Duelling guitar pedal

[tomlau]

Has anyone done this? I was thinking about how cool it would be to make a pedal that can give a single guitar the effect of two "duelling" guitars (think Thin Lizzy). Any suggestions on how I might do this?

[JimRayden]

Umm... "duelling sound"? Too bad, but you just can't stick two guitarists and guitars into this small of a box.

If you mean a delay, they're pretty complex and digital. It'll be cheaper to just buy a unit. Though it doesn't hurt to check out GGG.

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Jimbo

[Steben]

Modulated delay without any doubt. That's the trick if you don't want to overdub yourself ;-) .

[Gladmarr]

Too bad, but you just can't stick two guitarists and guitars into this small of a box.

Jimbo

I find you usually can't get two guitarist into a box of any size without some duelling going on!   

What about a delay that has sharp time shifts in the modulating waveform.  So the "second" guitar sound goes from, say, 100milliseconds behind to 140milliseconds behind the original instantly, so you don't get warbly shifts, but it actually emulates the natural timing differences between two guitarists' phrasing.

[Mark Hammer]

Do you mean simultaneously or "call-and-response" as in the (now famous) "The End" from Abbey Road?

[tomlau]

Hmm...
So what kind of modulated delay would be easily suited to this sound? I normally find those delays kind of warbly and awkward. I'm looking for something slightly more subtle with a singing quality rather than a warble (or worse, a yodel!  )

[soundcollage]

Unfortunately, those great harmonized solos ala Thin Lizzy and The Allman Brothers require digital circuitry to emulate (and even then it's shoddy). This is because any intervals other than unison or octave  will create tones that are out of key unless they are adjusted by fancy digital software. For example, in the key of C, if you had a device shifting what you played up a major third, only C, F and G would result in a second note in key. Boss makes an "intellegent" pitch shifter that solves this problem by shifting  between  a major  third up or a minor third (or any interval you choose) up to keep the harmony notes in key the downside of this is that you need to input a specific key and stay there or you get back to the "not so pretty notes". Also, this does not work well for cleantone if you are trying to sound like two actual guitars-- it sounds more like a glitchy casio is playing along with you (which can be fun but...).  Fuzzy distortion helps to hide the tonal discrepency,  but again this is no replacement for two guitar players or doubletracking.

[Dave_B]

What about a delay that has sharp time shifts in the modulating waveform.  So the "second" guitar sound goes from, say, 100milliseconds behind to 140milliseconds behind the original instantly, so you don't get warbly shifts, but it actually emulates the natural timing differences between two guitarists' phrasing.

I think that's what a Dimension C does, only times two, right? 

[Gladmarr]

I dunno...   

as for the in key thing, that's incidental anyway.  Most players don't know the intricacies of playing in key, and most listenners don't know much of anything about what they're hearing.  There's also the notion of incidental notes in a scale, and most important for me, I don't play anything that depends on staying in key, so I always get off the hook that way.  I know this is a total cop-out, but if you want a sound that is like two guitars getting all crazy playing against each other, there's little accuracy involved.

There's my little dissertation on the topic.