12 String Acoustic Guitar

Aural Illusion: How to Mimic a 12-String Guitar

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And 12-strings aren’t just for classic rock. Dave Mustaine routinely straps on a double-neck guitar featuring a 12-string neck to perform the dramatic arpeggios of the Megadeth classic “In My Darkest Hour.” But we don’t all have access to a 12-string, so sometimes you need to find creative ways around the problem: how do you fool your audience into thinking they’re hearing a 12-string when you’re not actually playing one? There are lots of creative ways around this. Let’s look at a few.

Electronica

The most obvious and easy is to simply use a pitch shifter set to double your playing by an octave. This has the advantage of allowing you to play very fast lines such as the hammered arpeggios of the “A Hard Day’s Night” solo just as you would if you were actually playing a 12-string. And depending on the particular riff you’re playing, it can be very effective. But watch out! If you set the level of the pitch-shifted note too high, you’ll hear a digital chatter that will give the game away. Set it too low and the effect will be lost. The illusion is heightened if you’re using a multi effects unit with deep editing capability. If you can reduce the treble of the pitch-shifted note while also delaying its attack by about 20-40 milliseconds, you’ll get much closer to the sonic signature of a real 12-string guitar. Be careful though: a real 12-string has pairs of strings tuned in octaves for the E, A, D and G strings, but the B and E aren’t octaves, they’re just two identical strings in unison. If you want to maintain the illusion of playing a 12-string, you may need to avoid those two strings or their octave-shifted duplicates will clue clever listeners in that you’re using an effect.

Source: Gibson