overdrive and distortion guitars in xw-p1

[Patrick Arend]

I have found if I use external overdrive and or distortion from my hardware multi fx in my d.a.w  as an insert  instead of xw-p1 insert overdrive/distortion ,the xw-p1  overdrive/distortion guitars take on a whole new life, and sounds  as good as any synth guitar emulation out there. If you want good xw-p1 dist/ overdrive guitars, insert external dist/overdrive  fx.

[AlenK]

Which is another way of saying that the distortion effect in the XW isn't really usable for anything at all realistic. After playing around with it for a while I fully agree. Adding "extreme grunge" is pretty well all it is good for.

I sure wish Casio hadn't assigned junior engineers to elements of the XW's design. Judging by some of the obvious and glaring deficiencies of the instrument it sure seems like this is what they did.

Now, it does sound like they improved the algorithms in the PX-5S. I've heard some pretty decent distortion guitar sounds from it at any rate. But that doesn't help us XW users.

[AlenK]

I realize I dissed the Casio engineers pretty hard in my statement above but it seems obvious they didn't critically listen to what they were creating when they programmed the distortion effect.

But all is not totally lost. I discovered that the way to get warmer sounds out of the XW-P1's distortion effect is to heavily filter whatever you're putting through it. It is the higher harmonics that create most of the digital fuzz that you usually hear. If you lower the cutoff to filter the snot out of your tone before you distort it you have significantly reduced the amplitude of those higher harmonics. It also helps to start with a wave that is harmonically challenged to begin with. I'll try to post an example this weekend.

[Patrick Arend]

Hi AllenK , I am baffled by many aspects of the xw-p1, its the weirdest synth ive  ever owned. I do like the other effects on the xw-p1 , its just that darn overdrive distortion.  I am interested in hearing what you come up with the overdrive/distortion,filter effect. 

[AlenK]

Hi Patrick,

I uploaded some files to the downloads area. The first file (http://www.casiomusicforums.com/index.php?/files/file/78-lead-electric-guitar-solo-synth/) contains three lead electric guitar sounds that contain some mild distortion. They are based on the overdrive PCM wave and two of them include my perhaps laughable attempt at a feedback sound using the XW's harmonic guitar PCM wave.

The base electric guitar sound employs the PCM oscillator's filter with a -18dB/octave slope to shave off some of the higher harmonics before the distortion is added. The filter doesn't track the keyboard, either, which also helps keep the high harmonics at bay. Even so, the amount of distortion I applied is still low (12, IIRC). I think the patch could be improved further by setting up a virtual controller to increase the amount of distortion somewhat with increasing pitch.

I admit I took the easy way out using an overdrive PCM wave. I believe much better lead guitar sounds can likely be obtained from scratch by using the synth oscillators and even the noise oscillator in addition to the PCM oscillators. And using the Total Filter, with its -24db/octave cutoff slope in lowpass mode, would be even more effective at controlling harmonics and allowing higher distortion levels without digital mush. But that's not something that I can put together in an evening.

I also uploaded some mildly distorted organs based on melody tone presets (i.e., not using the drawbar mode) here: http://www.casiomusicforums.com/index.php?/files/file/77-mildly-distorted-organs/. For one of them I used the cutoff control to reduce the higher harmonics. The PCM wave in the other tone was already lower in high harmonics. Even so, I still had to keep the amount of distortion very low to avoid sounding digital. Note that the distortion in both these sounds really only comes out to play when you voice a chord of three notes or more and in my opinion sounds best with just three of four. The effect of dIstortion increases with increasing signal amplitude; playing more simultaneous notes does just that, so you hear more distortion.

[Patrick Arend]

Hi AllenK,    listened to the files you uploaded, I have to say good job, it did improve the dist/od effect.

[BrettM]

To my ears the Jazz Guitar handles the XW distortion well. Although it was presumably sampled from an archtop, it seems to have a Stratocaster quality when the cutoff is opened up. Distorted Mute Guitar is also great for your basic chug, especially with the mids boosted via EQ. The Rotary DSP has two overdrive parameters which sound to me pretty similar to the straight Distortion DSP; although good for combining distortion with a Leslie effect, and for distorted organs of course.

[BrettM]

Besides filtering the tone before applying distortion, as AlenK suggests above, another trick is to use the DistWah dual DSP which applies a filter AFTER the distortion.So it's possible to filter the tone on either side of the distortion effect to get rid of excess upper harmonics.

 

Even better, when the wah waverform parameter of the effect is set to "off", as in DistWah 2, the wah depth parameter becomes cutoff instead of LFO depth for even greater control. Pity there's no resonance parameter.

 

This undocumented behaviour of the wah waveform parameter works for other dual wah DSPs as well.