Pro Tools 9 and the Pro Tools Mbox Family
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Pro Tools 9 and the Pro Tools Mbox Family Eleven Rack Figure A6.1 Eleven Rack: Pro Tools recording system for guitar players. Going back a couple of years, Digidesign released a plug-in called Eleven that modeled classic guitar amps and eff ects. Digidesign’s Eleven Rack now lets you run these on its internal DSP to provide higher quality with virtually no latency – and you also avoid loading your computer’s CPU. Designed with guitarists in mind, Eleven Rack is a 2U rack-mount unit that has just about everything a guitar player could wish for as far as software emulations of stomp-boxes and studio effects, classic guitar amps and cabinets, and typical studio microphones that would be used to record these are concerned. Just hook up the mono or stereo outputs to your guitar amp or a PA system, plug your guitar in, switch through the presets in ‘Rig’ mode, and you will fi nd instant gratifi cation from the classic guitar amp tones inspired by Fender, Vox, Marshall, Soldano, and Mesa/Boogie, and the sought-after classic stomp-box tones inspired by eff ects from MXR, Electro-Harmonix, Univox, and others. There are 104 preset Rigs and 104 user-memory locations that you can use to store edited versions of these, or your own custom rigs. The amps and eff ects are emulated using circuit-modeling techniques, while convolution-based techniques are used to deliver tremendous realism from the speaker cabinet emulations and from the classic dynamic, condenser, and ribbon microphone emulations. APPENDIX 6 As most electric guitar players are aware, when you plug a guitar into anything other than a real guitar amp, the dynamic response just doesn’t feel the same. This is because the electrical impedance of a real guitar amplifi er’s inputs, or that of an eff ects unit, has an enormous eff ect on the sound of the guitar. Eleven Rack addresses this problem very eff ectively by replicating the input impedances of classic amps and eff ects – implementing this using its own, proprietary, ‘True-Z’ analogue circuitry. The impedance value of the input will change automatically according to which eff ects pedal or amp model is first in the signal chain, and these settings are stored with each preset. You can manually adjust the impedance value to suit whichever guitar you are playing, and store your own settings with each preset. Eleven also has a microphone input and A/D-D/A converters that are of similar quality to those in the 003 Rack Plus. Interfacing with Pro Tools Eleven Rack can be used as an interface to Pro Tools, connecting via USB, and it is supplied with a copy of Pro Tools 8 LE software. There is an Eleven window in the Windows menu of Pro Tools that lets you edit the parameters inside Eleven Rack from your computer screen. Editing Eleven Rack from within Pro Tools in this way is much quicker and easier than using the front panel controls because you can see more parameters at the same time, and get around these using a mouse more quickly. However, Eleven Rack cannot be used as an interface to Pro Tools|HD. To use it with Pro Tools|HD hardware, or with another interface, you would still connect Eleven Rack to the computer via USB so that the Control window can be used from within Pro Tools, but you would also need to make audio I/O connections to your Pro Tools|HD or other interface using the digital I/O, for example. Re-amping Quite often, producers and remixers will want to change the sound of a recorded guitar track at the mixing stage. When you record audio from Eleven Rack into Pro Tools, the Rig data that you have used are also stored with the audio regions so that you can recall these data at any time and make further tweaks. Eleven Rack also has excellent features for ‘re-amping’. This technique is where you have previously recorded a guitar track, DI’ed cleanly into Pro Tools, and you want to feed this back out of Pro Tools into an amplifi er and maybe into Pro Tools 9 and the Pro Tools Mbox Family some eff ects units in your studio, re-recording this through a microphone back onto another track in Pro Tools. Eleven Rack is set up by default to record a ‘clean’ (unprocessed) guitar track alongside the track that is processed using the software emulations. It is easy to return this unprocessed guitar track back through the Eleven Rack via USB, add further processing inside the Eleven Rack (choosing a diff erent combination of amp, cabinet, eff ects, and microphone) and record this back into another Pro Tools track – ‘re-amping’ using Eleven Rack. Or you can feed this unprocessed track from Pro Tools out of the Eleven Rack’s guitar amplifier 1/4” jack output into a real amplifier in your studio, put