u/AceFaith

Howdy! I've been working off and on with some User Patches for guitar the past two weeks and have had a pretty fun time doing it. You can make some particularly wild sounds with very little in this nifty DAW.

Today I had a go at trying to make something like the fun BOSS pedal called Tera Echo TE-2. It's many things digital and even a little skittish... But on top of that, it's also quite the dynamic effect and a blast to play with.

To my ears, it sounds like two rhythmic delays with a phaser sandwiched between, with a resonant filter on the output that is really input sensitive. It's also doing resonation / octaving that's pretty hard to distinguish in general.

I did an attempt at it. While it's okay, I think I might actually have instead discovered ways to make an Ice Delay instead that sound granulated (but actually isn't -- things that are happening in the Cerberus AUX track are not what they seem when played in solo).

Ah, this could be a place to also page the moderators and ask. Are there any places where people buy / sell User Patches? I'd gladly get these into people's hands but I would also like a little acknowledgement for the time put into the patches. If this is against board rules, I'll look elsewhere of course.

I thought of a way to dynamically route a mono DI between two separate signal paths depending on input level.

The idea builds on splitting the DI into L/R by input level and treating them as completely independent paths.

On the Guitar In track, I use Noise Gate + Phat FX in dual mono. The left side is set to favour louder signals, while the right side is set in reverse to favour quieter signals. Phat FX's modulation is used to control the Master Output, so each side fades in/out according to the input level. The Noise Gate on the Left side is set to reject all input below -18 dB.

For some reason, Noise Gate in dual mono won't let you disable processing on just one side, so I use Ducker with null settings to effectively bypass the gate on the right (read: quiet) side.

The result is:

quiet strumming -> right channel
LOUD STRUMMING -> LEFT CHANNEL
Everything in between -> a crossfade between the two

The channels are then sent to separate auxes:

L -> Aux 1
R -> Aux 2

From there, you can put completely different processing on each side, using Gain on each Aux to adjust the balance accordingly.

In the video I'm using chorus/delay/reverb on the quiet side and distortion/flanger on the loud side. I'm also using a dual-mono Amp Designer with a low-gain amp on one side and high-gain amp on the other (see Aux 3), before summing everything back to mono (Gain plugin after Amp Designer).

I also have a Step FX reverb on another aux send (Aux 3 -> Aux 4, pre-fader -12 dB), ducked by the loud-side signal via sidechain on Phat FX (sidechain input: Aux 1).

So, essentially:

quiet playing -> clean/wet chain -> low-gain amp -> reverb send
loud playing -> distorted/dry chain -> high-gain amp (reverb ducks)

The transition is continuous rather than a hard switch, not unlike the sort of splitter you'd find on a conventional digital multieffects unit. It's neat I guess?

TL;DR: Logic has a janky native dynamic crossfader if you really want one.

Hello, it sure has been a little while. Summers are nice, but not always very creative. Let's change that today :)

Let's hop right into what you're listening to. As always, the explored sounds here are made entirely with stock Logic plugins, so anyone can recreate this. Unlike previous posts, I'll actually describe what is happening in the plugins below, so this post is a bit on the long side.

The guitar input track has the following chain:

Noise Gate (Fast Gate preset) → Delay Designer (Infinite Repeat - 4 bar preset) → Amp Designer (Small Brown Panel Combo) → Tape Delay → Phat FX

The Tape Delay is only there for flutter, filtering and modulation. Phat FX is doing some soft saturation with a little homespun tape compression/saturation thing I built by watching a waveform on an oscilloscope and trying to make something resembling the saturation of a Tascam 388.

The track has a pre-fader send going to a bus track, which then feeds into a summing stack.

The pre-fader send is where some real nonsense happens:

Space Designer (Seashore preset, 100% wet) → Beat Breaker → Step FX

Beat Breaker is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. There are a lot of custom settings, but the basic idea is that I'm manipulating the input beats by multiples of 3 inside a 16-beat sequence. The time repeats are set to multiples of 2, while the speed dials are offset around multiples of 50% by 1-5 percentage points to create tiny imperfect repitching artifacts in the Space Designer reverb tails.

Step FX is adding:

• Half-depth, fully wet vibrato
• Randomized pan sequencing
• AKAI-style downsampling
• Long reverse reverb
• Post-reverb gain from the Screamer distortion module

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I got the idea for this while exploring ways to make a Chase Bliss-style looper that could layer and mutate itself.

Searching around forums made it pretty clear that complaining about the lack of a loop feature is easier than trying to find the tool that does it. After some digging, I realized that Delay Designer behaves surprisingly similarly to some of the things I like about a Chase Bliss Blooper.

Not just in the "it repeats things good" sense. The taps will actually re-loop parameter changes like resonance, filtering and pitch shifting if you're not careful. It can become a beautiful mess of generation loss very quickly.

It might be a somewhat forgotten device in 2026, but Delay Designer is honestly one of Logic's most interesting sound design tools. Just loading the Infinite Repeat preset gets you very close to this whole world of layered looping.

It's a spectacular and hideously ugly piece of kit that I'm fairly sure many people aren't using yet ;)

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The second part of this experiment came from thinking about how people before us created some of these strange effects. Enter Imogen Heap, master of looping and sound manipulation sorceress.

Her track Just For Now uses loops built from a simple eighth-note sine synth melody. Throughout the end bar of the verse loop, she reverses and repitches the preceding sequence as the strings enter in the chorus.

I remember thinking: "How the heck are you doing this in 2004 on just a Pro Tools session?"

The answer is that we're lucky enough to live 20+ years in the future where tools like Beat Breaker exist.

Used correctly, or even in alternating sends of Beat Breaker → Delay Designer, you quickly get into that Chase Bliss MOOD territory.

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Finally, a word about patches.

Videos of DAWs are a good way of capturing vignettes of the ideas we're working with. But personally, I'd rather share ideas that people can inhabit with their own sounds.

Ideas that you can take over and reshape into whatever is happening in your head.

For that reason, one of my goals is to work toward a collection of Logic Pro patches focused primarily on guitar sound manipulation, similar to what you've heard here. Everything will use stock plugins, and I'll try to make them as compatible as possible for everyone.

The goal is to collect some of the sounds I’ve posted here before, add a bunch of new ones, and package them properly into an installer or DMG file.

Some will be useful.
Some will be beautiful.
Some will be ugly, noisy, and completely useless (and that’s kind of the point).

Hi!

Thanks for the reception last time. I still think Logic does a great job at doing dirty guitar, if you give a whirl at modulation and pitch effects.

Today, the name of the game is Bitcrusher. Bit of a misnomer with its three clipping methods, but it just does absolutely f*cked things to your sounds when you let them (which is good!).

In this example video, I use all three modes - wrap, clip and fold. Notice that some of these have very distinct effects on different parts of the frequency spectrum. Wrap mode suits really well in creating phenomenally unpredictable harshness - the filters are absolutely necessary to tame parts of the chaos unless you want to blow your system completely out.

Other fun unmentionables:

• Gain-staging into a fuzz effect to better utilize the otherwise paltry offerings in fuzz distortion from Stock Logic
• Using full Amp Designer to intentionally use lower quality cabinets
• Using Autofilter Distortion-stages in lieu with pedals and sends to add additional gain stages
• Post Reverb Distortion (a whole topic on its own)

Keep rockin dudes.