How to create Jimi Hendrix midi guitars.

PG Music Home

I thought it would never be possible to make a midi guitar track that sounded like Jimi did. However, it turns out to be fairly easy. Here's how.

Step 1. Loosen up the midi notes using melody|edit melody track|utilities|loosen up notes. Settings between -10 and 10 seem to work well. Humanize the line if it's too stiff. Extend the duration of notes to close gaps where appropriate; that is extend the sustain where Jimi would have let his guitar screech between licks.

Step 2. Load a clean guitar sound font using a sf player of your choice (sfz works well here) in slot 1. Although it's nowhere near as good, the mid-tone guitar in the VSC DXi will work in a pinch.

Step 3. Load the free Camel Crusher distortion VST in slot 2. Set to Tube Warmth as a starting preset. Play with it later as needed.

Step 4. Load the free phasa VST from killapluggies in slot 3. Set the rate just under half way and the freq to half. Play with it later to taste.

Step 5. Load the free juicy77 amp VST in slot 4. Make sure the 'Lead' switch is on. Reduce the output so as not to blow your speakers. Now play the song file. Adjust the gain, tone and output on the juicy amp to taste.

You can now pick your jaw off the floor as I had to. This combination of FX makes the guitar sound so close to Hendrix it is mind blowing. It even seems to replicate the feedback Jimi was so well known for. The phaser seems to replicate the fret and string noise by swirling the distortion around.

I've used this on two covers so far. Purple Haze and Little Wing. Both sound so good I can't believe it's midi. Wow. Have Fun.

The plugins can be found with a google search or direct from this page.

Can you possibly post a sound file somewhere we can hear this ?

Quote:

Can you possibly post a sound file somewhere we can hear this ?

Sure. I'm linking a small section since it's a cover. I don't want to violate any rules so I hope this is Ok.

Hendrix midi guitar demo

Wow..very impressive ! Can you do midi note pitch bends I wonder. Really just getting familiar with midi and not sure what all can be done to notes. Thanks for posting this info !

Quote:

Wow..very impressive ! Can you do midi note pitch bends I wonder. Really just getting familiar with midi and not sure what all can be done to notes. Thanks for posting this info !

For this demo I added a couple of guitar bends to some held notes between licks. I did that through the notation editor|edit note command. There's a guitar bend radio button in that dialog. The effect is subtle but there.

However, for this song demo all I did midi-wise was extend the duration of a couple of notes for increased sustain. The plugins do the rest; the overdrive amp, swirling distortion and feedback.

As to other midi tracks you would have to decide yourself what it needed in terms of tweaking. I'd always suggest starting with the loosen note start times menu command as this makes the track seem a lot more human. Then, if it needed more I go to the humanize functions and finally tweaking individual notes.

Hope this helps.

This is a very good emulation and it is one of the BEST I’ve heard however it will not fool a guitarist.

If I could make a suggestion it would be to add some pitch bends and vibrato using pitch bends. That would help with the illusion. Those longer notes without vibrato is a dead give away that it is midi being played by someone who is not a guitarist. Do not use tremolo to emulate vibrato. Tremolo is an oscillation of gain (volume) while vibrato is an oscillation of pitch.

I hope this helps.

Quote:

This is a very good emulation and it is one of the BEST I’ve heard however it will not fool a guitarist.

I never expected it would. It does, however, fool non-musicians as I've been asked who's playing the guitar.

Quote:

If I could make a suggestion it would be to add some pitch bends and vibrato using pitch bends.

I've tried in RB with a controller but since I don't have a clue where a guitarist would add bends and vibrato it sounded worse. That's why I added the phaser. It gives an illusion of 'motion'.

Quote:

I hope this helps.

It does, thanks. When I play my bass to that cover it makes the guitar sound even better. My crappy playing distracts everyone from the fact the guitar isn't real. lol

Quote:

Do not use tremolo to emulate vibrato. Tremolo is an oscillation of gain (volume) while vibrato is an oscillation of pitch.

