
Maybe you've seen food done as a deconstructed dish, where ingredients typically put together are served separately. For example, a deconstructed spring roll would plate all the ingredients inside it separately, with a dipping sauce on the side. You could wrap up the ingredients in whatever way you liked to construct your spring roll.
Wait-what does this have to do with guitar? Well, I had an opportunity to talk with Chris Jenkins, who won an Academy Award for the sound in Mad Max - Fury Road and worked on the documentary The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years. He mentioned how for the surround mix of ancient Beatles concert footage, instead of upmixing, they deconstructed it by sending pre-equalized sound into special-purpose, acoustical spaces optimized for different instruments. Re-recording the acoustified sounds created the 5.1 mix. This is why footage from the 60s could sound natural and organic in 5.1 surround.
Sound effects sometimes use a related approach. If they don't sound right laid into a film's soundtrack, they're sometimes played back in an acoustic space, re-recorded, and then added to the film. This makes them sound more real world.
So what if you took a dry guitar sound, pre-equalized the sound, split it into stereo, and fed it into two virtual cabinets from Ampire (no amps, no effects) for a deconstructed guitar sound? Listen to the audio example, and judge for yourself. Audio Example 1 is direct-injected, dry Tele.
Audio Example 2 is also DI Tele, but split into two cabs. Note how the deconstructed guitar opens up space in the center, and no longer has that flat DI sound. What's more, every time you change one of the cabs, you end up with a totally different tone. This approach is also ideal for LCR mixes, and the stereo image collapses well to mono.
Let's look at how to set this up in Artist, and then how to make an FX Chain in Professional (go to the end to download the FX Chain).
Artist Setup
Fig. 1 shows the setup for Artist. The dry guitar track's Pro EQ3 pre-conditions the sound going into the cabs. This is done to taste; there's no specific desirable curve. Just create a curve that sounds good with the cabs you use.
Figure 1: Deconstructed guitar setup for the Artist version.
Each of the dry guitar track's pre-fader sends goes to a bus. Each bus has an Ampire inserted, but with no amp or effects-only a cab. One bus has a 1 12 American cab, while the other has a 4 12 American cab. But there's nothing magic about those particular cabs, they just gave a sound I liked. In developing this tip, I tried a lot of cab combinations, and there were plenty of great-sounding options. Pre-conditioning with the EQ extended the options even further. For example, if a cab emphasized the bass too much, just trim the EQ's low frequencies.
The Bus panpots are set to the Dual Pan option. That gives more imaging choices, although in the screen shot, they're panned oppositely (hard left and hard right). To bring up the center, mix in some of the dry guitar track.
Pro Version FX Chain
With the Pro version, all this can fit into an FX Chain (fig. 2).
Figure 2: FX Chain for Studio One Professional.
The Splitter uses Normal mode. The comments above about the Pro EQ3 and Ampires apply here. The Dual Pans are set to pan hard left for one cab and hard right for the other one, but you can use these plug-ins to weight the sound more to one side or the other. For example, in one Dual Pan, the left panpot could go could full left, and the right panpot to center. The other Dual Pan could pan the left panpot to center, and the right panpot hard right.
The Chorus at the end is just an extra little goodie. The .multipreset has it turned off, but feel free to enable it. So, simply download the .multipreset, insert it in your dry guitar track of choice and have fun with deconstructing your guitar.
Click Here to download the Deconstructed Guitar.multipreset!
More from PreSonus
24/03/2023
You can mic piano, drums, guitar, voice, and other acoustic sources but you can't mic a synth, unless you put it through a PA or guitar amp, and then mic th...
22/03/2023
Notion Mobile v3 took mobile music creation to the next level with support for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Now v3.1 adds over 100 enhancements and fixes, l...
10/03/2023
First, some news: the free update to version 1.4 of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is finally available in the PreSonus Shop. If you purchased a pr...
03/03/2023
Last week's guitar-oriented tip seemed to go over well, so I figured y'all might like a follow-up. This takes advantage of Version 6's Track Presets...
24/02/2023
My sonic holy grail is clean distortion, which is why I like 3- or 4-band multiband presets. Splitting the audio into bands decreases the potential for nasty ...
17/02/2023
There's nothing new about using an FX Channel to add an effect in parallel to a main track. But we can make effects even more effective by tuning them, to...
10/02/2023
The March 2020 blog post, Taming the Wild Autofilter, never appeared in any of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips & Tricks eBook updates. This is because the tip ...
03/02/2023
High-gain distortion is great for lead guitar sustain and tone, but it also brings up that splat of pick noise at the note's beginning. Sometimes, you wan...
27/01/2023
First, an announcement: version 1.4 of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is a free update to owners of previous versions. It's currently available...
20/01/2023
Some virtual instruments can accept external audio inputs. This lets you process audio through the synthesizer's various modules like filters, VCAs, effects...
13/01/2023
This builds on last week's tip about splitting and navigating within the Video Track, because one of the main reasons for creating splits is to import addit...
06/01/2023
Studio One 6's enhanced video track now includes basic editing. Yes! You can cut out the section of your band's live video where the drunk guy came up a...
29/12/2022
Dim solo is a variation on the standard solo function. With dim solo, non-soloed tracks are still audible, but at a lower level than any soloed track or tracks....
16/12/2022
In June 2021, the blog post Metal Guitar Attack! described how to create a big sound for guitar power chords using Studio One Artist. Since then, I've ended...
09/12/2022
Maybe you've seen food done as a deconstructed dish, where ingredients typically put together are served separately. For example, a deconstructed spring rol...
