Guitar FX

Brain

Is there a website resource that can assist novices to understand various guitar FX and their placement in popular usage for well-known popular music? There are so many great guitar FX sounds being used nowadays (and back when) that I’d like to know how to emulate them (if possible) with iOS music apps - I have the Guitarism app, but I have so little experience with creating custom sounds on synths that I have even less experience with guitar FX, and GB doesn’t come close the real thing. I suppose I’d like to be pointed to a popular song bit with some novel FX and then learn how to re-create that sound with iOS apps.

Your thoughts?

McDtracy

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tonebridge-guitar-effects/id1117291846?mt=8

It's free and has the right model for you... You select a song you like and it loads the FX to create that Guitar Rig setup. It's connected to Ultimate Guitar website and encourages you to sign up for that service to learn Guitar Tunes using Tablature.

But the ToneBridge works well and FREE makes it a good starting point.

After free many like ToneStack, JamUp, Amplitube and making custom rigs using IOS FX Apps.

There are also a lot of YouTube videos that suggest the ordering of stomp boxes for various purposes. Steve Vai's interview with Guitar Magazine is a standout in that regard.

hacked_to_pieces

Heres a few diagrams which show some guitar rigs that you could set up in most ios amp sims. There used to be a site called Guitar geek that had thousands of these but it's gone now.

jimi_hendrix_woodstock1

nirvana_kurt_cobain_1995_guitar_rig

radiohead_jonny_1997_guitar_rig

eric_clapton_cream_guitar_rig_1967

srv_1985

zztop_billy_gibbons_2003

oat_phipps

Stolen from Strymon website:

Dynamics (compressors), filters (wah), pitch shifters, and Volume pedals typically go at the beginning of the signal chain.

Gain based effects such as and overdrive/distortion pedals come next.

Modulation effects such as chorus, flangers, phasers typically come next in the chain.

Time based effects such as delays and reverbs work best at the end of the signal chain.

Volume pedals can go at the beginning or end of your signal chain to provide slightly different functionality in different locations in your chain.

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The pictures above are good too. There's no golden rule, feel free to experiment, but the above would be the 'standard tuning' of effects chain orders.

Kranick

https://www.guitarplayer.com/gear/pedal-order-by-the-numbersplus-the-pros-on-pedal-order

https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/where-to-place-your-effect-pedals-in-your-signal-chain

ohwell

Great tips above. If you want to dive deep, here are some pointers.

Where things get complicated with guitar effects/signal chain and tone is that a lot of what we love comes down to feeding multiple processing stages into one another. The classic case is saturation and compression: most of the guitar tones we love involve multiple stages of saturation (from the most gentle to overdrive to full blown distortion/fuzz) interacting in complex ways with each other. But that’s true for proper ‘effects’ too (from delay and reverbs to wah, pitch shifting, chorus, phasing, etc.)

IMO a fantastic resource to get a deeper understanding of how to achieve the tones you want is this YouTube show: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnUXq8mGmoHt0e6ItuTs10w

They have a definite bias towards hardware signal chain (actual pedals and amps) but the many episodes they do about specific types of effects and signal chain are a fantastic source of ideas for digital processing too.

My experience has been that the most tricky parts of the signal chain to model accurately using digital are the amp and speaker cabinet stages. IMO on iOS positive grid bias is a great platform for getting a deeper understanding of what’s going on there, and how to achieve the results you like. (My own preference is to use Kazrog’s thermionik plugins on Mac OS for amp modeling - they blow everything I’ve tried out of the water for touch responsive lower to mid gain stuff (despite the fact that the guy who makes these plugins is more interested in high gain stuff himself!), so I’m out of touch with the all iOS options.) The other tip I have is to use good quality cabinet IRs. AFAIK Bias now carries celestion IRs as IAP. Those are probably worth getting!

I know you mentioned you’re a novice, so this might feel like TMI. But my 2 cents is that at least being aware of these issues will save you a lot of frustration if you keep finding you just can’t quite nail the sounds you want..

Brain

Thank you all for the vast amount of info offered. I’m not a guitar player by any stretch of the imagination (to say the least) so I’m looking at a lot of ramping-up to get my head around it all. If I could emulate - for example - that quintessential Queen guitar sound it would please the heck out of me, but there is obviously so much more to strive for. Hopefully I can get around this without ever having to learn to play the guitar!

Telefunky

If you're not a guitar player and don't want to precisely imitate a certain sound, just don't dig too deep into the setups pictured above.
An electric guitar generates a rather specific (basic) sound, which also gets heavily influenced by physical interaction in a real acoustic live environment.
Neither guitar amps nor cabinets are particularily 'trustworthy' in sound reinforcement, but just work well with an instrument/setup.

A similiar processing chain for synth sources may yield very different sounds for the lack of string response (which changes with hit position and kind of attack) and the absence of the instrument's body and speaker resonating in live space at loud playing volumes.
The latter producing a significant amount of the instrument's character.

The Queen guitar sound is based on multiple amps (Vox AC30 iirc) that are panned and/or multitracked.