a microphone in front of this, and record this back into Pro Tools via the Eleven Rack’s microphone input. This is what is usually meant by the term ‘re-amping’, that is feeding a previously recorded track back through an amplifier and re-recording the sound of this through a microphone. The Amps The designers went to great lengths to make the whole experience of playing through Eleven Rack satisfying for guitar players, as Digidesign’s website explains: Figure A6.2 Eleven Rack amps. APPENDIX 6 We spent years scouting a connoisseur’s collection of vintage and modern amps and cabinets, paying special attention to choosing amps that represented the best of their generation and remained unmodified from their original design. We then painstakingly inspected every component, took detailed measurements, and captured every stage of the signal path — point to point. We incorporated nuances like power amp sag, ghost notes, and cabinet resonance that other amp modeling developers overlooked, giving our clones the truly multi- dimensional tone and hyper-realistic response previously only achievable by mic’ing a real amp. We set out to invent an input circuit that re-creates the electronic relationship between your guitar and an actual amp or effect. This can’t be done digitally — so we developed a unique True-Z direct input that automatically adjusts the input impedance to match that of the particular amp/effects rig signal chain. Thanks to the True-Z input, plugging into Eleven Rack sounds and feels just like plugging into a real amp or effect. Using convolution processing, we captured the exact sound of the cabinets and mics used to create the tone of a mic’d combo — instead of using EQ filters to “fake” this sound the way other amp modeling solutions have done. We enlisted guitar recording expert John Cuniberti (Platinum and Gold recording engineer/producer and inventor of the Reamp box) to ensure the mic’ing techniques used during development were absolutely top notch. When you play guitar through Eleven Rack, you will appreciate all this painstaking design work, which has paid off extremely well in my opinion. Guitar amp emulations are based on: ’59 Fender Bassman ’59 Fender Tweed Deluxe ’64 Fender Black Face Deluxe Reverb Normal Channel ’64 Fender Black Face Deluxe Reverb Vibrato Channel ’67 Fender Black Face Twin Reverb ’66 VOX AC30 Top Boost ’69 Marshall 1959 100 Watt Super Lead Plexiglas Head Pro Tools 9 and the Pro Tools Mbox Family ’82 Marshall JCM800 2203 100-Watt Head ’89 Soldano SLO100 Super Lead Overdrive Head Clean Channel ’89 Soldano SLO100 Super Lead Overdrive Head Crunch Channel ’89 Soldano SLO100 Super Lead Overdrive Head Overdrive Channel ’85 Mesa/Boogie Mark IIc+ Drive Channel ’92 Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifi er Head Vintage Channel ’92 Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifi er Head Modern Channel Avid Custom Vintage Crunch Avid Custom Modern Overdrive The Effects Figure A6.3 Pedals, stomp boxes, typical guitar eff ects units recreated in software. Eleven Rack also emulates an assortment of vintage and classic effects processors – from highly sought-after stomp-box eff ects to high-end studio processors culled from Avid’s Pro Tools|HD TDM plug-in range. APPENDIX 6 Eff ects emulations are based on: Spring Reverb (based on the Fender Deluxe Reverb) Green JRC Overdrive (based on the Ibanez TS-808) Tri-Knob Fuzz (based on the Electro Harmonix Big Muff Pi) Black Op Distortion (based on the ProCo Rat) Shine Wah (based on the VOX V-846) C1 Chorus/Vibrato (based on the Boss CE-1) Orange Phaser (based on the MXR Phase 90) EP Tape Echo (based on the Maestro Echoplex EP-3) BBD Delay (based on the Electro Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man) Grey Compressor (based on the Ross Compressor) Vibe Phaser (based on the Univox Uni-Vibe) Black Wah (based on the Thomas Organ CB-95 Crybaby) Flanger Roto Speaker Volume Pedal Eleven SR (Stereo Reverb) Graphic EQ Tuner The Speaker Cabinets Eleven Rack has an option to automatically match the selected amp to a speaker. A total of seven-speaker cabinets are provided to match the amplifi ers, ranging from 1 × 12 Fender to 4 × 12 Marshall types. Speaker cabinet emulations are based on: ’59 Fender Bassman 4 × 10” with Jensen P10Qs Pro Tools 9 and the Pro Tools Mbox Family ’59 Fender Tweed Deluxe 1 × 12” with Jensen P12Q ’64 Fender Black Face Deluxe Reverb 1 × 12” with Jensen P12N ’67 Fender Black Face Twin Reverb 2 × 12” with Jensen C12Ns ’66 VOX AC30 2 × 12” with Celestion Alnico Blues ’68 Marshall 1960A with Celestion G12H ‘Greenbacks’ ’06 Marshall 1960AV 4 × 12” with Celestion Vintage 30s The Microphones Eight microphone emulations are provided, each with two positions: on axis or off axis.