02/12/2022
Some guitarists feel amp sims don't sound warm or smooth, but that can also be an issue with physical amps. This is why guitar players often turn down a...
25/11/2022
Here's the origin story: I had a 177 BPM drum loop that played the perfect part for a song. Audio Example 1 is the sound of the original 177 BPM file.
Howe...
18/11/2022
What's better than one vocoder? Two vocoders, of course . This tip is more about a technique than an application, although we'll cover an application ...
11/11/2022
I narrate an average of a video a week, so I'm always looking for better workflow options-and version 6 came through with the Lyrics Track. This tip is abou...
03/11/2022
I use vocoders all the time, but rarely for voice. One of my favorite techniques is using drums to drumcode synth pads or guitar power chords, and give instru...
21/10/2022
A previous Friday tip, Mid-Side Processing with Artist, was published in June 2021. Since then, I've found a less obvious, but simpler away to accomplish vi...
18/10/2022
Notion Mobile is a free, industry-leading music composition tool for iOS, iPadOS , MacOS, Android , Windows , Chrome OS , and Fire OS mobile devices. You'll...
14/10/2022
The May 2021 Friday Tip described how to use Jam Origin's MIDI Guitar 2 software with Studio One 5 running on Windows. Unlike the Mac, Windows doesn't s...
07/10/2022
You're probably familiar with Studio One's Micro Edit view, where you can expand/collapse an effect in the Insert Device Rack. However, Studio One 6 ext...
30/09/2022
Studio One's Pro EQ3 represents a major evolution to the Pro EQ. It now incorporates dynamic EQ, effectively but unobtrusively-if you want, you can treat EQ...
27/09/2022
Studio One 6 Professional Here's a quick FAQ of all you need to know about Studio One 6:
What's new in Studio One 6?
A lot. Studio One 6 is our most p...
23/09/2022
These simple EQ settings can fix a variety of issues. Just remember that often, a little goes a long way. When boosting or cutting with EQ, try the rule of hal...
16/09/2022
Quantizing audio works best with short, percussive sounds-like drums. Rhythm guitar is more of a challenge, because the attacks aren't always defined well, ...
09/09/2022
For me, the gold standard for sound isn't what comes out a studio, but live music. One of the reasons is that mono sound does not exist in an acoustic envir...
01/09/2022
The MIDI-oriented Songwriter's Assistant tip makes it easy to play around with chord progressions. This new tip is about experimenting with, and recording, ...
25/08/2022
Who reading this wouldn't want to make a little more money from their music? Okay, dumb question.
When people think soundtrack, images of Hollywood scori...
19/08/2022
A bass's low strings typically produce more energy than the higher strings. So, the low frequencies will push a compressor into compression before the highe...
12/08/2022
After the July 27 post on the Super Stereo and Mondo Mono FX Chain for Studio One Professional, there was interest in a version for Artist. I've always said...
05/08/2022
Go to the web, and you'll see a zillion YouTube videos and web posts that all say the same thing: a technique called parallel compression (also called New Y...
29/07/2022
This is my first FX Chain designed for Project page songs, although it also works for tracks and buses in the Song page. It's based on mid-side processing. ...
25/07/2022
With algorithmic reverbs (like the Room Reverb), you might be surprised at how much dry sound makes its way to the output, even with the dry/wet control set to ...
15/07/2022
I've written about how to get that cool pumped drum sound using the Compressor's internal sidechain-but I've never written about how to obtain the...
08/07/2022
If you've been following the Friday Tip blog posts, then you know two things: I actually use the stuff I write about, and ask What if? a lot. Those attrib...
01/07/2022
The July 4th weekend is approaching, so it's time to hit the beach-but you can't have surfing without surf music, right? So before you start scouting fo...
23/06/2022
How to Play Faster-By Playing Slower covered how to slow down tempo of non-MIDI based music without changing pitch. This allows playing a difficult part at a sl...
17/06/2022
as in, 10cc's I'm Not In Love. Back in those days, to minimize tape hiss, noise reduction compressed and increased highs when recording, then expanded...
10/06/2022
We already covered Mai Tai's FM synthesizer secret identity-but that was the start of fun things to do with Mai Tai, not the end. Here are five more Mai T...
03/06/2022
Almost all guitars, and many vintage keyboards, have mono outputs-but when it comes to recording and mixing, it's a stereo world. Ooops. Although you can al...
27/05/2022
This Main bus FX chain is all about an easy-to-adjust, useful set of controls for processing a stereo mix (or other buses, like background vocals or drums). Wan...
20/05/2022
On the surface, Mai Tai is an easy-to-program, fine-sounding virtual analog subtractive synthesizer. But let's dig deeper-and unlock its unique FM synthesis...
18/05/2022
I don't need a musical instrument when life plays the best notes
Chiara Luzzana (2022)
We at PreSonus are extremely thrilled to hear and see Chiara Luzz...
13/05/2022
The way I found out about Studio One and PreSonus: I had lunch with Bob Moses (president of the Audio Engineering Society at one time) and I asked him some que...
13/05/2022
Recently, I did some mix consulting on a 60-track project centered around Ukrainian relief-and as someone who usually works with far fewer tracks, it reminded m...
11/05/2022
Kris Xenopoulos, AKA KRIS XEN is a South African guitar player, musician and producer. Most well-known for his work with South African death metal outfit, Vul...
06/05/2022
We all know Impact XT is cool-but it's at its coolest when you use the individual audio outputs, because then you can add exquisite effects to individual dr...