LPM - Artificial guitar strum

Hey folks! In this edition of Let's Play Music I go over a very simple trick to add some extra life to an acoustic guitar performance and some wideness to your mix. I used this technique recently while mixing a track for Deadbolt and I really like the result so I wanted to share it with you. As you will see in the video, it's really easy to pull off and can be done with any stereo delay plugin. Take a look!

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In short, here are the steps:

• Pan your acoustic guitars (hard) left/right.
  
  • If you have only one performance it's best to pan it at the center position (C).
    
• Group your guitars into a stereo bus. This will save you processing power since you will load only one delay until. It will also come in handy if you want to add other effects to your guitars, like compression, EQ, etc. (Btw, dynamic effects and EQ should be added before the delay in the plugin chain)
  
  • Alternatively, you can add a Send FX track with the delay plugin and send your guitars there.
• Add a stereo delay effect to the guitar bus (or send). Make sure your plugin can sync to your DAW.
• Pan the two delays hard left/right
• Set the sync of the delays to something that makes sense as an upstroke strum. Dotted 1/8th and 16th usually works but it depends on the rhythm of each piece.
• Filter out some low frequencies from your delay. Upstroke usually has attenuated low end because the pick starts from the hi strings and might not even touch the lower ones.
• You're done!

Hope you found this one useful! See you in the next one ;)

​Chris