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Free Preview: Modifiers: Scene Controllers

Lesson 2 from: Axe-Fx Master Class

Cooper Carter

Free Preview: Modifiers: Scene Controllers

Lesson 2 from: Axe-Fx Master Class

Cooper Carter

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Lesson Info

2. Free Preview: Modifiers: Scene Controllers

Scene controllers are incredibly powerful – learn how to use them.

Lesson Info

Free Preview: Modifiers: Scene Controllers

Seeing controllers are incredibly powerful and for those of you don't know what scenes are there eight scenes preset they're basically many presets inside oven expects presets so with the scenes you can do the bypass states of blocks on and off into the x y states of blocks you can adjust the output volume here so you're basically allowing yourself like a giant almost like a classic bradshaw rig where all of the stuff changes with one click but you have all the same dear president in its lights like you have all the same gear on stage and you have a giant baby control or changing everything so you've got eight scenes and then if we go to the controllers you'll see that we have to seeing controllers controller one and control or two and what I'm gonna do is just again build a simple little preset and I think I'm gonna go we'll just stick with the brits silver because why not? All right so what I'm going to do is add a controller again to this input drive except instead of the physical e...

xternal controller this time I'm gonna goto the scene one controller basically what that's going to do and again I'm gonna go from about let's say two point five up tio nine or so as our minimum and maximum and then we go into the scene controller here and I believe these are actually already set from where I was tryingto kind of figure out what I was going to before but as you can see we've got these values in percentages so twenty five fifty seventy we go back to here and you'll see that we set a minimum of two point five and a maximum of nine point two one now I have no idea what twenty five percent of the distance between two point five two and nine point two one is and frankly I don't care enough to get a calculator out so you could use your ears but the much easier way to do this is to use something that you really only use when you're using the controllers which is allow the modifier toe have the full range so I don't want the amplifier to ever be on zero and I probably don't ever wanted to be on ten but in our scene controllers since our distance is now zero to ten and we have a percentage based value in the scene controllers we now can say twenty five percent of zero and ten is two point five on the drive scale fifty percent between zero and ten is a five on the drive scale so essentially we've simplified these percentages into values on the drive job so these already set but in scene one we have twenty five percent we should two point five we've got this kind of sound go to scene two you got fifty percent or five drive scene three and we've got even more and you could actually hear the noise increases I click through these scenes seventy percent okay, so what is the application for this say you've got a uh an intro you want the intro a little bit cleaner hit the verse seen tio all right hit the pre chorus and then you had the chorus in your wide open don't screw up playing and uh so that's kind of moving through the song you're upping the amp gain now how would you accomplish is in the real world you honestly couldn't you have to go back and turn up? You're not every time or you that your amp really high and user volume knob tio get the dynamics kind of rolling up as you go forward in the song but this is a much more precise way to do it with this you would need three separate dr pedals you need none on in the first scene you need one on in the second union, another on in the third and another on the fourth and they'd all be adding these tiny little incremental pieces of dr which really is silly and in the expects this case we can do this very simply through seeing controllers so what else could we dio uh let's go back to what we were talking about before, which was adding effects and using the same modifier teo hello modify each one we're going a little delay here and I'm gonna again so it's time to somewhere in the three hundred's and this mix I'm going to add to seem too so we have two different scene modifiers for each one ok so let's go in and again we want to keep a constant percentage and if you show the slide real quick I have a little saying down there that chris trainer the wonderful guy and lead guitarist for bush keep me in on a couple weeks ago it's called engineering not into seeing orange a dying or something uh way more importantly easier here than your eyes I don't care if your delay is a twenty five because if my delay sounds better at twenty seven that's what I'm going to play with my philosophy is all does it sound good people email me all the time like can I get your preset youtube video on they get it? They say it doesn't sound good you have your drive said it five I have mindset of five it's like yeah well maybe your fingers or stronger maybe your drive should be it for I don't know so it's all about how it sounds so we're going to go now they've attached this modifier we're going to go into the scene controller and I've just gone tio what sounds good here so in scene one we want to totally dry sound seem to we're going to add ten percent or so ten point two apparently of the way all right seeing three more ambience going up to twenty seven I'm actually got changes try a delay type tio something a little more saw and a little more subtle uh not important just because it sounds better to me on the scene for we're going to get up to kind of actually make a starker separation between these two is when you go ten nineteen on scene third thirty percent scene for which is definitively in lead territory all right, so with that what we've done is effect again the amp gain or the input drive and the delay mix with the same controller that is accessible across scenes you can do this with all sorts of different things you could for example, up the mix of your chorus in real time between scenes. So if you have, you know, a song where you want no chorus on the rhythm and then a little bit more on the you know, pre chorus and then a ton of course in the chorus uh or if you want to bring in a knocked of lower, increasingly louder or something, the