A Guitar Solo Trick You’ve Never Heard Before
By Craig Anderton
Let’s get right to what this sounds like. It’s not quite feedback or tape reverse, it’s…well, listen to what it does in this blues guitar solo.
Even better, it’s ridiculously simple to create this effect:
1. Right-click on your guitar solo, and then choose Audio > Audio Bend > Split at Bend Markers.
2. Now each note is separated, as in the top of fig. 1.
Figure 1: (Top) The original guitar solo in the audio example, after being split at bend markers. (Bottom) The track of reversed notes.
3. Create a new track.
4. Drag notes that decay to silence over a bit of time into the new track.
5. Select all the notes you copied to the new track. Choose Audio > Reverse Audio or type Ctrl/Cmd+R.
Additional Notes
- Adding reverb to only the reversed notes imparts an ethereal, feedback-type effect.
- When used selectively, this trick can also work extremely well with drum parts.
- Toward the beginning of the audio example, four short notes are also reversed. Doing so emphasizes these notes.
- The guitar sound in the audio example uses Ampire’s VC30 with the 2×12 VC 30 cab.
- So…am I crazy, or is this a really cool effect? Although I guess both could be true 😊