Digital Performer 7: Guitar Heroes

That seems easy enough, but what if you ever needed more than five plug-ins, for a more complex chain of effects? That’s also easy: go to the Mixing Board’s mini-menu and choose ‘Set Number of Effects Inserts’. In the dialogue box that appears, you can specify up to 20 slots, which should deal with even the most outrageous guitar treatments!

With bigger plug-in chains comes the challenge of using them efficiently, and here a tiny bit of Mixing Board technique is worth an awful lot. By moving your mouse pointer to the left edge of an occupied plug-in slot, you get a ‘move hand’. Click and drag a plug-in like this, and you can move it to another slot, which makes re-ordering a plug-in within a chain really easy. You can also re-order whole groups of plug-ins. First, click a plug-in within an insert slot (this time not at the left edge) to select it, and then shift-click additional plug-ins to add them to the selection. When you’re ready, point to the left edge of any one of them, and all the plug-ins you selected can be dragged en masse to a new location. You never need to worry about channel formats when you’re doing this either, as DP does all the behind-the-scenes work in switching the plug-in you’re moving, or those in neighbouring slots, to maintain the appropriate mono or stereo signal flow. Sweet!

Here are some other ideas. When you’re dragging a plug-in (or plug-ins), holding down the Alt key will duplicate rather than move them — which is really handy for copying whole chains from one track to another. Holding down Alt while you click a plug-in within its insert slot toggles it on and off, just the same as clicking its bypass button if its window were open. Bypassed plug-ins are shown with their names in italics. And if you’re getting overwhelmed with plug-in windows while tweaking a long chain of effects, try closing all but one, and then using that one’s ‘insert view’ pop-up menu to switch to another plug-in in the same window.

Using this same technique, you can build up whole libraries of plug-in settings and chains for yourself. Or try some that MOTU have made for you: go to www.motu.com/newsitems/new-guitar-tones-for-dp7 and download some of the Clippings there. You can then drag the Clippings files directly from the OS X Finder into plug-in slots in DP.

First of all, it’s important to understand that Custom ‘59 is just an amp head, not a speaker cabinet as well. If you use it by itself... well, just don’t! Not unless you like really hissy, sharp-edged distortion, that is. It’s really designed to be used in the signal flow ahead of Live Room G, which adds the speaker emulation that smooths everything out and thickens it up.

The next thing about Custom ‘59 is that it just doesn’t overdrive and distort in the aggressive way that some more modern amps do. Maybe the clue is in the name, because MOTU apparently aimed it at the production of predominantly clean and light blues tones, with the possibility of a bit of crunch emerging in response to a more active playing style. So the bottom line is that you need to work with what it was designed to do, and don’t expect it to replicate every amp on the planet. Having said that, you can massively expand its range by preceding it with one of the new distortion plug-ins, or just a humble Trim plug-in, set to drive the input with, say, an additional 30dB of gain.

Also, take a closer look at Live Room G (see screen opposite). It actually has its own drive stage, controlled by the ‘Cabinet Drive’ knob at top left. You can use this to increase Custom 59’s scope when it’s feeding into Live Room G. However, some of the best heavier tones available in DP7, I think, are those achieved by missing out Custom ‘59 altogether, and just running a distortion plug-in into Live Room G.

Finally for this month, let’s talk about reverb. Plenty of hardware guitar amps have it built in, but DP’s don’t, so what should you use and where? My suggestion is to look at the excellent Plate plug-in (and don’t forget to click its ‘expand’ toggle to get the full range of options). You can also check out the many varied Plate presets in ProVerb, or even import a spring reverb impulse response from the web: try www.xs4all.nl/~fokkie/IR.htm for some classics. Place the reverb plug-in before Live Room G, for an authentic amp-based sound, or at the end of your processing chain for more expansive treatments.  0