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More sustain with distortion pedals


coreyhchan
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I'm using an overdrive pedal and tube screamer with the red conpression pedal and a noise gate. But I can't seem to get a very long sustain. I get the distortion sound I want but the distortion tone seems to fade out while the clean tone carries much longer. Any tips?

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Raise the action slightly on your guitar.Your strings vibrate in an elliptical fashion towards and away from the fretboard not from side to side as they appear to .That will give you more sustain. Modern players demand super low strings slapping against the fingerboard action.That is not what you want to do for good sustain.My guitars all sustain even when using my HD500 through my FRFR speakers.

 

I am sure some here will disagree with my opinion. Thats okay I have over 40 years of not just pro experience live and in the studio but I am a qualified guitar repair/setup tech as well.Learning to live with slightly higher action is the simplest solution to sustain and intonation problems.

 

That is what I know IMHO.

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most likely the noise gate cuts too early the signal, try to adjust the threshold

I'm glad I read this. I have one patch that I love the sound of, but it always seemed to cut some of my sustained notes short compared to other patches. It didn't occur to me to lower the noise gate on this patch since I have it set similarly on most of my patches, but reducing it did the trick.

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Raise the action slightly on your guitar.Your strings vibrate in an elliptical fashion towards and away from the fretboard not from side to side as they appear to .That will give you more sustain. Modern players demand super low strings slapping against the fingerboard action.That is not what you want to do for good sustain.My guitars all sustain even when using my HD500 through my FRFR speakers.

 

I am sure some here will disagree with my opinion. Thats okay I have over 40 years of not just pro experience live and in the studio but I am a qualified guitar repair/setup tech as well.Learning to live with slightly higher action is the simplest solution to sustain and intonation problems.

 

That is what I know IMHO.

Absolutely. The closer the strings are to the magnets in the pickups, the more the magnets pull on them, keeping them from vibrating as long.

 

I keep my action at about what I would classify as medium (not really high or low). It doesn't negatively affect my playing at all compared to lower action.

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