possibilities are really endless and this goes for everything I'm going to say in this class really anything that you want to be doing you can use these same techniques to apply them to the blocks that you want to do, so I'm not just showing you, for example, that you can modify the mix of a delay or a reverb you guys can obviously apply use techniques to the mix of of anything I'm just because I'm not showing one specific thing doesn't mean it's possible, I do mean that literally anything that has this symbol can be endlessly modified by any of these controllers, and we're not even going to scratch the surface. After spending three solid hours today talking about modifiers controllers, eso please feel free to go wild experiment, you're not going to blow anything up because we're in the digital world, that is, again another beauty of the expects. All right, so on that slide, you can see, I've put that scene controllers are the best friend of the guy with too many guitars. Uh, I know a lot of guys like to bring a lot of guitars to gigs and then sometimes see them struggling with their amp because, you know, maybe a guitar has a much lower output than the one they were using before, and they try and pull off some lick and doesn't quite work. I know that I have because this guitar has a floating tremolo I've broken strings in the middle of shows, not had time to repair the string and had to play like hard core shred fast songs on my strat, which is the back of guitar bring because I play some songs on the strat but attempting to play the same leads that I play on this, which is definitely like a much more technically might be guitar on a much lower output single quill guitar is very challenging because you have the same out of game, so let's talk about how we could make some more subtle adjustments to an amp across scenes to kind of help with that. A lot of guys want to go into the input on the expects and change the input level, which I think is not really a wise thing. A lot of guys have talked about, you know, with different guitars going in and changing the actual input of the guitar hitting the aids, I tend to honestly, I just left those a default all the time people always like, like, do you change it between your strat and your ernie ball? Because these dimarzio zehr way hotter than the pickups in my stretch and the answer is no, I use them for different songs but say, for example, you want to make minute adjustments to how much gain your aunt is getting, depending on what qatar you're playing, so we're going to set scene one, for example, as a pretty high output guitar like this j p six where five on the mpa drive and a one on the input trim eyes a pretty good amount of game let's say you're second guitar is a strat with a really low output you'd want this drive to probably be up or alternatively, you could leave the drive where it is and you could up this input trim and with the impetus and we're talking really tiny adjustments like right in here? Uh, you get up the input trim so the way we do that across the scenes is again with seeing controllers, so as you can see, there were currently on scene to if we go to seeing one, we'll see seen one, and I'm gonna go in and we're going to do the exact same thing wanna go and set this minimum in this maximum two, zero and ten so we have a percentage base normalize scale on the scene controllers and it's going to start making really small adjustments to say we want to start at five fifty uh let's say you're nice guitar needs a little bit more gain you goto you know, say fifty eight, which is like a five point eight on the scale um and you guys get the point, if you have, you know, eight guitars, you can kind of go in here and change how much change one's getting and these air riel subtle adjustments that you're not going to really hear when I play the same guitar through them, but these were much more this is much more of kind of a very useful for live applications kind of thing where you say that like a really hot like parker fly or something you started way down um but this is something that is a really subtle adjustment that is very useful for guys who want to be able to have continuity throughout their set when they're switching guitars, so if you break a string and you have to use, you know, guitar that you don't really want to be using what you want to say about a game for that song you hit the one that has more gain I just realize that I've set five and eight to the same thing which makes absolutely no sense so again this is very subtle and this is just a quick example of one way you can use seen controllers I show this because it was put out on the forum as you know is this possible to do and so here you go it is possible to do and it's totally a valid way to do that you can also use the input trim here and that's going actually do it without, you know, messing with the master volume input drive relationship all right, so let's talk about using two aunts and two cabs there are a lot of benefits to doing this aa lot of the tones that we all know and love are not actually one guitar cabin one and they're actually too and for example, a lot of led zeppelin songs attract with two aunts and live especially guys use different aunts to get different sounds um what I'm going to do here is picked to different cabs and I'm gonna pick two calves that are very different sounding but what I'm going to do is run the exact same amp into them so I'm actually gonna delete that and flock and I'm just going to control c or command to see if you're on a mac on command control v that's we've got identical amplifiers um but I'm gonna put different cabs on them so let's set this bypass mode tio commute here so we can hear what each one sounds like on this first one I've got james santiago's fantastic sounding even told fifty and, uh well, maybe we'll play something it's not in the he that I as a guitarist I defaulted chunking on east way d just so we don't go crazy that's the sound of that cab and maybe we'll go with his oval let's face it a lot more fun uh I'm going with the other santiago cab, which is his fault here's got much more of kind of a paper he kind of I don't want to say brittle because brittles a bad word, but sicily is maybe a better word, really nice, sparkly sound, and together we're going to sound like this. I'm going to go ahead and reduce this level pretty drastically on each of these amplifiers, and again, we want the amps the same so that we can kind of see