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I would like to simulate a palm mute on synthesized guitars in Reason. I'm not after too much realism, just the basic effect.

Listening to some palm muting in metal, etc, I believe that a low pass filter would get me the frequency range, but how can I implement the percussive element into it?

Hope I worded it correctly and thanks for any replies :)

Glorfindel
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  • I don't have the answer, but I recently looked at a preset for my amp sim which simulated an electrified acoustic. It had problems, but it was fairly convincing and highly percussive. It was a long chain of EQs and out-of sync reverbs with tons of compression. Most of the mid-range was killed and some pretty aggressive boost of the highs, over and over again. –  Jul 08 '11 at 20:22

1 Answers1

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You can first try if a compressor with ≈ 400 ms attack, 30 ms decay, and rather violent threshold/ratio (something like -40 dB and ≥8:1) settings does the trick. If not, try a more conventional compressor setting (if the synthesized guitar has little dynamic range, that may not even be necessary) and put an expander/noise gate after it, which triggers only the note plucks. Fast attack and ≈ 400 ms decay.

If neither of these works satisfyingly, you will need to resort to specialized envelope tools, or to using a proper palm mute sound in the first place.

Note that, for a distorted sound, all tweaks can only work properly if you apply them before the distortion. Once the signal has passed the amp, it will be alnost impossible to do anything about the playing technique characteristics.

leftaroundabout
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