Can someone do a high gain palm muting demo?

[clay-man]

Hey, I just wanted to know how different palm muting honestly became after they enhanced it and how it sounds on the HD upgrade. I can't find any good demonstration of the improvement. 

 

Does anyone mind showing me a good demo of palm muting?

[daedae]

Don't know if it's a "good" demo ;) This is my 89F through the 5150 model in Guitar Rig 5: https://soundcloud.com/d-upton/pmtest/s-WZsAW

[clay-man]

Don't know if it's a "good" demo ;) This is my 89F through the 5150 model in Guitar Rig 5: https://soundcloud.com/d-upton/pmtest/s-WZsAW

 

Awesome! I use guitar rig a lot, as well as the 5150 model.

Sounds like there's still a bit of flubbyness in the palm muting, but it sounds better I suppose. You can usually make it sound tighter by working with the EQ of your tone. 

 

I really appreciate the demo though. HD firmware, correct? I forgot to mention that in the title.

[daedae]

I'm pretty sure this is the 2.0FW, I don't remember having gone through the effort of upgrading it since then. And yeah, there may be some room for improvement with post EQ or tweaking the amp settings, this was just with one of the included presets and no further tweaking. I saw nobody had responded to your post so I figured I could spare a minute or two to give you something :)

[clay-man]

I'm pretty sure this is the 2.0FW, I don't remember having gone through the effort of upgrading it since then. And yeah, there may be some room for improvement with post EQ or tweaking the amp settings, this was just with one of the included presets and no further tweaking. I saw nobody had responded to your post so I figured I could spare a minute or two to give you something :)

 

I really appreciate it! I know it's a bit of a hassle to do what I asked, but I thought it was the best place to ask obviously. 

 

I've noticed I get better results on my 600 if a palm mute a little higher on the strings than other people normally do on their Variax. It makes it less compressed and more muted.

 

I think the biggest problem is that the palm muting hand lies between the string vibrations and the pickups, so that robs a lot of frequencies and hears a lot different than say, the magnetic. Even the bridge magnetic pickup lies beyond the palm so it gets the frequencies better.

The piezos end up having a lot of low but now enough highs when palm muting, so it sounds really smooth and weird unless you push it a bit with some EQing.

 

The reason why they use piezos is because I believe they have the best frequency response and are better for modeling.

 

About 0-30 seconds is a good explanation of why Line 6 would use piezos over magnetics:

 

 

If we're emulating multiple pickups and bodies, it's not possible just using 1 regular magnetic pickup, because it'll chop off frequences. You can't just EQ them back or throw an algorithm because it has nothing to grab if you literally cut those frequencies out to begin with.

You can't make a standard humbucker sound like a single coil through EQ or impulses. You can make it bright, but it'll never replicate the attack of a telecaster pickup or anything.

 

 

I think the palm muting being a little bit different is fine though. I'm glad they at least improved it. The piezos are the whole reason it blows the VG strats out of the water.

[clay-man]

Hi. I'm bumping this because I have an interesting concept I'd like to share on the whole palm muting issue.

 

I'm not sure exactly how much palm muting has been resolved, if whether they only fixed the dynamics, or the frequency response.

 

 

 

 

On the topic of frequency response. Do you know why palm muting sounds the way it does on the Variax? I think I personally figured out why.

You see, when we palm mute on a regular guitar, where do the pickups sit? In front of the palm:

 

 

Now, on a Variax, where are the pickups for the modeling? In the bridge. Where is the bridge when you palm mute? Behind your hand. What does this mean? Well, a regular guitar's magnetics can hear the strings better than a piezo on the Variax.

 

Basically I think what's happening is that our hands are muffling the strings from the pickup being able to hear it correctly when we palm mute, which kills a lot of the high end from palm muting, which is why it sounds so smooth and compressed on a Variax.

 

 

 

I have a demonstration I want to show, when I am essentially palm muting regularly, and then palm muting at the nut with my fingers. Notice how when I use my fingers, the high end and clarity is there, almost like the palm muting problem is completely gone now! This is impractical to do though, as it's very difficult to palm mute with your left hand when playing on something other than an open string.

 

In this demo, everytime you hear an unmuted chord or note, it means I switched palm muting techniques. First starts out with regular at the bridge, next is at the nut, and back and forth. You can hear the clarity when I do it at the nut.

 

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21663288/Music/variaxpalmmuting.mp3

 

So how can we resolve this? Well notice, at the very end, it sounds clear when palm muting. Am I muting at the nut? No. I switched from Les Paul to a Tele sound. So what does this mean? I think if Line 6 could detect when a note is a palm mute, they could add some type of compensation filter to raise the highs when you palm mute, giving it a more natural sound. EQ all the frequencies that get mangled when passing through your palm to the piezo. 

 

I'm not sure how much Line 6 has already applied this since the palm muting update, but I think it's a very good idea. It's a very practical solution. What do you guys think?

[clay-man]

No thoughts on my idea?