Tracking With MOR

[Armageddon]

First of all, thanks to the moderators for wishing me a happy birthday on the 10th (actually, I'm sure it was an automated message from the board, but the sentiment holds ...)!

Secondly, I'm in the process of tracking my first song using MOR for the drums, bass, rhythm and lead guitars. I'd used the Les Paul Deluxe lead and PC patches, as well as the Gibson J-160 and the Telecaster lead patch on some film score work in the past, but that was a deal where I dumped (or "froze", as I use DP for MIDI and audio) the sound right out of MOR and mixed it with my other virtual instruments down to two tracks. This is the first time I'd actually decided to use MOR basses and drums, as well as have two completely different guitars, panned to either side like "real" rhythm guitars and track them all like a studio situation.

I wound up using a Les Paul Deluxe lead/PC and the Ibanez lead/PC patches as my rhythm guitars, humanizing and nudging the Ibanez's part, panned right, just a little bit to get the sound of "doubled guitars" (I've tried working with the built-in doubling on MOR, but doing it the way I just described sounds a lot more realistic, to me). First of all, the two guitars (and I used the KRANK amp sound on the Ibanez and the Marshall on the Les Paul) meshed together extremely well, despite the fact that their articulations and keyswitching are different (this actually helped the doubling effect a bit more, since you get more of an up-down pick stroke on the Les Paul). Secondly, I was concerned that the PC and the lead sounds would have to somehow be mixed in order to sound like a single cohesive guitar part -- they blended together flawlessly with no mixing required. I put the Les Paul PC/leads on one instance of MOR on two MIDI channels, both panned left and both left dry, and did the same with the Ibanez, panned right, on another instance of MOR, just so I could make sure the doubling worked out okay and have an idea of what they'll sound like in the finished song. When I actually track the audio, I'll be recording the Les Paul PC/leads on one mono audio track and the Ibanez on another, then treat both tracks like regular guitar tracks, with compression, EQ, reverb, etc. So far, they sound amazing, just playing straight out of MOR dry, and I have a mono Fender P-Bass patch as my bass sound, which really pretty much sells the guitars and meshes really well with the Black kit, which is what I'm using for percussion.

I think my only complaint with what I've experienced with this so far is, you can't really open-strum a distorted guitar on MOR, which is to say, you can't keep strumming the same chord with your sustain pedal down and get the effect of your guitar chord sound washing over itself (i.e. - think of the chorus for something like "Bring Me To Life"). If you want to sustain a chord in MOR, you have to just hold the key down and sustain that one chord without the effect of you continuing to strum that particular chord, and while I realize that plenty of songs with real guitars do just that, it sort of limits the realism you're striving for with a sampled guitar.

[digit]

My biggest complaint with MOR are the tuning issues and ghost notes. Also, I'd liked to have different types of distortion and guitar sounds. As it is it's more like MOM (Ministry of Metal) than MOR. But, sounds very good nonetheless!

Having said that, as a guitar player, I can offer you this: A chord doesn't really wash onto itself because the guitar has no sustain pedal. Even if you leave the left hand pressing on the strings without lifting/muting before striking each chord all you get is a re-triggering as the pick/fingers hit the strings each time. But, as you hit each string with a pick or fingers you are effectively stopping the previous vibration and inducing a new one. Does that make sense? The old notes don't really sustain over the new ones.

But, I think I know what you are trying to do.

Perhaps you can load a separate instance of the same LEAD guitar for each note of the chord and then, play the chords using the separate lead sounds, one note per guitar. This may give less audible re-triggering than using the chord patches and may sound more 'continuous'. I usually get a better sound playing chords using lead patches and a guitar MIDI controller than using the chord patches but, it depends on the sample...

The reason to load separate instances is that since a guitar has 6 separate MONOPHONIC strings you get a more realistic sound that way. But, this works best with a guitar MIDI controller set to send each string on a different MIDI channel. However, I don't think the MOR guitars were sampled with ALL the notes for each string, unfortunately. Otherwise they would have had a patch indicating the 6 separate strings and a way to assign them to separate MIDI channels. But, you can get close enough.

[Armageddon]

Thanks for your (especially a real guitar player's) input! It always just seemed to me that, if you strike an open chord, then strike it again, the first instance of that chord doesn't necessarily stop (unless you were to mute it beforehand) ... but then again, I don't really play guitar and sort of try to imagine how a real guitar would do it when I'm programming a guitar part. Before MOR, I was using the "Guitar Man" patch on a Korg X5-D with all the effects and "chord sounds" off, so that it sounded like a DI'd electric guitar, then running it through [third-party amp software I won't mention here] once it was recorded. I was able to get sustained chords and single notes that way, but then again, it was all being done on a keyboard, not a guitar.

Part of my concern with programming the guitar parts on this song was that the lead sounds and the chord sounds wouldn't quite match up when programming a rhythm guitar part, but surprisingly, they match up rather well, and for the MOR patches that actually have both chord and lead sounds, it really adds an extra layer of articulation.

I agree that there's a lot of stuff lacking in MOR that prevents it from being a "perfect toolkit" -- an odd lack of lead AND chord sounds for many of their included instruments (I'll say it for the millionth time: we need J-160 lead patches!!!), drum kits that lack all the (literal) bells and whistles of a standard GM drum kit, and an inconsistency from guitar patch to guitar patch (for example, on my song, I discovered that the Ibanez rhythm patch actually contains more chords than the Les Paul Deluxe rhythm patch, so I had to improvise). No two rhythm guitar patches play alike, so if you change your mind about using a Les Paul Deluxe patch and decide to use a PRS garage metal patch instead, you pretty much have to reprogram that track from the ground up. Considering that their bass and drum patches are consistent across the board, would it have been that hard to do the same with the guitars?

I suggested elsewhere that, instead of giving us one or two amping options, they provide us with DI'd versions of the guitars and either have a variety of amp simulations built into the instrument that we can choose from (and have running live, which is always better that having a pre-sampled amp sound) or allow us the ability to use third-party amp software -- even giving us the capability to "re-amp" the sound with a real amp like a real guitar. It would probably save a lot of disk space and allow for more articulations and sounds per instrument.

All that griping aside, this is still the best sampled rock guitar and bass instrument on the market (we've come so far, and yet, so many distorted guitar samples still seem to sound like that 8-bit E-MU guitar chord sample!) ... you just can't help but feel that they got so close, it really wouldn't take that much more to push them over the edge.