Completely Useless Modular Guitar Effects with VCV Rack - Episode 1

Music & Patches
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Here’s the first installment in an occasional series, which I’m doing whenever I can be arsed. I’ve got loads of effects patches for guitar and decided to make an effort to share them. Obviously you can use these on regular oscillators, or any other audio source you like, but guitar is what they’re designed for.

Episode 1: Dirty Talk Box

This was inspired by Jakub Ciupinski’s idea of feeding audio into the Random module to make a resampler, which then goes through a filter for a formant effect (Video here: VCV Rack Hacks | Bitcrusher - YouTube). I wanted to try this on guitar, with an expression pedal connected to my MIDI foot controller for a kind of talk box. The guitar didn’t really have the right frequency range to make it work, until I had the idea of running the signal through a clock divider first. This is basically an octaver, but it’s absolutely filthy on guitar. I also mixed in some of the original guitar sound on a separate channel just to make the notes clearer, and added a few VST effects using Host (reverb, delay and chorus). I can’t think of any musical application for this sound at all, but if you have an expression controller and want to make a horrible talk box effect in VCV, now you can.

YouTube Demo

Patch:

4 Likes
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Well done, I like it, it would go well with a nice psychedelic patch a la Syd Barrett! I was thinking of making a psychedelic track but what to start with-Organ, Mellotron, guitar? Any advice on the perfect prescription :smile: > ?

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Thanks! Hmm, early Pink Floyd stuff with Syd Barrett was made with fairly basic instruments - guitars, organs and basic effects. I’d probably advise you don’t use VCV :wink:

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Don’t forget a marble - Syd used to sit one on a couple of strings then angle the guitar to get the marble to run up up down the neck a bit like a slide. That combined with oodles of echo/delay is a pretty trippy sound.

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It’s a lot cheaper to buy VCV and thousands of modules than to buy a strat, a farfisa and some vintage echoes, amirite?

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Sounds cool, you should join us in here: https://m.facebook.com/groups/196390261050644

Look forward to playing with them!

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at least marbles are cheap let me guess, you produce some round products that roll in a more efficient manner?

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So how would you go about recreating that in VCV Rack- Resonator for guitar and the ‘slide effect’ a pitch shifter? Chronoblob would work for the echo, maybe two of them? Any other ideas?

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try that, but rather than Chronoblob maybe something a bit closer to a Binson Echorec like

even though Gilmour is more associated with the heavy delay/echo than Syd it’s still a Floyd sound

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Thanks, that not crossed my mind. I was thinking of Watkins Watcat Varispeed Vst in Host. A very early British delay machine not sure they used it though! I have created a dreamy belly guitar soundscape using following patch using Cymatics SP Reverb in Host :

Resonating slider guitar.vcv (62.9 KB)

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didn’t realise before, but the Echorec has a wiki page and it says

Binson units were used to great effect by Pink Floyd’s original frontman Syd Barrett and then guitarist David Gilmour, but also by keyboardist Richard Wright. The classic Binson delay effect can be heard on songs such as “Interstellar Overdrive”, “Astronomy Domine”, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Time”.

so does seem the way to go

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Pity he lost his marbles in the end

1 Like
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boom tish… tish… tish… tish…

that Echorec’s still doing the business