BTW, do you know if BiaB can add tremelo or vibrato to held notes? Do you insert a midi command in the midi editor or can it be done on the piano roll?

Quote:

Quote:

Do not use tremolo to emulate vibrato. Tremolo is an oscillation of gain (volume) while vibrato is an oscillation of pitch.

BTW, do you know if BiaB can add tremelo or vibrato to held notes? Do you insert a midi command in the midi editor or can it be done on the piano roll?

Sorry I do not use BiaB for my entire project, just as a starting place. All of my editing is done in Sonar but I would think the process would be very similar in BiaB.

For tremolo use a VST effect. There are a lot of them for tremolo and some are free, as is the one in Amplitude.

Vibrato can be done with a pitch wheel. Think of vibrato as a sine wave with the higher the peaks the higher or lower the pitch. Also think of the distance between the waves. The closer the distance the faster the vibrato and the farther the distance the slower the vibrato. This can be done two ways. One, as mentioned, with a pitch wheel. The other you can draw it using the pitch bend in the piano roll. I just checked this out before writing this but I have no experience editing midi in BiaB. It sounds like you can midi edit in BiaB so have fun.

Listen very carefully to your favorite guitarist and you will soon learn how far to pitch bend and where to use it. Pitch bend can add a lot of life to a midi file and is especially important for either midi guitar or sax leads.

I hope this helps.

I wish you would post this, or at least a reference to it, in the Off Topic forum, maybe in one of those discussions about how MIDI is dead and never was much use anyway. Far more is possible with MIDI than almost anyone gives it credit for.

Buried somewhere on some old hard drives (think sub-100 Mb size) I have some eye-opening MIDI tracks. One that stands out is a Beatles tune using 70% MIDI Upright Bass and 30% Acoustic Guitar to emulate Paul's Hofner violin bass. The likeness is stunning.

By the way, I AM a guitarist, and I might not have picked out your track as MIDI if you hadn't told me. It's the best emulation of an electric guitar I've ever heard. Way good, pal.

Quote:

I wish you would post this, or at least a reference to it, in the Off Topic forum, maybe in one of those discussions about how MIDI is dead and never was much use anyway. Far more is possible with MIDI than almost anyone gives it credit for.

I'd be happy to start an off topic discussion. I'd really like to hear what others are doing with midi. Especially now that we have VSTs foreach track.

Quote:

By the way, I AM a guitarist, and I might not have picked out your track as MIDI if you hadn't told me. It's the best emulation of an electric guitar I've ever heard. Way good, pal.

Thanks. I was literally stunned when I started playing that track in BiaB. I never would have believed midi guitars could sound that good. Imagine what a real midi guru could do with a controller and VSTs. I suspect you could get midi guitars that would be undetectable mixed with RTs.

Excellent. Now, we've gotta find a way to do this with the basic tools in Amplitube (rather than buying the Hendrix expansion, that is)....

Quote:

Excellent. Now, we've gotta find a way to do this with the basic tools in Amplitube (rather than buying the Hendrix expansion, that is)....

Download the free Juicy77 amp and Camel Crusher distortion plugins. Amplitube is nice but I can't get it to rival Juicy77 and CamelCrusher for overdriven leads. Link is provided in my second post above.

Here is a midi guitar track i did a few years back i thought it came out pretty good. I used a free midi file, worked with the midi notes a bit, and added free plugins for the distortion http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=468247&t=4329

Quote:

Here is a midi guitar track i did a few years back i thought it came out pretty good. I used a free midi file, worked with the midi notes a bit, and added free plugins for the distortion http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=468247&t=4329

It's a shame I can't listen without registering. I would have liked to hear it.

It's worth mentioning that just about ANY MIDI guitar part can be improved dramatically by applying Amplitube to it. It doesn't have to be distorted Hendrix-type stuff... with the right effects midi strumming, fingerpicking or jazz can all sound more like a real guitar