Thanks a lot guys, I feel like we're getting closer to a solution!
That Woods of Desolation is definitely 16th triplets on guitars.
To me it's like magic that you can hear that. Is there something like dyslexia for rythm, because I think I might have something like that. I've experienced trying to play to a metronome and feeling like the metronome beat gets super irregular as soon as I start playing. That's something I never got a grip on.
The intention is to technically play either the same speed or double speed with the kick drum, depending on the tempo of the song. Or let's say that it's rather a "general guideline" adopted by most of the bands, but naturally it is completely up to people how conventionally they want to do it!
Good to know!
One crucial point is to be made unfortunately, which is that you will have a hell of a hard time emulating that certain style of "arhythmic" picking in VST's and midi. You see, what often happens is that instead of sharp 16th notes you end up playing something between 8th- note triplets and those 16th notes when the tempo is a bit too fast to sustain as a guitarist.
Maybe I could automate the speed dial for the tremolo picking articulation in shreddage 2 and adjust the picking speed with it?
And that also makes the overall guitar sound a bit more "wall of sound" instead of sharp and distinguished rhythmic playing. It's part of the charm and part of the style as well which differs black metal from many other metal genres, and is generally accepted to sound like that instead of sounding like technical death metal.
I can see that. In one of my experiments I used a transient shaper to soften the attack of each picked note to get the sound a little more silky.
I think the 3rd is pretty convincing, tbh.
Glad to hear that! I was concerned it might sound weird to have "too many guitars", but it's probably still closer to "real playing" than trying to emulate strumming across a chord from single-note articulations.
Hmmm, let me think about this after reading what
@Henu wrote. IDK how you're tuned, I assume drop D or something or if you're using a 7 string. So it's 3 note chords played extremely rapidly. Do you have an example without the black metal distortion/reverb e.g. you playing one of these?
Iirc shreddage is a drop g 7 string, my 6 string is B, and my 7 string is Bb. I've uploaded 2 examples:
dry:
guitar-chord-dry.mp3
distorted:
guitar-chord-distorted.mp3
both are the same instrument input, but one dry and one distorted. The first riff is me playing my 6-string, the second riff is me playing my 7-string, the 3rd riff is shreddage 2 with the singlenote articulation and staggered note triggers like this:
Instead of trem picking using the vst articulation, I would probably do this by hand using my beat pad technique (initially using a non-sampled instrument run through an amp/cab sims to avoid latency), and then copy it to the fifth and octave or whatever the voicing is and add minor delay to the second and third note in the chord like 5-11ms and switch to sampled. A forearm perpendicular to the beatpad lets you tap quicker. Less movement is more.
I'm not very familiar with surf guitar, do you mean a sound like this?
I think the beat pad technique will make it sound pretty human plus w/an fx chain like this which is rather heavy and the distinctive tone given the genre (much like surf and tweed) will make it sound even more convincing since you obviously have that whole reverb-y black metal thing down. Your playing chords throws a wrinkle in it since it's not really actually tremolo picking but as someone else mentioned just "playing til your arm falls off", but I don't think it's insurmountable.
I tried using a pad controller to do "tremolo triggering" of the singlenote articulation of shreddage 2 and clean I could see that fooling someone into thinking it is a real guitar, but with distortion it sounds terribly machinegunny. I believe the distortion hides some things, but greatly amplifies others. If you listen to my 3 example riffs, I kind of like the shreddage version the most from the clean ones, but when adding distortion, the machinegun effect starts to show again imho. The real guitar riffs sound really bad to me too though :-/.
With the beatpad, you may also want to try playing at half time or double time depending on how easy or difficult you find the timing. As a guitarist, you may actually play "too well" at speed for the sound you're going for. You're actually emulating someone who, technically speaking, isn't playing well.
I can guarantuee that I'm not playing "too well" :D. I'm roughly at a level of 1 or 2 years of casual guitar practice. I had to stop playing real early because I got medical issues in my wrist from it. I barely touched my guitars in the last 15 years :(.
Ultimately, if you still get machine gunning, you may have to consider modeling and running a synth tone through the amp and cab instead of using a sampled instrument.
At the moment I feel like my best bet is using the tremolo picked articulation of shreddage 2, because that is a real player doing tremolo picking and I can't get "more real" with synths or other means. And even if I recorded my own sampled tremolo picking Kontakt instrument, my guitars sound much worse than the one in S2.
One more example and question if I may:
riff-a-b.mp3
This is the same riff, played twice in a row, double tracked both times, but it is distributed accross my guitar tracks like this:
So the first time you hear 5 guitars (melody left + right, root note left + right, root note center - I guess technically that means it's tripple tracked?), and for the second half I have put the root note left and right into the same shreddage 2 instances that have the melody. It should sound slightly different (or at least I'm imagining it does). Which approach makes more sense?
[AUDIOPLUS=https://vi-control.net/community/attachments/guitar-chord-dry-mp3.15946/][/AUDIOPLUS]
[AUDIOPLUS=https://vi-control.net/community/attachments/guitar-chord-distorted-mp3.15947/][/AUDIOPLUS]
[AUDIOPLUS=https://vi-control.net/community/attachments/riff-a-b-mp3.15949/][/AUDIOPLUS]