what we're gonna do that different sounds ok, so how can we make these each discrete? Well, the obvious answer is to hardpan each one, so we go hard left and hard, right, and what we have now and again, this is a good point to say that anybody was watching. You're going to get the most out of what I'm doing here if you have on headphones or you have super discreet stereo separated field of monitors if you don't have really good monitors were not really good if you don't have good monitors, you're listening on laptops, speakers or those crappy little computer speakers that come with a computer in a box from best buy or something. Please put on some headphones. You're going get much more out of this class if you can really hear stuff, and when we get into some hard core stereo stuff like we're about to in four seconds it's kind of fun that you have your head like feel like it's you know, cruising around while I'm panning stuff so now we've got the stereo separated and each is in its own discreet channels so on the left we've got the not the one selected this one and, uh that one on the other side all right, so let's attach a scene controller to this balance we're going to see in one here not external five seen one when I was actually talking about, uh we believe the men in the max it hard left and hard, right? And on this other cab let's uh do the same thing, but we're gonna do seem to we've got to separate see modifier so in seeing one, just go into the controller here and I want to put, uh, this top cab all the way the left in this bottom capital with the right just like we had it wait again mute this one you did not move it. Uh, let me get this one going to the controllers headphones and a signal that was fun. Ok, uh so in scene one let's just separate these discreetly so we're going to go all the way to the left on scene on the on that one and then all the way to the right on that one er and so what is the application of this? Okay, so first off the way that I would use this is two in one preset have some very distinct sounds because you're going to get a very different sounding rig if you have these two separated for example, you could currently take one output from the left and one output from the right and track two separate amplifiers through calves to separate cabs rather through discreet channels so you'd have one and bear and the other and they're on you could record that or you could send it out live and have somebody mixed them on a sound I could figure out what he thinks sounds best or you could have it so that you can do your mixing on your own so you set your eight favorite mixes of these cabs for various stages of separation or combination between the two uh and you will be able to select those on a scene a scene base person basis rather so on this next one I'm going to put this at say twenty five percent and I will put this one on seventy five percent ah and if you ignore the percentage values and you just look at the knob you can tell exactly where we are in the panning field um so scene one sounds like this collapse the stereo field a little bit and seem to you can hear how different the overall perceived tone in your ears is just from bringing those two in a little bit, so you're not really a two least to my mind I'm not really hearing two separate sounds come together what I'm hearing is one sound that I heard in the first one start to morph into a difference out that it has in the second one so let's put them all fifty so right up the middle in this next one and you're going to get a volume increase as we do this uh and we could actually go in here and modify this cabinet level as well for each of these cabs to bring down the level as we increase the amount of panning towards center, we'd have to do it with another controller is we're out of seeing controllers that it would be possible? Um so in seeing three, we've got basically one unified sound where both of these cabs that are very different sounding or complementing each other and creating this, I think much better sounding tone not that either one of these is necessarily bad on its own, but we've got this tone very silly and we've got way have a bypass state that is not playing well here content uh somehow I hit why inadvertently okay, so again we have this kind of paper kind of sicilia sorry that's the normal one this is the papers the idea is that they're very complimentary neither one is doing much of what the other is doing. They're kind of occupying discrete areas, so when they come together and then again, you could just go into the scene controllers and start doing on your own little minute adjustments. So maybe, uh maybe you think it sounds good brought up, teo, you know, say thirty um and seventy, you know, so right there is a good sound, but you have all of this creative control and you have eight different ways to do it say for some reason you want them all in the left channel. I don't know why you'd want to do that, but again, I see this less as a stereo separation issue and mohr of a opportunity to mix these cabs in real time in creative ways, so just kind of circling back around, we could easily attach the pan states of both of these two what we did with the whammy pedals that were inverted and have a one curve going from bottom to top left, right and one going from top to bottom left to right on live panties so that in the middle of the pedal we would have them both at the center and then we'd have them completely separated this is way to do it with scenes you could do with a physical pedal uh, you could do with any of these controllers, which is really the cool thing about it. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that. Um, at this point, I'm three minutes ahead of schedule. So if there are any questions anybody wants tio quickly ask or anybody wondering about anything earlier today, we were talking about that same thing with two different things. Do you have a minute to show how you might be able to do the four outputs with that same type of, ah situation that's going on? Uh, just quickly. You could set both of these calves to stereo, and you'd be able to set each one hardpan, and then you had seven effects. Loop and send that throughout. But to so you could have the four different ones through four different things. It's, super simple. Basically, youjust get rid of that line and you put this. Anyone affect, salute instead with the effects lou block being up to. So, um, yeah, that's, that's how you do that?

