“Hit It” by Fairlights (Enda Bates)
Spicetone’s 6Appeal hexaphonic distortion, routed to DAW and synced to a drum track with MIDI from computer.
Gear List
Godin LGX electric guitar with RMC piezo-style hexaphonic pickup
Spicetone 6Appeal (breakout box mode)
Motu Ultralite multichannel soundcard
UAD Stereo Reverb + Delay plugins
Time Freezer VST plugin
Description
The track uses three presets on the 6Appeal. The first one is a fairly full-on distortion setting with the Gain and Tone turned up full. The strings are panned across the stereo field with the low strings quite central, and the two middle strings panned about halfway left and right. The melody is played solely on the top two strings which are hard-panned left and right to give the impression of two distinct melodic lines, with a rhythmic backing from the other, more centrally panned strings.
The rhythmic pulsing in the opening is created by tapping the back of the guitar neck with the right hand while holding a chord with the left. In the first half of the track, the melody is played on the top two strings using hammer-ons and pull-offs (as the picking hand is occupied tapping the neck).
In the second half of the tune a new, modified version of the initial preset is used. This has a tremolo effect on the lower three strings which mimics the tapped pulsing effect from earlier but using modulation, which now frees up the right hand for strumming and picking. This was done using LFO2 which is tempo-synced to the drum machine track using MIDI clock from the DAW.
Finally, the end section just uses a clean preset with the same stereo spread. Apart from the 6Appeal, the only other effects are simple things like some stereo delay and reverb. The one exception is the Time Freezer plugin (which is very similar to the EHX Freezer pedal), thats used to create a sustained drone from the top three strings towards the end of the track. No amps or amp modelling was used.
The same with a promo video (and with Youtube compression, sorry):