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Virtual guitar stomp boxes is certainly not a new idea with Software such as Amplitube and Guitar Rig already popular solutions to the computer guitar processing market, a new addition to this market place is Image Line’s Hardcore. Image Line are already famous for their flagship software audio DAW FL Studio as well as their software synth plugins such as PoiZone and Morphine and now they have expanded into the world of Guitar Effect plugins:

“When I started Hardcore the idea was to fill the ‘distortion’ guitar plugin gap in the Image Line FX suite, but it turned into a much bigger and exciting project” noted the developer of Hardcore, Maxx Claster. It seems that once Maxx had created one guitar plugin, it was difficult for him to stop. Maxx Claster is well known to Image Line customers for the synths Morphine, PoiZone and Toxic.

Hardcore includes 10 carefully crafted stomp-box simulations:
—Distortion
—Chorus
—Flanger
—Phaser
—Reverb
—Delay
—Noise Gate
—Equalizer
—Compression
—Modulator

Five stomp-box simulations can be arranged in any order on the Hardcore pedal board. The output then passes through an 8-band graphic EQ and Cabinet Simulator, tying it all together into one massive sound.

Plugin formats:
- FL Studio plugin
- VSTi 2.4 (Win/OSX)
- Audiounit (OSX)

For more information head over to Image Line’s website.

Back in October I reviewed Riffworks a software application designed to make recording your riffs a simple process so that you don’t get bogged down in the technology and lose that initial inspiration. They took it even further with Riffworld.com and RiffRumble which utilise Riffworks’ online recording collaboration features:

“RiffWorks recording software includes built-in online music collaboration and song posting - RiffWorld integrates these technologies into a modern social networking environment. Record quality songs with musicians around the world regardless of locations and schedules. Post your tunes. Win trophy icons and song contest prizes. All the world’s your stage!“

And the prizes are great by the way, check out the current Riff Rumble prizes, a Schecter C-1, a couple of Seymour Duncan pickups and some Instant Drummer sessions for your backing tracks worth over $1000.

Well now Sonoma Wireworks are releasing a FREE version of Riffworks called Riffworks T-4 available for immediate download for both Mac and PC! There are a few differences from the fully functioning paid version which I will outline below.

You can only create 4 layers in your recording rather than the 24 in Riffworks Standard.
You only get 1 InstantDrummers pack instead of the 9 you get with Riffworkds Standard.
T-4 doesn’t have a REX file player and doesn’t have ReWire functionality so that it can be used in conjunction with multitrack recording software such as Abelton Live.
The included Amp simulator plugins are AmpliTube® Duo LE & Studio Devil BVC rather than the full version of Amplitube 2 Live
7 effects (Wah, Multi-band Compression & Distortion, Modulation, Delay, Reverb, Compression, and British Style EQ)

“A free level of online collaboration is included with RiffWorks T4, which allows up to four musicians to collaborate on a song and chat simultaneously. RiffWorks loop-based recording workflow allows collaboration without latency or distance issues. As a track is recorded, it streams to other players and is perfectly in sync. All contributions are saved on RiffWorld.com and can be opened later in RiffWorks to continue recording. An unlimited number of musicians may contribute to a song (4 at a time).“

This is a pretty amazing piece of software to give away for free, you could be jamming with other musicians in a matter of minutes! Make sure you check out RiffWorld.com to hear some of the online collaboration possibilities already happening. Sonoma Wireworks have worked hard to make sure they have built a strong community around their software and Riffworks T-4 will really help solidify that community by making super easy multitrack recording with simple InstantDrummers backing tracks available to any guitarist with a computer! You never know I might be jamming with you later!

Riffworks Homepage.
Riffworld.com - Riffworks online collaboration community.
RiffRumble - Riffworks songwriting competition.

Guitar Noize regulars will know that I recently started using Abelton Live 7 (check the review here) and while I am still putting the finishing touches to my first Techno track I am still yet to produce a decent original guitar track. However I am always looking for inspiration and the other day I stumbled across a plug-in that I thought looked very impressive and unlike any other plug-ins I had ever used and wondered if it be useful to creating the ultimate shredder track. The plug-in is called Effectrix by a company called Sugar Bytes and unlike most plug-ins I have used before it is actually a loop based effect. Now normally I use plug-ins for effects like Reverb, Delay, Compression etc. but Effectrix does a number of different effects in pattern based sequences, now initially this might seem a little confusing but within seconds of feeding a drum loop through Effectrix I was blown away.

Let me explain a little about how the effect works. You have a grid that has 14 rows, each containing a separate effect you can then choose how you want the effect to loop, from 1/4 notes to 1/32 notes with the option of 1/8 & 1/4 triplets. You then draw where you want each effect to trigger, or cycle through the presets to get some ideas. The plug-in takes the tempo from the master tempo so that your effects will always be matched perfectly. Each effect can be customised at the bottom of the plug-in window, simply select the coloured row of the effect you wish to change to see the parameters appear under the grid. Now these effects range from Reverb to Reverse to Loop and I found the X-Loop and Loop effects to be the most fun, especially mixed with the Phaser or Stutter! The best thing is that you can set up a pattern then when you are happy with turn on the ‘Pattern Keys’ and click on the next note in the keyboard octave shown. This means you can assign a different pattern to every note of the keyboard, just be aware that you can only assign variations of the pattern not the actual effect parameters.

