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eftychia at 05:50pm on 2005-03-28One more bit about the music room, just in case it winds
up amusing ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
hobbitblue: Running a mandolin through
a wah pedal sounds rather interesting, verging on the silly.
Though the highest notes of "Rights Of Man" didn't leave the
pedal a lot of overtones to work with, so the effect was
considerably diminished on the notes that could've used it
most dramatically. But in the low- and middle-range of the
mandolin, I guess there's an especially rich mix of frequencies
for the pedal to go nuts with.
(I'm betting that different models of wah pedal have different
high-frequency limits, so a different pedal might be able to do
something with those high notes ... but maybe not, if it would
mean losing the effect on the low end. Hmm. Back-burner research
project. It might be fun to take the mandolin into a few music
stores to try out all the different wah pedals I can find. Hmm.
I wonder whether anybody makes a digital super-wah with tweakable
parameters and presets for most of the popular analog wahs. Turn
a knob and it goes from being a bass-wah to a mandolin-wah, push
a button and it turns into a T-wah ... it would make sense to
include on a rack-mount multi-effects unit with a multi-function
pedal, but I've never looked closely at any multi-effects boxes
except the one madbodger loaned me (which I need to
go through all the settings on again to see whether it can do
a particular effect I've been hearing in my head that I want
to use). Y'know, there are times I really wish I had EE-fu.)
And in the "I should have remembered that" category -- hey, it's been quite a while since I stuck a battery in that pedal -- trying to use a wah pedal while sitting in too low a chair is not good. Gotta use a taller chair or stand up.
I still need to get the electric mandolin refretted so I can play G# again. (If I try to play G# at the 6th fret on the 3rd course, one string plays G# and the other plays a rather buzzy A. Very much not-good.)
(no subject)
First, get some software that can do some frequency spectrum analysis.
I'm sure there's some good stuff out there that can run on a well-equipped Mac or something. It'll probably show you nice and graphically what frequencies you need to hit.
Then all you need to do is look up the frequency specs of all the Wahs out there. (I'm sure someone has posted them on the Net)
It'll only cost you the Mac and the Software.
Or, if you're springing for the computer anyway...
Get a decent MIDI interface and some effects software and you can probably do an "assign" where the pedal is set to sweep thru the "useful" frequencies.
As a matter of fact, you can even record the mandolin digitally and then add in the Wah stuff later. If you're basically editing a sound file, you can even do effects that are faster and more precise than what you can keep up with live, so you can eliminate the pedal altogether.
And since the mandolin has very little sustain and is a reasonably pure tone, you can just go and sample one note and then use Cakewalk or something to sequence your passage and, while you're at it, custom craft each note thru an EQ patch.
Or you can sample different notes and play them back at different speeds. Who knows? A440 might sound better on the D string than on the open A. Heck, pitch shifting the G# so that it plays a fifth higher might have overtones that respond to the wah better than the normal D#. Hey, and slower sample speeds might respond to the wah better since those cut off corners on the waves might have more frequencies (pink noise) for the wah effect to play with. And let's not forget the tuning distortion when you fret the strings, especially since they're doubled. You can tweak each note so that plays exactly in tune and then mix it again with slightly detuned sample to dial in exactly how much double string chorus you want. Of course some amounts of chorus might play with the Wah effect differently, so you'll want to check that too.
The downside, of course is that the number of things you want to test adds up fast with each parameter you want to check. My mandolin has
18X4=72 notes, (yours probably has a few more) so you can work out the number of combinations of notes, wah (EQ) settings, and sample speeds and bit rates. Oh, and don't forget the alternate tunings and maybe some different string sizes.
But I'm sure it'll be time well spent once you find that perfect sound.
So,
For a mere few thousand dollars and some well spent time in research, you can eliminate the problems of fret buzz and tuning distortion, not have to play a single note, AND have total control over every single tonal paramater. The reward will be that with a little time, money and research you'll have exactly the effect you hear in your head, played flawlessly, without those silly human and/or mechanical limitations.
Have fun!