s where the wet out of the HOG out went:

    DOD-250 Overdrive: I find a little bit warms up my HOG’s sound nicely.

    I tuned my frequency analyzer to the drone notes I was playing and set the mix so that it didn’t overpower the cleaner prettier notes. The frequency analyzer can get some weird buzzy stuff if you tune it super high, and can also get some awesome gong like sounds if you tune it just right.

    Lastly I had the SMMH. I got a reverb setting I liked and put the blend at about 50 and recorded some droning. Then I turned the blend all the way up after recording the loop so that all the processing on the melodies would be blurrier and not clash too much with the clean melodies.

    December 16, 2010 at 1:53 pm #113124
    KartoonHead
    Member

    Bill did electric synth sounds in this (my personal favorite) episode of Effectology;

    Electro-Harmonix Effectology, Vol.18 World Sounds

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