So how does this work as a guitarist. Well the ‘Pattern Keys’ had me very interested. Imagine setting up some patterns and then connecting a midi foot controller which allowed you to affect your playing in realtime! Well I don’t have a foot controller but this didn’t stop me trying a few patterns that I had set up using a drum loop. The only thing was that while doing crazy drum looped effects is great when you are playing live guitar and it suddenly reverses your phrase and then loops the first note of your riff in 16ths for a bar it is actually distracting so you really need to think about what is useful as a guitarist. I think you would need to steer clear of the top end of the spectrum, but you can get some great gated effects with the Stutter effect and the filter allows you to draw an envelope which you can assign to a low pass, band pass or high pass filter double that up with a Phaser and the Crush (a distortion effect that allows you to change the sample rate or bitrate). Actually I should mention that every effect has 2 modulator tracks (A and B) that allow you to draw in a curve or steps (or randomize) and then assign that to one of the effect parameters and these 2 modulator tracks are unique per key pattern, that means every pattern assigned to a different midi key can have a different modulator track. These modulator tracks are a very powerful feature so this a welcome feature.

As a guitarist I think you really need to spend a lot of time playing around with combinations of patterns and effects to find something that is usable and not too crazy sounding, mind you if you are wanting to write a crazy piece of music than this will make your life much easier! I am going to experiment over the next few weeks and post a few examples for Guitarists to give you a better idea.

As an electronic music producer I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t jump onto the Effectrix website right now and download the demo, it is a VST plug-in so it will work with probably every audio sequencer out there whether you are a Mac or PC user. It will inspire you to add variation to your loops and the midi assignable variations mean they can be easily triggered or programmed into your compositions. If you are a live musician you can set up patterns and trigger them in realtime via midi using “Run on MIDI note” mode where the effect sequences will only be played when you hit a MIDI note. That way you can modify your live audio using an external controller, whether that be a keyboard or foot controller. There are so many possibilities I can’t begin to explain them all in this review so I recommend you download the demo and check it out, or check out their demo video to see it in action!

The only problem I could find with this plug-in is that it is very tempting to use it on every track, it is very addictive and you have to use a bit of restraint! That and the fact that I now want to use it on my Techno track so it is now going to take me even longer to finish…

Effectrix website.

I’m quite lazy it has to be said. I’ve owned a mac or two for the last 3 or 4 years and not once have I recorded anything in GarageBand, why? Well by the time I’ve loaded it up and plugged in my Takamine I’ve started to lose interest. Then I’m searching around for a decent drum loop to jam to and well its all over and I’m online searching for cool guitars before I know it. Well I don’t have that excuse anymore because I am now the proud owner of Sonoma Wireworks - Riffworks! If you haven’t heard of this product I encourage you to watch this video or search YouTube for videos tagged with “Riffworks”.

Ok done that? Impressed? Skeptical? Ok so that video is edited a little in order to make it nice and snappy but believe me the first 2 riffs the guy lays down are realtime, Riffworks only records a new layer when it has a signal so you can wait for a couple of repeats then start playing and it will instantly record your next take. Ok I’m getting ahead of myself… This is a really fun bit of software, it really takes me back to when my brother and I got our first 4-track (Yamaha MT100II) and started recording song after song. The key to Riffworks is that it has been tailored to creating songs by Riffs (not suprisingly!). So you can just keep adding layer after layer without touching the computer and it keeps each take which you can also set to mute as it finishes so that you can do multiple takes. The next thing that makes it so great is a little feature called Instant Drummer™ which lets you dial up a drum loop and with the turn of a dial alter the intensity of the playing and the variation of the pattern. This is left to the creators of the drum patches to interpret as they wish but it is so easy to find a drum track to jam along to. These drum patches are available as add-ons from the website at $9.99 a set so be prepared to outlay a few extra dollars to get the right mix of loops to keep the creative juices flowing.

When you create a layer, say an 8 bar riff in 4/4, you can add and remove effects to this layer. The effects are pretty amazing, you could quite literally use riffworks as your main signal processor for recording without using any other features they are that good! They aren’t just your run of the mill reverbs and delays either there are some very creative units like the Attaq and Tempest modules. I was stuck playing with those two for hours!! Oh and did I mention that the standard version comes with Amplitube 2 Live? Oh my… When you plug in to Riffworks you can choose to use hardware monitoring or if you prefer, run it through the effects first. Please, please make sure you do this it is soo good. Select Amp and use Amplitube to create a head and cabinet to get your sound started, then you can either use Amplitube’s stomp boxes which are good or you can use Riffworks effects which are great. Although I found myself making silly noises far too often because it was fun! I plugged my Takamine TEAN46C directly into my Macbook Pro and used Amplitube to create a nice Amp and then played around with Riffworks effects to create a couple of tracks and a bass track using the Tripwire effects module to detune my guitar an octave. You can hear the results of an hours messing around here and believe me it really doesn’t do this software justice!!

