Working on a freeze pedal patch for guitar

iOS
1

I’ve got a functional, simple “freeze pedal” patch for MG3, in AUM on iOS, and I’m now looking to improve it as best I can. To that end I thought I’d throw a couple of questions to this group.

My intention is to have separate channels, in AUM, for the guitar sound, and for the “freeze” sound, so I can manage them separately. (Sending “freeze” sound along with “main” sound to a dirty amp can get rather…spiky.)

What I have working, on my “freeze pedal” channel, is an instance of MG3 with a single Chain, consisting of a Sustainer set to “freeze chord”, and an internal DX10 FM Synth Module (initially set to the “FM Guitar” preset, with some tweaking to cut out all the pitch warbling, and with the Attack, Decay, and Release knobs all the way up to swell in and out gracefully). I’ve got a momentary footswitch assigned to the Sustainer Module’s bypass switch, and this does achieve the “freeze pedal” effect. The sound is “good enough” for me to play with, especially if I follow it with a suitable amp sim and gentle modulation.

What I’d like to improve, is that configured only as above, I still hear the synth sound while playing without freezing, and it does not seem to work to try and connect both the Chain and the Sustainer to the same momentary footswitch–the Sustainer doesn’t respond to the “freeze chord” event if it is enabled at the same time as the Chain that contains it. Now…I’m pretty sure I can get around this by using AUM to bypass the audio input of that session Channel when not freezing–that should allow me to leave the Chain on all the time, permit the “freeze chord” event to work normally, and also allow delay and reverb tails to continue after cutting off the freeze"–but I’m a little perplexed why MG3 wouldn’t do this naturally by lighting up the Chain and the “freeze chord” effect at the same time. Any ideas on that?

Also, I’m curious about other ideas for how I can approximate the original guitar sound in the freeze, as this is how a hardware freeze pedal would work (FTR, my hardware reference is the TC Infinite Sample Sustainer, which I really like). So far the best sound I’ve tried (that has worked) has been the above internal DX10 FM Synth Module; it’s “close enough” and fits neatly inside the MG3 patch (rather than requiring another channel to send MIDI Out data to another synth), but if there are better options I’d love to know about them too. :nerd_face: (Incidentally, I wanted to try the Synth Mod for that purpose, but it doesn’t seem to respond to either the Guitar Mod FX Sustainer or the “normal” Sustainer Modules at all.

Anyway, if others have suggestions or guidance I’d love to hear them.

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Well fooey, that didn’t work either. A bit surprising really; I thought that would be the key here (it works great for cutting off Instruments which produce reverb/delay tails, rather than muting the output of the channel). Maybe there is some latency required between the time either a) audio hits the front end of an MG3 instance, or b) the Chain is activated, before the Sustainer Module can start to pick up signal for freezing?

And just for giggles, I thought I’d try the “infinite sustain” mode of the Sustainer to see how that worked instead. And…it kinda does, but creates another problem. If I use the “infinite sustain” mode, I can indeed get it to “open up” and pick up my input immediately, but that mode will of course pick up the next notes too, meaning it’s not really “frozen”; likewise, if I then come off the footswitch, either a) it immediately decays, if the switch is also connected to the Sustainer; or b) the tone goes on forever (never decays) if the switch is not connected to the Sustainer.

(The “ideas” guy in my head can certainly come up with potential uses for both of those behaviors, but neither is the classic “freeze pedal” behavior I’m after.)

Next step will be to try and see if I might be able to do all of it in MG3, using NAM Modules for the amp tones. We’ll see.

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I don’t really understand the problem exactly. Maybe you could create a short video to help demonstrate?

FWIW, the benchmark for granular freezing of audio signals – IMO – is the EHX Freeze pedal (also the EHX Super Ego apparently has very similar performance). Also up for consideration are the Gamechanger Audio Plus pedal, the Red Panda Particle pedal, and Line 6 Helix also does great freeze with it’s Poly Sustain module. In the macOS/Windows plug-in environments, it’s only Helix Native or MG3. On iOS, nothing except MG3.