Trails/Carryover From Distortion?

[DarthTangYang]

Hello! I'm new to the forum and have a question that I can't find an answer to anywhere. We all know there are delay and reverb pedals that come with a trails function, allowing the effect to continue and fade out after you've disengaged the pedal. However, I would like to find a way to achieve the same when disengaging my distortion pedal. Let's say you play a song that has heavy distortion on its chorus but clean or a completely different effect on its verse. When you step on that distortion pedal (disengaging it) you get a hard break between the effect and your clean sound. Is there any way of allowing the distortion to trail and keep ringing for a while afterwards, allowing you to start playing the clean part while the trail from the distortion smoothly fades away in the background?

[xtian]

Short answer, no, that's not how distortion works. A pro player will rest briefly while switching patches to avoid an ugly sound. Delay can be useful to cover this rest.

[DarthTangYang]

Short answer, no, that's not how distortion works. A pro player will rest briefly while switching patches to avoid an ugly sound. Delay can be useful to cover this rest.

So it wouldn't be possible to construct a distortion pedal that allows, say, the last 2 seconds of being engaged to carry over its effect once the switch on the pedal is disengaged? Or even a separate pedal that sits after the distortion pedal in the pedal chain and allows a trail to spill over?

[Helmholtz]

It would require some kind of storage.

Have you tried a delay pedal after the distortion?

[xtian]

You're having trouble grasping that distortion is not a time-based effect. It can't "spill over" or have a tail. Reverb and delay are time-based effects, and can spill over after you disengage the effect. As I said above, if you COMBINE distortion with delay, then you can let the delay's repeat spill over after you disengage the distortion.

[Greg Robinson]

How about an automated panner/crossfade? That might fit the bill?

[Mick Bailey]

The OP raises a really interesting idea that I haven't really considered before. It is possible to achieve this, though in a digital pedal because you can then apply time-based functions. After giving it some thought I already have a setup that goes some way to achieving this idea, but it's based around my self-build modular synth. The principal is that I digitise the guitar signal and convert this to a control voltage and trigger used to control the (analogue) synth. The digitiser continually tracks and stores the current note, both as a MIDI and 1volt/octave value. At the same time I can switch to the unprocessed guitar signal, or have them in parallel. However, the digitizer is continually tracking the fretboard at all times. Using the synth's envelope generator decay time as a variable, I can switch from synth to clean and have the synth sound decay as short or as long as I want, or it will hold the synth note indefinitely.

The same principal could be applied to a standalone fuzz pedal. In my case the whole synth side is monophonic, apart from a module that generates chords from a single note. To build a poyphonic digital fuzz pedal that does 'tails' or a decay function is in the realms of the level of sampling and digitisation that companies such as Boss, EH, or Digitech can only achieve, but it would be a straightforward idea to put into practice. There may be digital pedals already out there that can do this. The EH 'Freeze' pedal already has the polyphonic sample and hold functionality that such an idea could be based on, and the TC Infinite Sustain pedal also has the same basis.

[galaxiex]

A "really expensive" solution....

My HeadRush pedal board is capable of a "soft" change from one patch to the next.

IOW, setup one patch with your distortion sound and another with your clean sound.

On the HeadRush, when switching patches it "carries over" the sound from the previous patch and fades it out.

Obviously this is done in the software/digital domain.

It's nice cuz you don't get a "hard" transition from patch to patch.

Tough to do with individual pedals, but easy for a pedal board modeler device.

[Helmholtz]

Not sure if I understand correctly, but here's a method to fade out the distortion effect only (while not sustaining a previously played note).
The effect could realized using an analog pedal with separate clean and distorted channels/paths that are both fed simultaneously.

Clean and distorted output signals are then connected to a (to be designed) mixing/ switching unit which is triggered by a footswitch and that slowly fades out the distortion channel after the clean signal is turned on and if desired fades in the clean signal.
The switching/mixing/fading could be realized using Fets, the timing would best be done digitally.

[Chuck H]

Didn't Tom Scholz build some whacky pedal that would do something like this? I know he had a prototype something like that for stage use with Boston because he couldn't recreate the studio lines well enough without it. I don't know that the design was ever made for sale though.

[Mick Bailey]

Using a split analogue path could be controlled easily by using an Arduino and pair of JFETs + single opamp as a voltage controlled attenuator. The issue is that when changing from verse to chorus the fading note would change as well, which may sound odd.

An example of how maybe Tom Scholz would need to recreate a held note fade out is at 0:43. This is how I imagined it (though in this case he doesn't change to clean, and it's a studio overdub, but it's the same idea);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4QK8RxCAwo

[DarthTangYang]

Any of these three pedals could be what I'm looking for. From left to right: The Electro Harmonix Superego+, The Gamechanger's Plus Pedal and TC Electronic's Infinite Sample Sustainer. They can all take a sample of whatever you're playing, duplicate it and create a continous sustain from that sample. You can choose to let it continue for as long as you like and even set it to fade out, all while playing something different on top of it.

[Helmholtz]

Fine - if that's what you need.
It's not what I understood from your first post.

[Mick Bailey]

The issue I see with these pedals is they act on a single signal path. To go from distorted to clean and have a natural decay to the distorted note (tails, if you like), would be quite difficult to achieve, unless I'm missing something. The underlying technology is there, but I don't see how the implementation is there to achieve what you described in the original post. Take the Gamechanger, for example; you have a distorted signal that you want to decay, so you press the pedal and then slowly release it, but at the same time the signal needs to change to clean (or whatever) for the chorus - so you simultaneously have to switch from distortion to clean. Am I missing something?

[DarthTangYang]

The issue I see with these pedals is they act on a single signal path. To go from distorted to clean and have a natural decay to the distorted note (tails, if you like), would be quite difficult to achieve, unless I'm missing something. The underlying technology is there, but I don't see how the implementation is there to achieve what you described in the original post. Take the Gamechanger, for example; you have a distorted signal that you want to decay, so you press the pedal and then slowly release it, but at the same time the signal needs to change to clean (or whatever) for the chorus - so you simultaneously have to switch from distortion to clean. Am I missing something?

Well, I think all of these sustainer pedals allow you to set the time for the sustain and its decay. Then it has different modes, some that you need to hold the switch down for as long as you'd want it to sustain but there's another mode that allows you to simply step on the switch once, just like you would with any pedal and it sustains a small part of the sound right after it was pressed and lets it slowly decay in a certain amount of time that you can adjust on the pedal. So basically you step on it immediately after having struck the last distorted note/chord and right after that you switch off the distortion pedal, leaving you a clean tone to continue playing the next part while the distortion is still fading out. But whether or not it sounds good is a different matter. The risk is that a too short amount of the note is sampled that it sounds weird, kinda lika synthesizer that fades out. Non of the demonstration videos ever demonstrated them using distortion so, I wouldn't know without trying it out