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Cooper Carter - Axe-Fx Master Class Slides.pdf
Cooper Carter - Axe-FX Master Class Presets.zip
Cooper Carter - Axe-Fx Master Class IR Files.zip
Cooper Carter -- Axe-Fx Master Class Bonus Q and A.pdf

bonus material

Cooper Carter -- Axe-Fx Master Class Syllabus.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Cooper is great! Knows the Axe-Fx inside and out, the class provides EXCELLENT insights regarding ways to maximize it's power (especially for live playing). Cooper is the real deal. A great investment to get the most out of your AxeFx

Bernie a5cffc
 

Another great tutorial. Every aspect of the Master Class covered informations that I can use. The Axe-FX II is a magical box and Cooper Carter is the right magician to deliver what it can do. I have purchase both Axe-FX courses by CC and it is now my goto bible to mastering this marvel. If more secret can be said about the Axe-FX II, I am definitely first in line for more. A great investment and must have for all Axe-FX users.

Razvan Cirligeanu
 

Hello there, This is the next step if you are serious about the AxeFX. It helped me to use features, great features, that I wouldn't EVER have the patience to explore by myself. Yeah, I am lazy... Coop makes it easy, I got more than I expected from this class. One demand: Please, Coop, upgrade the info, there are so many great updates since you recorded this class. Thanks, Razvan

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