Once you create a riff it is really easy to then put them together to create a song, just by dragging and dropping onto the song timeline. You can even create songlayers which are not riff based so that you can lay down solos or vocals. However this is not Riffworks’ main focus and it is tricky to edit the volume throughout a songlayer for instance if you wanted to splice two together, you might be better creating a few and then exporting them to Ableton Live or something for more detailed wave editing. I think if I coupled this with something like Abelton Live I would pretty much have a perfect set up for a very small amount of cash. There is a lot more to this software like the online collaboration and sharing functionality but I really recommend you just download the demo and check it out for yourself. I’m off to try and emulate Eddie’s “Brown sound” and write me a VH classic!

When it comes to writing down your latest creation most of us would probably scribble a few chords on a scrap of paper and hope we can remember it the next time or if it is for someone else… well just hope for the best or supply a recording with it. The more adventurous guitarists out there might actually write it down in TAB notation either on paper or in ASCII in your favourite text editor (a very tedious task!). I have come from a background of using Steinberg Cubase first on an Atari ST520 and then VST on PC and there were basic scoring features in these programs but it didn’t translate to Guitar. So I was really excited to get my hands on Progression by Notion Music.

Notion Music specialise in Music Scoring software, their flagship product Notion 2.0 uses samples of the London Symphony Orchestra recorded at Abbey Road Studios for authentic playback instead of nasty MIDI instruments. Progression also uses sampled sounds in order to make it easier to get realistic sounding scores but they are specifically tailored to Guitarists needs. For a start you have a choice of Guitars and Basses, Keyboards and Harps and a Drum Kit. Ok say you choose an electric guitar, lets face it that is where most of us start and you drag a couple of notes onto the stave or tab to see how it sounds. It sounds like a clean guitar, obviously. But, and this is where Progression is really different from normal TAB software, you have 3 FX banks per instrument. If you open FX1 you have a choice of amps, a speaker simulator, Chorus, Delay and Reverb units. There are also lots of presets from Clean to Rock and you can modify any of the parameters by changing the settings on the effects units or by adding and removing effects modules very easily.

Now the real job of this software is to notate your compositions so how do we do that. Well there are 3 methods. The first and primary method is using a MIDI guitar, something that unfortunately I don’t own and therefore couldn’t test but I think this is where this software would really shine. The second method is using a MIDI keyboard ,alas again which is something I don’t own. So I had to use the 3rd and quite frankly least preferable method of drag and drop. Now I’m not a very patient person so I found this pretty tricky. I knew what I wanted to do but it seemed a bit of a chore to actually do it. My advice is use a keyboard if you have one, but a MIDI guitar would be a lot easier. Saying that when you see what can be achieved with a little patience and know how in the demo files it is pretty impressive and you could use it create jam tracks using the built in drum sample tracks and throw some chord progressions in there. The only thing I was a bit disappointed about was that you can’t convert the chord diagrams to TAB, this would be a nice addition for quickly creating tracks.

I am going to have to put in some time in to see if I can learn how to create notation with minimum effort and no external MIDI input device. That said, this is an incredibly powerful software application if you are prepared to take the time to learn. Teachers in particular will probably find this indispensible once they use it. If you just wanted to notate scales and chord changes it is actually really easy there is a Chord diagram section at the bottom of the application where you choose the key and it shows all the chord variations which you can drag and drop into your score, these are visual elements only. If you want to TAB a C Major scale you can click on the strings in the TAB and type the fret number into the box that appears, very simple. And I suppose if you start out with these tasks you will slowly start expanding on your knowledge and start creating multi-voice multi-instrument scores in no time.

I just came across this app for OS X called GuitarLog, I haven’t tried it yet but it looks pretty cool. The idea is that you structure practice sessions by using stored exercises. Each take remembers the “state” of your performance of an exercise and increments the BPM each time unless you specify otherwise.

“If you haven’t practiced an exercise for a while and don’t want to waste time listening to mistakes, you should rate all of your takes. It only takes a simple keystroke to set a rating, but can provide you with so much information as you review your practice sessions. It can also be used from the Statistics view to quickly recall the fastest tempo you’ve achieved in a particular exercise.“

You can also track which guitars were used on specific takes and see statistical graphs of your improvements. So far it is heavily geared toward reaching maximum tempo per exercise but apparently this application is still evolving so maybe it will analyse precision in the future? That would be very useful, say you had an mp3 of a riff and it checked your version against theirs at different tempos?

Anyway I can’t really tell how useful it is until I try it, so that is my plan for this weekend!